I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals. I suspect that working for oneself feels better to humans in much the same way that living in the wild must feel better to a wide-ranging predator(n.食肉动物，掠夺者) like a lion. Life in a zoo is easier, but it isn't the life they were designed for.
Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild is that each species thrives(v.兴旺，繁荣) in groups of a certain size. A herd(n.兽群) of impalas（黑斑羚） might have 100 adults; baboons(狒狒) maybe 20; lions rarely 10. Humans also seem designed to work in groups, and what I've read about hunter-gatherers accords with research on organizations and my own experience to suggest roughly what the ideal size is: groups of 8 work well; by 20 they're getting hard to manage; and a group of 50 is really unwieldy(adj.笨拙的，难处理的).
Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate(v.协调) these they have to introduce something new: bosses.
These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly(adv.明白地). In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups, which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals.
In practice a group of people are never able to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it.
