Self-organization is often presented as an ideological commitment: Scrum values autonomy, therefore teams should self-organize. This framing makes it easy to dismiss as a nice-sounding principle without a concrete payoff. The actual case for self-organization is more practical and more specific than a values statement.
The information-proximity argument
The people doing the work have information a manager assigning that work typically doesn't: the specific technical trade-offs of one approach versus another, which team member's current workload actually has room for a new task, which piece of work is more urgent given something learned yesterday that hasn't been reported up yet. A manager making assignment decisions from outside this information has to either gather it first (adding delay and communication overhead) or decide without it (accepting worse decisions). Self-organization moves the decision to where the information already is, which is faster and, on average, better-informed.
The speed argument
Every decision routed through a manager for approval adds latency, even when the manager would ultimately approve exactly what the team proposed. A team empowered to make its own decisions about how to organize its work doesn't wait for that approval cycle, which compounds meaningfully across the dozens of small organizational decisions a team makes in a typical sprint.
The ownership argument
People who choose how they'll approach a problem generally invest more in making that approach succeed than people who are simply told how to approach it. This isn't a claim about motivation in the abstract: it's a specific, well-documented effect where perceived autonomy over how work gets done increases engagement with the outcome of that work, independent of the actual quality of the chosen approach.
Where self-organization has real limits
Self-organization applies to how the team accomplishes its work (task allocation, technical approach, internal process) not to what the team works on, which remains the Product Owner's accountability, or to organizational constraints the team doesn't control, like budget or headcount. A team that interprets self-organization as license to ignore business priorities has misunderstood the scope of the autonomy Scrum actually grants. The autonomy is real, but it's bounded, and confusing "self-organizing around how" with "self-directing around what" is a common and consequential misunderstanding.
What this means for building self-organizing capability
Self-organization isn't a switch a team flips by declaration. It requires a track record that justifies the trust (a team demonstrating good judgment on smaller decisions before being given latitude on larger ones) and it requires management genuinely willing to accept team decisions it might not have made itself, provided they're reasonable, rather than only tolerating self-organization when it produces the outcome a manager would have chosen anyway. Both conditions take time to build, which is why self-organization tends to develop gradually in a newly formed team rather than existing fully formed from day one.