Modeling the span of control of leaders with different skill sets

In leading a team doing routine engineering design, two orthogonal skill sets can be distinguished: domain-specific or technical skills, and interpersonal “managerial” skills which are more general. This paper presents a computational model of team performance that relates these two types of skills to the amount of managerial and communication work generated given a certain team size (i.e. span of control). This model can be used to derive the optimal managerial profile for any team size, or the optimal team size for the skill set of a specific manager, provided the nature of the work remains fixed. The analysis of the model reveals several interesting insights. First, managerial skills are found to increase team performance up to a point after which it starts to decrease again. Second, a manager needs to compensate for low domain knowledge with high people skills, so optimal managerial skill level increases with lower domain knowledge. Third, both abilities have a significant impact on the manager’s allocated time for his/her group; however, more influence is noticed for managerial skills. Finally, the manager was found to be more essential to large teams.