ORGANISATIONS AND BEHAVIOUR

Organisations and Behaviour



Organisations and Behaviour

Task 1:Organizational structure and culture

This section of the report compares and contrasts the organization structure and culture of Tarmac and Deloitte. Tarmac is the brainchild of Edgar Purnell Hooley, a Nottingham County Surveyor who founded this company in 1903 and named it after the road construction system developer John MacAdam. Tarmac is a manufacturing sector company and this assignment compares Tarmac with a services sector company Deloitte. Deloitte is a UK private company that is limited by guarantee. Deloitte is among the big four companies at international level providing services in the disciplines of audit, risk management, tax, financial advisory and consulting. Deloitte is a brand that collaborates thousands of dedicated professionals working in independent firms in different countries sharing the same ideology and standards of providing service.

Tarmac and Deloitte are different in terms of their cultural norms and symbols, values and beliefs and development of their organizational culture. Tarmac has underlying assumptions and beliefs of its founder Edgar Purnell Hooley and the complete business ideology derives from perception and mindset of that person, whereas Deloitte has an international mindset that is more mature on learning curve as compared to Tarmac due to its decades of experience in providing professional services via a decentralized structure that gives autonomy to its member companies to maintain their bond with Deloitte brand by simultaneously working with independence in their own geographical regions (Bisel & Keyton, 2007, Pp. 136-159).

Advantages and disadvantages of each type of structure to each organization

Tarmac runs a centralized and Divisional organizational structure with role culture as the whole company is organized into three businesses that we refer as divisions with each employee serving a particular role peculiar to its department. The three divisions in Tarmac are:

Tarmac Quarry Materials

Tarmac Building Materials

International

Tarmac has a tall organizational structure with seven hierarchical levels.

The advantages to Tarmac of operating a centralised divisional organization structure are:

Divisions are more flexible and achieve greater market proximity through better knowledge of customers and competitors as Tarmac has different customers and competitors in each division. Quarry Materials market would be affected by different factors generally as compared to Building Materials;

Coordination efforts in Tarmac's apex level increases due to better understanding of individual product markets that enables in corporate strategy formulation and identification of better and weak performing business segments;

The staff become more motivated by increased responsibility and feeling of autonomy within their divisions as they feel justified to be appraised with respect to their performance specific to that division and not to the company as a whole;

Higher level of identification with their company or specific area of their task encourages specialization skills within staff and they are able to perform their task with economy, efficiency and effectiveness with higher level of precision, and

Successes and failures can be associated with better opportunities available for staff in each division in their respective division or market segment that enables staff to grow and prosper in their specific discipline (Kjaergaad & Kautz, 2008, ...