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Modeling the span of control of leaders with different skill sets

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Abstract

In leading a team doing routine engineering design, two orthogonal skill sets can be distinguished: domain-specific or technical skills, and interpersonal “managerial” skills which are more general. This paper presents a computational model of team performance that relates these two types of skills to the amount of managerial and communication work generated given a certain team size (i.e. span of control). This model can be used to derive the optimal managerial profile for any team size, or the optimal team size for the skill set of a specific manager, provided the nature of the work remains fixed. The analysis of the model reveals several interesting insights. First, managerial skills are found to increase team performance up to a point after which it starts to decrease again. Second, a manager needs to compensate for low domain knowledge with high people skills, so optimal managerial skill level increases with lower domain knowledge. Third, both abilities have a significant impact on the manager’s allocated time for his/her group; however, more influence is noticed for managerial skills. Finally, the manager was found to be more essential to large teams.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Engineering Management Program, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Walid F. Nasrallah, Charbel J. Ouba & Ali A. Yassine

  2. Faculty of Engineering and Architecture, The American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Issam M. Srour

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  1. Walid F. Nasrallah
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  2. Charbel J. Ouba
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  3. Ali A. Yassine
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  4. Issam M. Srour
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Correspondence to Walid F. Nasrallah.

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Nasrallah, W.F., Ouba, C.J., Yassine, A.A. et al. Modeling the span of control of leaders with different skill sets. Comput Math Organ Theory 21, 296–317 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10588-015-9187-8

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