Limitations of Staff

The use of staff specialists can ensure many benefits to organizations but the nature of staff authority and the difficulty of understanding it lead to certain problems in practice, as under

1. An escape clause for staff specialists : Staff specialists only propose a plan; others must make the decision to adopt the plan and put it into operation. This creates an ideal situation for shifting blame for mistakes. The staff will claim that it was a good plan and that it failedbecause the operating manager was inefficient and ineffective.

2. Line authority being undermined : Operating (line) managers represent the main line of the organization and they also gain a degree of indispensability. The staff specialists may. however, forget that their value lives in the extent to which they strengthen line managers and also that they are to counsel and not to order. They need to remember that if they undermine line authority, they risk becoming expendable. As a matter of fact, if there is an expendable person in an organization. it is most likely to be the staff specialist.

3. Impracticality of staff recommendations : Since staff people do not implement what they recommend, it is possible that they may think in a vacuum. thereby making their recommendations impractical and which in their turn. often results in friction, loss of morale and sabotage. 4. Disunity in command : Unity of command is unavoidable for the management of any organization to reach its goal. So, multiple authority. created out of the use of staff specialists, may create disastrous consequences.

4. Complicacy in leadership and control : The chief executive of a 's large organization may be so busy dealing with the advice and recommendations of a large number of staff specialists that he finds little time to devote for operating departments.