HIERARCHICAL STRUCTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS - A CONCEPTUAL-FRAMEWORK

The paper gives a general framework which allows to study various hierarchical structures of an organisation. It provides a unified view on hierarchical algorithms, hierarchical planning, principal-agent relationships, and hierarchical negotiations. The main idea is to describe an organisation as a superposition of interfering individual decision processes resulting in a pair of functional equations. Different specifications of these equations allow to characterize the above mentioned hierarchical phenomena. Since management can be considered as a planning and leadership activity to control the interrelationship of individual decision processes, the paper gives a contribution to a better understanding of the general structure of the management process.