Understanding Facebook

Understanding Facebook: Management Organization

Melinda Bonte

Principles of Management and Leadership

Judson University

Abstract

Facebook is a social network service and website that was launched in February 2004. Currently, Facebook has over 1 billion active users. Users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. (Shetty, 2011) Additionally, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the service stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year. (ChaCha, 2011) University administrations gave the book to its students with the intention of helping students get to know each other better. (Shetty, 2011) Facebook allows anyone who declares themselves to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website.

Facebook is founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his college roommates and a few fellow computer science students. The website’s membership was initially limited by the founders to Harvard students but was expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and Stanford University. (Shetty, 2011) It gradually added support for students at various other universities before opening to high school students, and, finally to anyone aged 13 and over. (Shetty, 2011)

Understanding Facebook: Management Organization

To better understand Facebook, its organizational hierarchy and the levels at which its executives manage the employees and business structure, we must first look at the chain of command and the levels of hierarchy through an organizational chart. From this chart, we can discuss Facebook’s organizational structure, span of control and the effectiveness of its distribution of authority and sufficient coordination among individuals and functions within the organization. This...