A supervisor oversees research chemists doing complex and dissimilar work. What follows for the span of control?

1. Where hundreds of employees perform the same job, one supervisor may be able to manage a very large number of them. 2. Where employees perform complex and dissimilar tasks, a manager can effectively supervise only a much smaller number. 3. Research chemistry is the complex and dissimilar case, so the span must be narrow. 4. The more complex the task, the narrower the span of control. 5. High skill does widen a span, but here the complexity of the work dominates and the example given is explicitly a narrow one. 6. Span of control is a managerial judgment about the work, not a figure handed down by the finance department. _Source: OpenStax Introduction to Business (CC BY 4.0), Ch 7 "Designing Organizational Structures", section 7.4 Span of Control_