The Hierarchy of Authority in Organizations

Abstract

The unexpected finding of a previous study of 150 government agencies, that superior qualifications of the personnel increase the ratio of supervisors, was interpreted to imply that many supervisors improve upward communication,whereas few entail centralized management trough directives from the top down. A study of 250 government agencies of a different type confirms the inference that organizations requiring higher qualifications of their personnel are more decentralized, and it shows that the larger proportion of supervisors in them results partly from the narrower span of control of first-line supervisors and partly from the larger number of managerial levels in the hierarchy. Other correlates of a hierarchy with many levels are size, few major divisions, automation, and explicit promotion regulations that give much weight to merit and little to seniority. The implication is that large organizations developed multilevel hierarchies,which remove top management from the operating level, primarily if conditions in the agency, such as automation and personnel standards that assure minimum qualifications, make operations relatively self regulating and independent of direct intervention by management. Such conditions transfrom squat structures that are centrally governed into tall hierarchies with decentralized authority. These conclusions are supported by data on still another type of government agency, which reveal essentially the same correlations with multilevel hierarchy.

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