Hierarchical Status, Contingencies, and the Administrative Staff Conference

The principal aim of this paper has been to investigate two structural characteristics of complex organizations which were hypothesized to influence the use of staff conferences: (1) the manager's position in the hierarchy of authority, and (2) the degree to which the manager by virtue of his position is exposed to contingencies. The hypotheses were based on the assumption that these structural characteristics entail coordinative activities which are handled, in part, in the context of the staff conference. Data were gathered by questionnaire and analyzed for 680 managers of a large industrial and engineering organization. Hierarchical status was found to be strongly related to staff-conference utilization. The data suggest that top-level managers employ the conference in order to coordinate their activities, and first-line supervisors may employ proportionately more spontaneous contacts and meetings to accomplish their duties. Contingency exposure was found to be only weakly related to staff-conference utilization. Several social-psychological and structural variables were introduced as control variables. The original relationships were not greatly influenced by these controls, however the procedure disclosed some small but suggestive differences in the partial relationships. For example, it was found that spontaneous consultations did not serve as substitutes for staff conferences; high-level executives did not reduce their staff conference use; and, in fact, the first-line supervisors slightly increased their utilization of staff conferences. The weak relationships between contingency exposure and staff-conference utilization may be explained in various ways.