Works
- The Elements of Administration, Sir Isaac Pitman and Sons, London, 1943; Harper and Brothers, New York, 1944, 1943
- The manager's span of control, Harvard Business Review 34(3), May to June 1956, from page 39, 1956
- The span of control, Scottish Journal of Political Economy 4(2), 101 to 113, 1957
- V. A. Graicunas and the span of control, Academy of Management Journal 17(2), 349 to 354, 1974
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Classical principles of administration and span of control
Ideas
The span of control. No superior can directly supervise the work of more than a small number of subordinates whose work interlocks. Caveat: The limit is the standard reading of Urwick's argument; the texts were not read. Meier and Bohte (2003) found that span varies with function, time, and space.
Staff and line. Urwick separated staff relations, in which subordinates act for a superior and extend the leader's personality on the model of the military general staff, from functional relations, in which a specialist exercises authority on one subject by reason of special skill alongside the line. Caveat: Only passages of the book's 1947 second edition were read.
Span of control. Urwick defended a limited span of control for superiors whose subordinates' work interlocks. Caveat: A rule of experience; later work found span varies with technology and coordinating mechanism.
In this section, “read” means read by the Organizational Structures series: where a line says a work, or part of one, was not read, the series did not read it.