Strongly agree with this. I've been in situations where my team had no manager, a bad manager, and a great manager. The situation where I had no manager was the worst, by far.

I've found that if you throw a bunch of Alpha Geeks together without constraints you may as well be herding cats. They'll want to work on their individual wishlists of strategic research problems (throw in this new tool! new methodologies I saw at this conference!) with less concern for the unromantic tactics, socialization, and alignment that makes a project succeed.