Observational interview study demonstrates that higher job complexity reduces managerial span of control among hospital staff, indicating work technology shapes organizational hierarchy.
This investigation explores three determinants of span of control. Interviews were conducted with supervisors and their employees in a community hospital. The findings suggest that when subordinates' job are highly complex, span of control is decreased. Similarly, the more complex a supervisor's job the lower his span of control. Closeness of supervision on the other hand was unrelated to administrators' spans of supervision. Finally, subordinates' and supervisors' job complexity were found to be positively related. These findings suggest that technological characteristics of productive processes are key determinants of variations in size of spans of control.
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Gerald D. Bell (1967) studied this question.
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