What is the difference between line personnel and staff personnel?
Line and staff are basically the functional types in organizations. Line personnel is the one who carries out basic activities and directly deals with the everyday operations of a business. These could be anything related to creating a product or service or selling a product or service. Staff personnel on the other hand supports the business by carrying out specialized services and stands as a support function for the line personnel. The job functions of staff personnel could be related to specific departments like human resources and accounting.
Why are the two groups so often in conflict?
Although both the personnel play an important role in success of a business, often it is noticed that both the groups are engaged in conflict. Staff personnel are always apprehensive of justifying their existence in the organization as they feel they are highly dependent on line personnel and are not a part of the core functioning team in the business. Nevertheless, line personnel feel that the staff personnel lack expertise in the core working areas of business and they often distract them in their execution of core tasks (Barbeito 85).
Do you think that this would also be true in a virtual organization?
Well, an organization is a group of individuals who work together to meet common business goals. Although, in a virtual organization the probability of such conflicts is minimized to a great extent, the physical interaction of staff personnel and line personnel is very rare. But still, be it a physical or virtual organization, both have their department performing different staff and line functions and it is the responsibility of every individual to dedicate all knowledge and efforts towards achieving common organizational goals.
How would you minimize the conflict problem?
The only way to minimize such conflicts is by imparting proper organizational training to the employees. Both, the line and staff personnel will have to understand that they complement and supplement each other in varying circumstances and in no way can benefit the organization without the support of each other. They should maintain cordial relations and should always empathize with the problems concerning all functional departments within the organization (Barbeito 56).
Would you rather have a line job or the staff job? Why?
I would prefer to have a line job over staff job as it is a kind of front runner job where one has to deal with the core tasks in an organization. It has an associated competitive edge and the performance of line personnel is directly associated with the overall revenue growth and profit generation of the organization. As of otherwise, staff function is a supportive function that facilitates with specialized advisory services to the line function to meet organizational objectives.
Works Cited
Barbeito, C L. Human Resource Policies and Procedures: For Non-profit Organizations. New York: John Wiley, 2004.
