BUS603: Managing People

This is perhaps the first recorded example of a clear hierarchy of authority - an arrangement of individuals based on rank. A similar idea is used today in the U.S. justice system where there are lower courts for easy-to-resolve cases and the Supreme Court only handles the most difficult cases.

The leaders at the top of organizations have long known that division of labor can improve efficiency.  In the eighteenth century, Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations quantified the tremendous advantages that division of labor offered for a pin factory. If a worker performed all the various steps involved in making pins himself, he could make about twenty pins per day. By breaking the process into multiple steps, however, ten workers could make forty-eight thousand pins a day. In other words, the pin factory was a staggering 240 times more productive than it would have been without relying on division of labor. In the early twentieth century, Smith's ideas strongly influenced Henry Ford and other industrial pioneers who sought to create efficient organizations.

While division of labor fuels efficiency, it also creates a challenge - figuring out how to coordinate different tasks and the people who perform them. The solution is organizational structure, which is defined as how tasks are assigned and grouped together with formal reporting relationships. Creating a structure that effectively coordinates a firm's activities increases the firm's likelihood of success. Meanwhile, a structure that does not match well with a firm's needs undermines the firm's chances of prosperity.

Division of labor was central to Henry Ford's development of assembly lines in his automobile factory. Ford noted, "Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small jobs".