The Morphology of Organizations

Organization structures are generally assumed to take on the shape of a pyramid. To see whether this assumption is valid, an index of organization shape was devised and applied to 25 agencies of the federal government and four county health departments. Line personnel and the chiefs of line units did indeed form the familiar pyramidal pattern, but staff personnel and the chiefs of staff units formed inverse pyramids, while total personnel fell into a wide variety of patterns, none of which could reasonably be called pyramids. Shape did not correlate with organization age, size, mission, expenditures, expenditures per employee, or any combination of these factors. A possible conclusion is that line structures are governed by commonly assumed imperatives of span of control and convenience of communication, but staff people are distributed to organizational levels on the basis of organizational politics. If this is so, the distribution of personnel among administrative levels may indicate the locus of power in organizations.