If you want to manage as many people as possible at a state sector university, you should apply for a job at Karlstad University. Last year, a manager there had 43 employees under them, the most of all higher education institutions.
In 2014, there were 41 employees per manager in Karlstad. The year before that, there was an organisational restructure, and the number of departments was reduced from thirty to twelve, says Ingrid Ganrot, Head of HR at Karlstad University.
“I could give you a detailed description, because I have been involved in all the reorganisations, discussions and dialogues of the past 15 years.”
Ingrid Ganrot
Head of HR at Karlstad University
She describes the change as radical. The departments grew larger, and the heads of department were given significantly greater ‘control spans’, another term for more staff per manager.
“It was also based on the premise that they (the heads of department, editor’s note) would be given a good support structure and good administrative support, with deputy heads of department, directors of studies, heads of subject, support staff, HR, communication, finance and so on.”
Over the years, the change has been evaluated, and things are now heading in the opposite direction. Instead, they want a higher ratio of managers, says Ganrot.
“Our evaluations have shown that there have been some problems with this structure. That the workloads for managers, especially the heads of department and those with large control spans, has become too heavy. And that some employees feel their manager is inaccessible.”
As a result, a decision was made at the end of 2024 to allow heads of department to appoint managers below them, known as deputy heads of department with personnel responsibilities. So far, five such roles have been added. There may be more in the coming year, says Ganrot.
At Uppsala University, each manager was responsible for 36 employees last year. This is the joint second highest number of all higher education institutions, together with Linnaeus University (see full list here). Ten years ago, each head of department had 80 employees reporting to them.
The increase in the ratio of managers is a result of an investigation into the work situation of heads of department that was carried out a few years ago, says Pia Lindberg, HR Director at Uppsala University. Additionally, the BESTA work classification system, which was developed jointly by the Swedish Agency for Government Employers and the trade union organisations representing state sector employees to classify roles, has been recoded.
“It is a combination of things. We have carried out this recoding of roles and looked more carefully to ensure that the people who actually have been delegated personnel responsibility are also coded as managers. But we also conducted this major review of the work situation, conditions and challenges of heads of department, where we saw that many heads of department had a tough time managing many people. That is why we have endeavoured to reduce the number of staff per manager,” says Lindberg.
Pia Lindberg
HR Director at Uppsala University
The fact that Uppsala University still has a lower ratio of managers to staff than many other higher education institutions is partly due to the fact that it is such a large institution, she believes.
“We (the higher education institutions, editor’s note) are organised a little differently. Some of the departments here are also very large, where we have more employees per manager, which pushes up this statistic for the whole university.”
One higher education institution that stands out at the other end of the scale is Karolinska Institutet, KI. Ten years ago, each KI manager had 27 employees under them. Last year that number was 6, the statistics show. One possible explanation for this is that the way in which managers are coded in the BESTA classification system changed during the corresponding period, says Johanna Bäckström, Head of HR at KI.
“This means that research group leaders who only have personnel responsibility for one or two employees are also coded as managers. So KI has around 800 plus managers in the system, many of whom are research group leaders,” she explains by email.
Bäckström also points out that KI has a slightly different organisational structure than other universities and colleges, which may make it stand out in comparison.
Björn Andersson, the chair of the local Saco-S association and vice chair of the local SULF association at KI, describes how a new way of thinking about staff-management ratios has developed gradually in recent decades. At least on the research side. Nowadays, each research group leader has personnel and financial responsibility for their group.
“Previously, the heads of department or section had that responsibility, but it has now been pushed down to individual research groups. Each research group has become more and more its own little company instead of being part of the larger organisation. That is part of this famous excellence mindset.”
Björn Andersson
Chair of the local Saco-S association and vice chair of the local SULF association at KI
He is not in favour of this change, which he believes gives people less security and makes it more difficult to have a long research career at KI.
“There is greater pressure now,” he explains. “You have no support and protection from above at all. You have to be fully responsible for your own funding, even more so than before, and this is part of that. You have complete responsibility yourself and you get less administrative support.”
Annica Lindkvist, chair of the local SULF association and secretary of the local Saco-S association at KI, points out that it can be positive at a basic level that a manager does not have too many employees under them.
“I don’t really know if there is a lower limit for whether there can be too few employees per manager. If there could be some managerial inflation,” she says.
Annica Lindkvist
Chair of the local SULF association and secretary of the local Saco-S association at KI
One consequence of the fact that more people have become managers in academia, Lindkvist feels, is that the proportion of involuntary managers is increasing.
“Many people are given managerial responsibilities that they are not really ready or able to take on. They become managers but perhaps actually want to focus more on research or teaching. And they end up in a situation where they may not be fully prepared to take on managerial responsibilities,” she says.
Three higher education institutions contacted by Universitetsläraren point out that the Swedish Agency for Government Employers’ figures are not correct. At Mid Sweden University, at least, the figure for the number of managers in 2024 is wrong, the university’s press department informs us by email. In fact, the number of managers was about three times higher, which gives a ratio of 24 employees per manager.
Kristianstad University has also corrected its figure for 2024, resulting in 19 employees per manager. The Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, SLU, had a ratio of 25 employees per manager in 2024 after changing its figures.
The fact that the ratio of managers at state sector universities and colleges now averages 20 employees per manager, as the statistics show, is on the whole a fairly reasonable level, believes Linda Corin, who is a senior researcher at the Institute of Stress Medicine, Region Västra Götaland. She has a PhD in the work environment of managers in the public sector and now studies managers’ everyday lives and conditions, primarily within health care in municipal organisations. Quite simply, what managers need in order to be able to ensure that employees in turn get what they need, as she describes it. One of several different factors that play a role in this is the size of the staff group.
