CSEC Principles of Business  /  Inside an organisation  /  Organisational charts

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Organisational charts

An organisational chart is a diagram of a business’s structure: who holds each job, who reports to whom and how authority flows down. The line runs from the highest level of management down to the departments. Paper 1 shows a chart and asks you to read it almost every year.

By the end of this page you can

  • Read the chain of command on a chart
  • Work out a manager’s span of control
  • Tell line, line and staff, and functional charts apart
  • Draw a simple organisational chart

Goals tick themselves off as you try the activities below.

A 1914 organisational chart of a stove-making company: stockholders and the board of directors at the top, then the president, managers, departments, foremen and workmen.

Photo: Willard C. Brinton, Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts (1914), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Resized, JPEG q78.

Read from the top down: the board, the president, the managers, the departments, the workers.

How often it shows up in past papers

All papers12 of 23 papers
Last 53 of 5 · 2023–2026

Paper 1 counts come from our past-paper bank of CSEC Principles of Business Paper 1s. The last-5 row shows how often it came up in the five most recent papers.

Inside this topic

  1. Reading a chartLocked
  2. Chart wordsLocked
  3. Key termsLocked
  4. Test yourselfmarkedLocked
  5. Practise for real · 2 past questionsLocked