Not exhaustingly artificially scared, running around serving only the interest of the rider.

Grasing, in their lane, Thriving.
Only running when it's fun or actually necessary.

Actually had that thought in my bed this morning, not in the shower :D

Workers without a boss are more like a beehive with no queen.

Functional, but we're going to have to turn one of these unhatched eggs into a new set of genitals eventually.

I guess that depends on who you assume the worker is in this premise

If the "worker with no boss" is someone that is self employed, or they are the "boss", then they are closer to OPs example

If they are a lower level worker in a company that has no leadership at all, then it's closer to the bee example. However, just like with bees, the workers will raise a new bee to be the queen in order to keep the system functional

I think the difference between the hive and a workplace is that when a human boss mismanages a company and overworks the workers, the workers eventually burn out and get replaced, or the boss leaves to do the same thing at a new company. Bee hives can't do that, and if they mismanage the hive (by sending the wrong pheromones), then the colony dies

Sure but since we've been trained and domesticated there are a lot of difficulties

A horse with no name.

To the desert perchance?

AFAIK there is evidence that the best management strategy is to treat workers like a limb of a multi limbed species and let them mostly coordinate their own work capacity and problems. So you are on to something. But no centralized coordination can lead to its own problems.

And it's always Bob from Accounting who ends up swinging their sack around in the end.

Workers without a boss are like a fish without a bicycle.

See: Valve's lost decade.

Valve overcharges everyone so much that they could actually afford to try this and let their workers work on whatever they wanted. The end result was a cluster fuck that produced basically nothing for a decade.

It didn't matter, because, again, Valve rips the entire gaming industry off so badly that they were still wildly profitable, but it's part of why we saw no sequels to any of their games.