Managerial, Institutional, and Technical Influences on Administration - A Longitudinal Analysis

A framework is proposed in which changes in administrative component are related to organization requirements for managerial, institutional, and technical activities. Longitudinal data for a sample of high school districts are used to test the framework. Empirically, size of administrative component had impact on both revenue acquisition and service outputs. Findings suggest that an administrative component larger than required by organization size may have positive influence on both institutional and technical outcomes of school district organizations. The question has often been asked, what accounts for the relative size of the administrative component in organizations? Answers have been coming in for about 25 years, beginning with Melman and with Terrian and Mills. The extent of research answers since that time was captured by Kimberly (a), who reported 80 studies of organization size, most of which also opera