The most-endangered species in corporate America today might be the manager overseeing a tiny team.

The latest broadside against small-team bosses comes from Uber. The ride-sharing giant said Wednesday it would reduce the number of "micro-teams"-those with only one or two direct reports-by nearly half. The move is part of a broader plan to cut 10% of its staff, about 3,300 people. Ultimately, the company will have 20% fewer managers, a spokesman said.

The cuts highlight a larger shift afoot: CEOs want managers overseeing bigger groups, with fewer layers between individual workers and executives at the top of companies. Many employers now expect managers to do less coordinating between departments, and to spend more time in the trenches building products or generating revenue themselves.

Intel Chief Financial Officer David Zinsner said last week that the chip maker had shrunk its layers of management by half, from 12 to six. The company "pulled a lot of middle management out, which bogged down a lot of the decision-making," he said. In May, Coinbase announced layoffs with the aim of having no more than five management levels below its leadership team.

"Managers should be like player-coaches, getting their hands dirty alongside their teams," CEO Brian Armstrong wrote in a staff memo.

For the supervisors still standing, that often means doing a job that is bigger, and more complicated, than ever. Workers, meanwhile, say it can often be tough to get time with bosses overseeing ever-more people.

Watching the burdens on bosses grow, many junior employees say they have no interest in pursuing the management track. In a survey by staffing firm Robert Half last year, 40% of Gen Z professionals said they wanted a promotion that doesn't require them to become a manager.

Leading a small team has long been seen as an important steppingstone to management, a way for companies to give budding leaders a taste of it without overwhelming them. But in the latest wave of cost cuts, companies are going after managers with small fiefdoms with particular focus.

Google said it reduced the number of managers overseeing small teams last year by 35%, in pursuit of greater efficiency. That was also the reason given by public safety-tech company Axon when it cut hundreds of manager roles and reassigned small-team supervisors to individual-contributor roles.

The small teams that used to be Axon's norm-an average of roughly four employees to every manager-were "borderline offensive" because they could potentially slow down progress, Axon President Josh Isner said at the time.

"The better our talent is, the more self motivated the team is, the more mission oriented the team is, the less management we need in the middle of that," he said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal last year.

Uber's own cuts are aimed at "broadening manager scopes" and cutting the number of people who sit seven or more layers from the CEO by 20%, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi wrote to employees Wednesday. The goal: "A simpler org chart geared toward building versus managing," he said.

Across U.S. companies, the share of departures among middle managers has ticked up, according to an analysis by Live Data Technologies. Companies also have tended to be slower to replace middle managers when they leave.

In the past, those purges usually led to another cycle of manager hiring and promotions. That pattern could play out differently in the era of artificial intelligence. George Arison, CEO of the dating app Grindr, said he sees a future with flat management structures-particularly when AI agents and machines can do more of the work.

"You still need people managers," Arison said, but "I think they're going to be managing more people."