Linda Corin
Senior researcher at the Institute of Stress Medicine, Region Västra Götaland
But there is no rule of thumb or ideal number for how many employees someone can manage efficiently.
“Researchers have been trying for very many years to find some kind of magic number, but it doesn’t really exist. It will depend on a range of circumstances,” she says.
The circumstances may include the support the manager has from above and from the administration, the level of education and the tasks the employees have. The closest that research has come to finding some kind of cut-off point for the ideal size of a staff group is still somewhere around 30 to 35.
“If you calculate backwards with annual working hours and how much time is spent per employee,” says Corin, “for salary dialogues, professional development dialogues, holiday planning and all those things that increase as the number of staff grows, it is also at somewhere around 30 (employees per manager, editor’s note) that working time seems to run out.”
However, she is surprised that higher education institutions have no more than 20 employees per manager on average.
“It sounds much lower than I would have thought, but there is probably also a very wide spread of numbers. If you include staff functions, which have grown in size at universities and which may not have as many employees per manager, the figures may be a little distorted.”
Although managers have increased in number at higher education institutions overall, it is less likely that numbers have grown to the same extent within the research and teaching parts of the organisations as in other parts, believes Staffan Furusten, a professor of management, organisation and society and deputy head of department at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University. He is also chair of the Stockholm Centre for Organisational Research, SCORE.
Staffan Furusten
Deputy head of department at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University.
As the administrative side of academia has grown over the past decade, new units have been formed and managers have become more numerous, he tells Universitetsläraren.
“On the academic side, I don’t think the change is so great that we have more managers. We work in quite a similar way today as we did before. There are heads of department, there are heads of unit and then that’s it.”
Furusten describes management as more informal in research and education. There are different forms of co-operation with different types of leader, who are not necessarily managers in a formal sense.
“There are research groups where people work together in different projects. With project leaders. You work on books together, and so there is someone who leads the book project. You apply for money together, get funding for different projects, and so someone leads that. But you are not formally a manager. The people who have managerial roles should ensure that things can work on a more general level. But the work itself is often managed more from below.”
This view is supported by Darcy Parks, chair of the local SULF association at Linköping University, where each manager has 16 employees under them, according to the Swedish Agency for Government Employers’ statistics.
“In my experience, my formal manager is not really involved in my research or teaching at all.”
Darcy Parks
Chair of the local SULF association at Linköping University
In recent years, he says, the number of managers has grown. This is also reflected in the statistics from the Swedish Agency for Government Employers.
“I don’t know the exact figures, but we have added a managerial layer within our core activities,” says Parks. “We have gone from, in my case, a head of section for perhaps 50 people to also having two or three heads of unit under the head of section. That probably explains part of the change. It is a difference for those of us who are researchers and teachers. We have a manager who is closer to us now.”
According to organisational researcher Staffan Furusten, an increase in the number of managers in an organisation generally means less distance between managers and their staff. This increases the likelihood that more people will feel engaged.
“If the manager is far removed and you are one of many people,” he says, “there is a danger that you do not really feel that you are performing together with others. You are not seen in context. When there are smaller groups, you are visible, and each employee has a clearer function in that small context.”
One risk with more, smaller units, on the other hand, is that the overall assignment itself gets overshadowed, says Furusten.
“The small units with different managers become more interested in their own goals than the overall assignment. And this can also lead to more administration. Each unit needs to be followed up and each unit needs to have people working with measuring performance.”
The increase in the number of managers may ultimately also affect how managers feel. Alina Lidén and Ulrika Westrup, both senior lecturers at Lund University, have conducted two different studies to investigate managers’ perceptions of how they can talk about their wellbeing and what support they need. One study focuses on municipal managers in health and social care, labour market and education. The other is about managers in other public sector organisations, including the state. The latter was conducted together with Magnus Lidén, also of Lund University.
Alina Lidén
Senior lecturer at Lund University
Previous research studies, Alina Lidén tells us, show that managers with many employees under them run a greater risk of work-related stress.
“That is one aspect,” she says. “The other is that the increase we are now seeing in managers probably mostly applies to middle management. And there is research on middle managers that very clearly indicates that it is quite a vulnerable position to be this intermediary between staff, subordinates, management and senior managers. A position that has a major bearing on managers’ well-being.”
Increasing the number of managers may seem like a simple way to reduce the distance between managers and staff, but it may not always be the best solution, says Ulrika Westrup. Managers also need to be seen as employees. Employees who need support.
“Because that is very much what they are. They are also employees, and that means they need different support systems, because they have a different role to that of other employees.”
Ulrika Westrup
Senior lecturer at Lund University
Linda Corin, senior researcher at the Institute of Stress Medicine, also sees risks in the increased numbers of middle managers.
“When an organisation gets to a certain size, you have to start breaking it down in different ways. And then you have to coordinate between these parts. But we know that when we start to expand the organisation vertically, meaning that we get many layers of management upwards, there is a very great risk that we suddenly get a little ‘lost in translation’.”
Management risks going in one direction, while operational managers and employees further down in the organisation might go in another. It can also make it more difficult to pick up signals about how things are going in the core functions, she says.
“That’s why it’s not a universal solution to just appoint a lot of managers You also have to think about the how. If your aim is to reduce the number of employees per manager, there are different ways to go about it. You can certainly break up departments, but you can also start working more with joint leadership, shared leadership. Then you may not need to increase the number of layers of management, but you will still get a higher ratio of managers. So there are a few different paths to the goal here.”
