Line organizations

A line organization is one in which there are direct two-way lines of responsibility, authority, and communication running from the top to the bottom of the organization, with all people reporting to only one supervisor. The most obvious example is the army, which has a clear line of authority going from general to colonel to major to lieutenant to sergeant to corporal to private.

A private reports to a corporal, the corporal to a sergeant, and so on back up to the generals. A line organization has the advantages of having clearly defined responsibility and authority, of being easy to understand, and of providing one supervisor for each person. The principles of good organizational design are met.

However, a line organization may have the disadvantages of being too inflexible, of having few specialists or experts to advise people along the line, of having lines of communication that are too long, and of being unable to handle the complex decisions involved in an organization with thousands of sometimes unrelated products and literally tons of paperwork.

Simple line organization

							♦ President ♦
Vice president (finance)				Vice president (engineering)					Vice president (marketing)							Vice president (production)
Super- visor		Super- visor		Super- visor		Super- visor			Super- visor					Super- visor		Super- visor		Super- visor

Figure 1. Simple line organization line and staff organizations

To minimize the disadvantages of simple line organizations, most organizations today have both line and staff personnel. A couple of definitions will help:

• Line personnel perform functions that contribute directly to the primary goals of the organization (e. g., making the product, distributing it, and selling it).

• Staff personnel perform functions that advise and assist line personnel in performing their goals (e. g., marketing research, legal advising, and personnel). (See Figure 2.)

Most organizations have benefited from the expert advice of staff assistants in areas such as safety, quality control, computer technology, personnel, investing, and so forth. Such positions strengthen the line positions and are by no means inferior or lower-paid positions. It is like having well-paid consultants on the organization's payroll.

Staff usually serve an advisory function; that is, they usually cannot tell line managers or their workers what to do. Naturally, this can cause conflicts, because staff experts often know more about correct procedures to follow than line managers. This can be very frustrating for staff people. In fact, different organizations handle line-staff relationships in different ways. In some organizations, line managers must consult with staff managers on some issues; on others, they must get staff approval for certain actions; and in others, staff people may actually give orders.

Simple line and staff organization (staff personnel act as advisors, in-house expert)

♦ President ♦

		Legal staff															Public relations director
Vice president (finance)						Vice president (engineering)						Vice president (marketing)						Vice president (production)
Super- visor			Super- visor			Super- visor				Super- visor		Super- visor			Super- visor			Super- visor		Super- visor

Figure 2. Line and staff organizations.

The benefits of the line and staff organization structure are rather clear. The disadvantages are not so obvious at first. Today, however, some organizations are suffering from too many staff personnel (over-staffing). To justify their existence, staff people may conduct research and generate reports that no one asks for or needs (over-analyzing). The resulting paperwork can be astounding. Lines of authority and communication can become blurred when staff people get involved in decision making (over-managing). For example, by the time a line manager clears a decision with the legal department, the safety department, and personnel, the initial problem could have become much more serious.

As you have learned, the trend today is to cut staff positions or assign staff to smaller functional units where they truly assist, rather than work independently from line managers. Much of the attention of top managers today is focused on designing systems that enable line and staff managers to co-operate more fully and to move more quickly to respond to market changes.