Matching: Board size and executive span

Abstract

Since the Pennsylvania-Central Railroad downfall in 1969, and the minority and societal pressures of the 1970’s, boards of directors and corporate level management have come under critical examination by social science investigators. Central to the study of these comnonents within complex organizations is the notion that viable systems seek self-stabilization in correlating the changing demands of the organization’s task environment with the internal processes of the technological core. In this sense, the organization’s board of directors, as well as higher level management, provides the boundary spanning function of monitoring and negotiating the external en& ronment, e.g., accepting representatives of outside financial institutions on the corporate board of directors increases the probabihty of access to financial resources for the duration of the interface between the organization and that particular sector of the environment. Frequently, individuals are replaced in top management ranks in order to bring in new administrative resources and ideas to deal with contingencies arising out of the changing task environment. Certainly Thompson [22] is correct in arguing that the organization behaves like an open system at the institutional level of management in contraist to the more structured (closed system) of the internal productive functions of the manufacturing enterprise. Coordination of these changes in both the board of directors and in the executive span of leadership is generally referred to as the “administrative process” [ 221. Certainly a rare opportunity for examining the administrative process occurs when new leadership is introduced into the organiztition. Although treated “tangentially” in Thompson’s [22:79] description of complex organizations in action, the succession of the chiefexecutive provides the primer for further modification in the administrative structure of the organization. In this sense the new leader may be considered the agent or catalyst for organizational change. As Grusky observes, “Bureaucracies, with-