Parkinson Revisited: A Component Analysis of the Use of Staff Specialists in Manufacturing Organizations

Abstract

The substantial body of research on the correlates of the size of the support staff in organizations has produced highly inconsistent results. One reason for this may be that most researchers have focused on a single aggregate measure of support staff. A study of 20 manufacturing concerns confirmed a suspicion that the total size of support staff may be a very heterogeneous trait, and that treating it as one homogeneous variable may have resulted in oversimplified or even misleading conclusions. This study found support staff to consist of four relatively independent components, each of which was related to different organizational and situational variables (such as process technology and technological change), while aggregate staff was related only to organization size. These results suggest that future research should not be confined to a simple aggregate measure of the number of staff specialists in organizations, but should, rather, focus on each of the staff components or specialties separately.

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