Organisation Structure & Employees

• An organisational structure maps out who reports to who, and who's responsible for what.
• Structures are usually shown on an organisation chart, and described using hierarchy, chain of command, and span of control.
• A long chain of command + narrow span of control = hierarchical (tall) structure. A short chain + wide span = flat structure.
• Businesses can also be centralised (decisions made at the top) or decentralised (decisions pushed down the hierarchy).
• Delegation is a manager handing a task — and the authority to do it — to someone below them. It's central to how flat structures actually work.
• Employees fall into roles: directors (strategy), managers (senior, functional, supervisors), and operational/support staff (day-to-day work).
• Businesses are organised into functional areas / departments: Human Resources, Finance, Marketing, and Production — each with its own job, but all needing to work together.

What is an organisational structure?

Think of a business like a football team. Everyone can't just run around doing whatever they want — someone has to be the manager, someone the captain, and everyone else needs to know their position and who to listen to. That's exactly what an organisational structure does for a company: it lays out the reporting relationships, roles, and responsibilities of every employee, so that when a decision needs making, everyone knows whose job it is to make it.

Businesses pick a structure carefully because it affects how well the business communicates, how fast it makes decisions, and ultimately whether it can actually achieve its objectives. A badly designed structure is like a football team where three players all think they're the goalkeeper — chaos.

This is usually drawn out visually as an organisation chart — a diagram (like a family tree) showing every position and who reports to who.

This is a traditional hierarchy — workers answer to a supervisor, who answers to a manager, who answers up the chain all the way to the top.

1. Hierarchy

A hierarchy is simply the levels of authority in an organisation — the ranking of positions from top to bottom. The higher up the hierarchy someone sits, the more authority and power they have. Most hierarchies have three broad bands: top-level management (directors, CEO), middle-level management (functional managers), and lower-level employees (operational staff).

span of control