One of the more intuitive methods is to judge the scale of a company by looking at the number of management-levels (ML’s). Companies with a lot of ML’s often have a tendency to be bureaucratic, ineffective and not market-fit. They are said to be top-down-managed and primarily relaying on the initiatives of their management instead of their employees. On the other hand companies with only a few ML’s are said to be quite the opposite and are supposed to be flexible and profit-driven.

Whatever the companies mission, goal, HRM-philosophy, organisation structure (divisions, matrix, etc) or background are, managing a large company with a lot of employees certainly "demands" a minimum amount of ML’s to "control", "co-ordinate" and "handle" the company and guarantee thereby its future.

That’s why even large companies try to minimise their ML’s to become as "flat" as possible. Flattening the company’s size is however a limited process.

Between the two variances of "all chiefs, no Indians" and "all Indians, no chiefs", the world of "common sense" exists. Nevertheless it maybe useful to develop a model, as a kind of check, to get sight on wetter the number of ML’s in a company is relatively high, medium or low.

In studying on how flat an organisation can be, we start by defining a very simple model that only depends on the next variables in the organisation:

The relation between these variables can be given by the next formulae:

Suppose you’re the manager (the boss!) of an SME (see image below).

The "span of control" in your organisation is three. So you (as the boss) are managing three managers (supervisors) and each supervisor manages three other employees.

So in this case it follows:

S = 3
N = 2 (two levels of management)
T = 13 = 9 employees + 3 managers + 1 boss(manager)= (3(2+1)-1)/(3-1)
M = 4 managers (3+1) = (32-1)/(3-1)

Let’s define the "flatness" of an organisation by the number of managementlevels [N]. Now we can derive the next formula for a minimal number of ML’s [N_min] an organisation needs to "manage" the total of given employees [T] of a company, given an assumed fixed span of control [S] for every manager:

From this simple model we can construct the next table that shows us how N_min and T are related, for each S.

Suppose your company consists of 100 employees (T=100; including yourself, staff, etc.) and you think that a span of control of 9 (S=9) is the absolute maximum in your company. From the table above (table 1) we conclude that you need a minimum of 3 managementlevels to run the company. However should you decide to reorganise your company with a span of control of 10 (S=10), two managementlevels would be sufficient.

Of course this kind of decisions is not only taken upon mathematical models, but strongly depends on all kind of other factors, as mentioned earlier.

From experience we know that the maximum span of control of a common manager varies between 3 and 15 people, and depends on several factors. The average span of control in companies is about 9 to 10 people. Middle managers with similar and streamlined activities in their department can perhaps manage a maximum span of control of 15 or 20 people. Top management on the other hand often can manage only a maximum of 3 to 6 sub-managers.

From table 1 and the knowledge we have about the span of control we can draw some interesting practical conclusions about the optimal flatness of an organisation.

To do so we divide table 1 in different parts, as you see in table 2.

In table 2 we can distinguish several coloured areas:

J.N. Berkemeijer, July 2002