Posted by Chester Morton / Wednesday 20 December 2017 / No comments
Span of control, what it is.
UNDERSTANDING THE PRINCIPLE-SPAN
OF MANAGEMENT OR SPAN OF CONTROL
Span of control is very important in determining how
effective or otherwise a manager would be in his supervisory duties. It will be
useful for us to take a look at some observations within the context of span of
management or span of control.
A limit to a manager's effectiveness
The
first to understand about the concept of span of control is that, there is a
limit to how effective a manager would be. However, there is no limit to how
inefficient or ineffective a manager can ever be. Hence the principle of span
of management would apply only when we are talking about effective management.
As an example let’s look at the number of high school students in one classroom. Ideally, there must be a limit to the number of students
admitted into one classroom. This is because no matter how good the teacher is,
it would be impossible for him to effectively teach an indefinite number of
students lumped into one classroom. The teacher would be limited by issues such as the noise level, inability to give quality
attention to each student, providing special supervision to students with
specific difficulty in understanding the subject, and monitoring the progress
of each student. It would be difficult for the teacher to effectively teach a classroom with an
indefinite number of students, regardless of how good the teacher may be.
Let us compare the classroom example to a public speaker who
is able to address hundreds of thousands of people in a gigantic stadium. In this
case, because it doesn’t matter so much whether or not the message of the
speaker is well delivered or whether the audience can remember what the speaker
said after they have left the gathering or not and so on…, we cannot apply the
principle of span of management. This is because unless in extreme cases no one
is coming back to examine the audience in a stadium whether they understood
what the speaker said or not.
This means that we can only apply the principle of span of
control to those situations where we expect the manager (in these cases
the class teacher) to be effective for obvious reasons. In the company some of
these reasons could be the need to grow the company’s profit, increase sales,
improve product quality or outsell our competitors.
Span of control is situational
Secondly,
whenever we talk about span of management or span of control, we are thinking
of which number of subordinates a manager should have under his immediate
control or supervision for him to be efficient in managing them an producing
the best results. Obviously, this is difficult to tell because a manager may be effective in managing say 10 subordinates in one situation but can only manage
say four in another situation. This is why we say that the principle of span of
control is situational. In other
words, there are no hard and fast numbers of subordinates which can produce
optimum results, if placed under one manger’s control in every situation. Much depends on how competent the manager is; the skill and
expertise of the sub managers placed under him; and the particular situation in
which the firm finds itself.
Organizational structure
The
third thing to note about the span of management principle is that it tells us
a lot about the firm’s structure or what is more often called the organizational structure. If a single
manager could manage the entire number of subordinates, there will be no need
for a formal organizational structure. But where the manager cannot manage all
subordinates in the company effectively then these subordinates must be grouped
under various sub managers; leading to a kind of a structured organizational
structure.
In large
part, this is what creates the distinction between a flat organizational
structure or a tall one like the ones in the diagram below.
It can be observed that in the top organizational structure the only manager manages all the subordinates in the firm and
therefore there are no Assistant Managers. The truth about this scenario is
that if we continue to add more subordinates, it will get to a point where the
manager can no longer be efficient at managing these subordinates. The would
then be the need to create positions for assistant managers to manage the
growing number of subordinates, leading to a taller organizational structure as
in the second scenario.
We can conclude that in this kind of
firm, the span of management is narrow. Where the firm can function optimally,
with a wider span of control the organizational structure would be much
flatter.
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ALSO READ:
The outcome of exercising the managerial function of organizing
Explaining the term organizing and the steps in organizing
