This paper surveys the literature over a period of the last decades in the field of self-organising multi-agent systems. Self-organisation has been extensively studied and applied in multi-agent systems and other fields, e.g., sensor networks and grid systems. Self-organisation mechanisms in other fields have been thoroughly surveyed. However, there has not been a survey of self-organisation mechanisms developed for use in multiagent systems. The aim of this paper is to provide a survey of existing literature on self-organisation mechanisms in multiagent systems. This paper also highlights the future work on the key research issues in multi-agent systems. This paper serves as a guide and a starting point for anyone who will conduct research on self-organisation in multi-agent systems. Also, this paper complements existing survey studies of self-organisation in multi-agent systems.