Introduction to Organisations and Management Essay - 10

Introduction to Organisations and Management - Essay Example As such, this report seeks to critically evaluate how these concepts are implemented by two different organisations namely; Watsons Engine Components and H & M Consulting. The report starts by giving a brief description of the two organisations followed by a critical discussion of how these organisations differ in the implementation of the above mentioned concepts in their operations. Similarities and differences between the implementation of these concepts will be outlined and a conclusion to sum up the major points discussed will be given at the end of the report. 1.1 Description of the organisations Watsons is an independent, family-owned company which specialises in mass-production of engine parts for cars in North East London. The company employees 200 people in total and these comprise of 125 semi-skilled production workers, 15 clerical workers, 20 technical staff and 40 managers. On the other hand, H&M Consulting is a large global management, engineering and development consul tancy which was established in 1989 when two consultancy businesses merged. The company has grown from strength to strength since then and in 2007, it bought an educational consultancy in Romania, an environmental firm in the Netherlands and a power engineering company in the USA in a bid to strengthen its market sectors in these countries. The company employs more than 13  000 employees. 2.0 Organisational design and structure Structuring the flow of work involves decisions about how the organisation as a whole is structured (Swanepoel, 1998). Basically, organisation design essentially means choosing an organisational structure that is appropriate for strategy implementation and mission accomplishment. Kleynhans (2007) suggests that there are different structural variables that come into play in the process of designing an organisation and these include the following: configuration which deals with the number of levels in hierarchies, formalisation which concerns the use of forma l procedures in policy formulation, specialisation as well as centralisation which refers to the extent to which power and authority are delegated. As can be seen, all these variables hold important implications in respect of different types of organisational structures. Whilst there are different types of organisational structures, it can be noted that Watsons Engine Components has a bureaucratic organisation structure. This is also known as a mechanist approach to organisation design which is described as an â€Å"organisation design emphasising the importance of achieving high levels of production and efficiency through extensive use of rules and procedures and authority.† (Gibson & Donnelly, 1994 as cited in Swanepoel, 1998). A close analysis of the case study for this organisation shows that its structure is very old-fashioned and hierarchical. The organisation is highly unionised and has a very poor history of relations between the management and the employees. This has often led to job actions and is mainly attributed to lack of trust between the management and the employees. Another aspect that illustrates the hierarchical structure of the organisation is that the people in the Marketing Department for instance rarely speak to anyone in the Manufacturing Department given that it is the firm’s procedure that interdepartmental liaison should go