Another issue in designing organization structure is the span of control or span of management which refers to the number of employees directly supervised by a manager. The question is the appropriate number of subordinates each manager can efficiently and effectively manage in the hierarchy. To use human resources effectively, managers should manage as many employees as they can. However, if they supervise too many subordinates then they may lose part of their effectiveness. Therefore, managers should limit the size in order to maintain closer control. There is no magic number of how many employees a manager should supervise. In today’s organizations, the span of control is believed to be determined by various contingency variables. In other words, organizations, employees and situations are different therefore require different spans of control for managers. 

In a mass production setting for example, workers perform similar tasks and those tasks are simple. In this case, a supervisor can manage larger numbers of workers. However, a CEO of a large firm probably cannot effectively manage many top executives all at once as their work is complex and interrelated. Therefore, in general, a manager’s ability to directly control subordinates is limited by the complexity of tasks and the interrelatedness of the subordinates’ tasks.1

If the physical locations of subordinates are distant or if they need much coordination then the spans of control should be narrow. Also, when subordinates and/or supervisor are knowledgeable these factors would tend to widen the span of control. Managers can further implement some other forms of control within the company’s information systems used by employees in their jobs. This way, managers are able to widen the spans of control. For the same reason, the use of standard operating procedures would lead to a higher level of standardization of work activities and allow managers to supervise larger numbers of employees.