The Relationship Between Organization Size and Supervision Ratio

The structure of organizations has long been of interest to students of administration. Parkinson's observation' of the disproportionate increase of chiefs to Indians, as organizations increase in size, is not supported by the data presented in this paper.2 We have found in the five sets of organizations studied here that the relationship between organization unit size and supervision ratio is logarithmic in form and negative in slope. Several reasons for this finding are suggested and explored; no rationale, however, has yet been experimentally proven. Bernard P. Indik is an assistant professor, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University.