What are the characteristics of tall organizations and flat organizations?
While this is more a question for a business answer board than for geology, I’ll take a shot at it. The main difference is that in a flat organization, the number of workers per manager is higher than in a tall organization. For example, in a typical engineering company, there might be 6 engineers per first level manager and 6 first level managers for each second level manager and 6 second level managers for each third level manager and so forth. In a tall organization, however, the number employees managed by a single manager might be 3. The numbers 3 and 6 are called the fan out in engineering terms. The flat organizations have lower managerial cost per lowest level worker than do the tall organizations. Thus, flatter organizations can be much more profitable than tall organizations doing the same business.
