Understanding Parent-Child Relationships by Employee

When you define organizational structures, you create hierarchies of relationships between parents and children. For example, a large business might have headquarters in one city and several regional offices that are subsidiaries of the headquarters. You can define an organizational structure in which you set up the regional offices as children, or subsidiary business units, of the headquarters. The regional offices can in turn be parents, or higher-level business units, of local offices. For each office, you can set up an organizational structure by employee, with upper-level managers as parents of mid-level managers, and mid-level managers as parents of employees.

Each employee can have only one immediate supervisor. The system prevents you from entering a manager as a subordinate of an employee.

You use one of these modes to define an organizational structure by employee:

• Enter child positions for a higher-level parent.

• Enter a parent position for subordinate child positions.

After you create parent-child relationships, you can revise these relationships as necessary to reflect changes in the organization.