To structure organizations in a top-down-model, having leaders on the top. Sometimes having a leadership is a problem, especially in self-organizing systems like Free Software/Open Source.

Most structures in which the organisation is flexible, and likely to change over time, will take the shape of a hierarchy, for the simple reason that it has very low overhead: it minimises the average number of links to any given node assuming a bound on the number of connections per node.

Hi`er*arch"ic*al (?), a. [Cf. F. hi'erarchique.]

Pertaining to a hierarchy.

<-- 2. Pertaining to a transitive relation between objects by which they may be ordered into a hierarchy. -->

© Webster 1913.