If a business grew only within the three primary functions (production, sales, and finance), chain of command would present no special problems. Responsibility for all activities could be easily assigned. All that would be necessary would be the downward delegation of authority commensurate with assigned responsibilities. All persons would then be accountable upward for results.

However, with growth, it becomes economical and even necessary to relieve these primary line functions of certain special duties. Thus, it becomes necessary to delegate responsibility and authority horizontally from the basic lines. So we have staff specialists who must derive their authority and responsibility from the primary chains of command, but who exercise no authority or only limited authority along these lines. They do, however, exercise authority within their own staff organizational unit.

Creation of staff specialists give rise to certain special problems of authority and responsibility.

For example, the specialists assigned production control duties might be responsible for planning production. They would determine the routes over which work Is to travel, schedule work, and release orders and instructions to the production department foremen. It might appear to the foremen that, although his immediate line superior is the production manager, he is also receiving orders and instructions from the production control personnel* And, in fact, this would be actually what is happening.

However, the foremen would not really have two "bosses, nor is he accountable to two different managers* Bather, production control would have received from the production manager an expressed delegation of responsibility and commensurate authority to prepare routes and schedules for the use of the foremen. Whenever a production control man issue? orders and instructions to the foremen, he is acting in the place of the production manager for this function. He is relieving the production manager or the foremen of responsibilities which they would otherwise have to fulfill, and in this capacity, he most have the limited authority necessary to carry out the assigned task.

Consider, for example, the position of market research in the sales organization. This group takes the reports of salesmen in the various districts concerning demand for the product, correlates this data with factors which are known to influence demand, and produces a sales forecast to be used in planning the salesman's activities. They release sales quotas and subsequent modifications