Span of Control and Span of Activity

Oriana Bandiera, Andrea Prat, Raffaella Sadun and Julie Wulf

CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE

Abstract: For both practitioners and researchers, span of control plays an important role in defining and understanding the role of the CEO. In this paper, we combine organizational chart information for a sample of 65 companies with detailed data on how their CEOs allocate their work time, which we define as their span of activity. Span of activity provides a direct measure of the CEO's management style, including the attention devoted to specific subordinates and functions, the time devoted to individual work and outside constituencies, a preference for multilateral or bilateral interaction, the degree of planning, etc. We find that CEOs with a larger number of reports spend more time with subordinates, more time on large meetings, less time on unplanned activities. The presence of a delegate, such as the COO, allows the CEO to reduce the time spent with insiders and to focus on bilateral and unplanned activities. These results suggest that time-use information is helpful in interpreting how span of control determines management style.

Keywords: Management; firms; CEO; productivity; firm activities (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 C25 L22 L23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-hrm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/dp1139.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Span of control and span of activity (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1139

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEP Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Performance, LSE
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().