Exploring Managers’ Views on Span of Control: More Than a Headcount
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore front-line managers' (FLMs') perceptions of their span of control (SOC) and how they manage it. As part of a larger quantitative study examining relationships between FLMs' SOC and performance outcomes, 10 manager focus groups were conducted by teleconference, involving 48 managers from 14 academic healthcare organizations. Themes and subthemes were identified according to (a) perceptions of the size and scope of SOC; (b) factors influencing the complexity of SOC; (c) supports needed to manage SOC; (d) changing leadership style; and (e) ways of coping with role overload. Participants described system demands as a significant contributor to their work responsibilities and a sense of role overload. About half of managers stated their SOC was unreasonable and that they lacked the necessary supports to manage it. Many managers who described their SOC as reasonable still expressed concerns about internal and external workload pressures that contributed to changing leadership style and role overload. Findings reinforce the importance of organizational strategies to create regular dialogue with FLMs regarding the size, complexity and appropriateness of current spans and to provide the resource supports necessary to ensure they can manage their SOC effectively.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".