Question

atk, I is aldly conceivable to consider the improvements we have made in both human relations and technological advancements. Discussion 5 Locked before Monday, November 4, 2019 12:01 AM CST. Pick a job you have held, and describe it in terms of span of control, delegation, responsibility, authority, and accountability. If you have never held a job, interview someone you know regarding the same criteria and summarize their responses 3 Note: The business world offers many varied opportunities to excel in the workplace. As workers, we often do not stop to think about the terms listed in this question. The Unity of Command Principle refers to the basic rule that an employee must answer to a single manager and not several. An exception to this rule is the Matrix management concept. Week

Answer 1

Any typical job, has requirements to be met by an individual across each role type. With modernization and advancements to organizational structures, concepts such as delegation, span of control etc. have evolved over a period of time.

In context to the case study, we evaluated an assistant manager of an analytics firm Google and the responses and explanation of each of the terms is as follows. Further the position of the person to each of the described term has also been clearly depicted.

Span of Control:-

Span of control, refers to the number of people that work under an employee within the organization. Any organization for its existence requires a structure in which people work under managers who then have the authority of distributing work among team members and getting their work done.

A narrow span of control means that the person has relatively lesser number of people to manage. A wider one on the other hand indicates just the opposite.

As a person moves from middle management to higher levels, the span of control increases. I.E an assistant manager would have relatively lesser span of control compared to a manager or a process owner respectively.

In our case, the person interviewed was in charge of managing Asia Pacific as a region, and had 5 people working under him thus indicating 5 as the span of control. Each person was responsible for his sub areas and directly reported to the assistant manager as indicated.

Delegation:-

Delegation, refers to the division of work among each other which is usually done by someone at the higher authority than you. Delegation seeks to bring higher productivity among people as it specializes people in a particular area or type of work.

In our case, the delegation was done by the manager into different territories within Asia Pacific. For example one among the 5 handled developing markets such as India, Taiwan, China etc. whereas others were supposed to handle smaller markets in terms of revenue such as Afghanistan, Pakistan etc.

Further, the remaining members were kept to handle specific countries such as Singapore, Sri-Lanka, Iran, and Iraq etc.

Responsibility, Authority & Accountability

The analytics assistant manager as indicated was responsible for all data analytics queries related to Asia as a continent. He held authority over the 5 team members and had sub divided the area for them, for proper control.

The 5 Team members, thus were accountable to the assistant manager, whereas the assistant manager himself was accountable to the manager of the company.

Here, responsibility refers to the area or domain which an employee has been given tasks and the expected quality and quantity of the same which is expected out of him. Further, authority refers to the number of people working under a person which in this case is 5 as illustrated. The accountability refers to who are the 5 people answerable to which in this case is the assistant manager.

Please feel free to ask your doubts in the comments section if any.