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Nisan comments on Are You a Paralyzed Subordinate Monkey? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm just beginning to discover this. It doesn't seem very nice, does it?
Eventually I just get really annoyed with other people dithering. This is the problem with the concept of nonhierarchical communal living or organisations, viz. someone like me will start running everything just to keep other people from pissing us off.
(Tangentially, an important essay on emergent social hierarchies: The Tyranny Of Structurelessness by Jo Freeman. Originally about feminist activism, but I've found it widely applicable to the sort of self-organising groups one sees all the time on the Internet. tl;dr: if you penalise the formation of explicit social structures, secret ones will form anyway and bite you in the backside.)
On the flip side of this, I've found that some people prefer the power structure in an organization to be implicit, as it lets them exert power with less explicit accountability and to be exclusive without having to formalize (or even necessarily acknowledge) that exclusivity, and will resist or even actively sabotage attempts to render those structures explicit.
I generally model this as the "of course you aren't prohibited from doing X, dear, it's just inappropriate" trap.
I often have a hard time telling the difference between those people, and the ones who just want to get things done. Which is not to say that there isn't one, or many.
This distinction between implicit and explicit reminds me of Mencius Moldbug's theory of corruption - that corruption is just when power is exercised through non-formalized channels, but where power is thought to be exercised through formal channels (shades of homo hypocritus and Venkat's Gervais principle). There's probably some testable predictions here, like people with low social skills who are bad at the homo hypocritus game would prefer non-corrupt/formal power structures, and good social game players would prefer the exact opposite.
(It also reminds me a little, I think, of Gang Leader for a Day, where the student learns that much of the power in the building centered around an old black woman who controlled rents and housing grants.)
Theory aside, I would certainly expect this to be true. You should totally read the Freeman article David_Gerard cites, if you haven't; IIRC she talks about this dynamic a fair bit.
I often amuse myself by wanting a clear specification of who is responsible for what at precisely the moment when I am frustrated by my inability to achieve my goals within an organization, and wanting that to stay fuzzy and flexible right up until that moment.