About “organizational units”:

In a modern, complex organization (like a university), a legitimate “organizational unit” (org. unit) generally satisfies the following six criteria. It is or has…

1. managed by a formally appointed and acknowledged “leader” who is responsible and accountable for its operation

2. charged to provide a specific service (purpose or mission) for the organization

3. a formally allocated budget that leader is responsible to manage & expend

4. a formal set of functions or tasks to accomplish together with plans for improving or developing those functions into the future

5. served by set of employees whose work is overseen by leader and for whom leader is responsible for formal evaluations at prescribed intervals; unit leader is responsible (at least in part) for hiring, developing, promoting, and terminating employees of unit

6. a physical place or site in which to conduct its affairs and operations

The organizational unit is often depicted in an organizational chart as a box with a single reporting line extending up to a larger unit and possibly several supervising lines extending downward to smaller sub-units that unit leader is responsible for overseeing in addition to activities of the unit itself.

Thus, for example, in the academic arena, a college is a sub-unit of a university while an academic department is a sup-unit of a college. It may be that a discipline or program is a formal sub-unit of a department; but this group may not be characterized by all the criteria of a formal organizational unit. (It may lack a distinct budget or a unique set of staff, for example.)

Or among support services, an office may be a sub-unit of a department while a department may be a sub-unit of a larger division.

In any event, within a modern complex organization, the formal leader of any unit will “report to,” be “supervised” by, and is accountable to the leader of a larger “superior” unit. And the leader of the supervising unit is responsible to monitor and authorize the activities of the subordinate unit and its leader.

See: Nadler, Gerstein, & Shaw (1992), Organizational Architecture: Designs for Changing Organizations, Jossey-Bass.