Professed Words of a Management Guru

To promote the effective functioning of the formal organization, a number of authority relationships are needed. The reasoning is: Different managers need different decision-making powers, in both type and amount, to make the formal groups efforts meaningful and effective in attaining specific goals. A system of accountability must be created to implement management control and evaluate performance. These authority types, extending throughout the entire organizational structure, give rise to various formal relationships among the managers of the organization units, and these relationships are required to make the organization function as designed. It will be helpful to reiterate at this point that we are discussing and setting forth formal organizing as the basis for study

For General Managers who are closely involved with the subordinates than super managers, the span of management has to be comparatively narrow (say - 10 to 12 subordinates only). For middle managers, the appropriate span of management depends in parts, on the precise mix of executive and operative supervision that their specific jobs require. Generally speaking it can be 50 subordinates. At the supervisory levels where the work involved is of routine nature, the span of management is normally quite wide, say 100 subordinates. Economic considerations also affect the choice of span. Smaller spans mean a larger number of managers with the added salaries and other costs they entail. But wide spans also involve ‘extra costs in the inefficiencies that result from diminished managerial leadership. Hence, an economic balance has to be arrived at between cost savings that result from the largest possible span and the added costs that an organization begins to incur as the span grows too wide.