Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas

Who was Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas?

Vytautas Andrius Graičiūnas was a Lithuanian management theorist, management consultant, and engineer. Born to Lithuanian immigrants, he studied at the University of Chicago. During World War I served in France. After coming back in 1919, he became interested in management and continued his studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 1927 he came to Lithuania and worked at Kaunas factories. Soon he started traveling and working across Europe. Until 1935 he worked as a consultant and helped to establish large companies in Barcelona, Brussels, Copenhagen, London, and Milan. During this period he published his classical study printed in Geneva Relationship in Organization in 1933. Soon other editions appeared in the United States. He mathematically proved that a manager should not have more than 4-5 subordinates. He came up with the following formula to express the total number of relationships between a boss and his or her subordinates:N

When number of subordinates increases, the number of relationships increases exponentially; at 5 subordinates the number of relationships is 100, at 10 - 5,210. Many scientists expanded or criticized the theory, among them was Herbert A. Simon.