Ob Reflective Notes

Reflective Notes: Organizational Behavior

Submitted by – Anand Bharti – TCL

Topics covered: Organizational Structure (Case: Appex Corporation)

                          : Power and Politics (Case: Donna Dubinsky and Apple Computer)  

• Organizational Structure

What Have I Learnt

1. As organizations grow, they go through a continuous process of evolution and change, which necessitates adapting to these phases of change and reorientation   and reorganization of organizational structures.

2. Every organization structure has its inherent advantages and disadvantages. The formation of an organization structure is based on operating environment, organizational strategy, scale and operations of business and culture.

Culture has important significance and need to be kept in mind in creating organizational structures. For e.g. Japanese organizations follow a circular structure where top rung in the hierarchy is also accessible directly.

People have little autonomy to make decisions, obey authority and respect traditions. This kind of structure may not work in other countries due an element of cultural shift.  

3. Understanding of following types of structures

• Functional structure -   Consists of all departments that an organization require to produce goods and services
• Divisional Structure -  Consists of a series of business units to produce specific kind of products for a specific customer(Product ,market and geographic structures)
• Matrix Structure – Structure which simultaneously group’s people and resources by function and product.

How do I know I have learnt it

The above learnings have been helpful to understand, relate and distinguish various organizational structures and in Cummins. Cummins in India has 8 entities today. The structure looked from an entity level perspective is a product structure. Entity is headed by Vice president Operations and there are Purchasing, HR, Supply chain, Quality, plant operations who report into VP operations. All these entities heads report into Cummins India COO.

These various functions also have a dotted line reporting into India level functional heads. Like purchasing head of entity has direct reporting into entity head and purchasing head also report into Cummins India purchasing chief.

All new developments/platforms are coordinated and managed by VPI teams where constitution is from all functions. The functional team members do not have formal reporting into program heads but are responsible for functional deliverables to program heads.

It is a matrix structure at Cummins India level