Centralized management is the organizational structure where a small handful of individuals make most of the decisions in a company. For example, a small family diner owned by a married couple probably uses centralized management. The couple themselves order inventory, decide the marketing direction, and hire new employees. As a company with centralized management grows, they add new levels of mid and lower level managers, each of whom answers to a superior, with very strictly defined roles in the company.
More centralized management is usually seen in highly competitive industries, where companies specialize in similar products to their competition. A common example is Apple computers, where most of the direction of the company is orchestrated at the very top (formerly Steve Jobs himself), which the lower levels of management and employees very tightly organized to *** those goals.
