Mahindra Organizational Structure

This research paper has been written by Lawrence B Mohr. He was an assistant professor of political science and a research associate in the institute of Public Policy Studies at the University of Michigan. The paper explores the technology-structure dependency. To examine the scope of relationship between organizational structure and organizational technology, both subjective and objective data were used. It resulted into Mohr concluding that there is a weak relationship between organization’s technology and structure. There is no substantial proof of the strong relationship. It is also inappropriate to expect some dimensions such as span of control, participativeness and prescriptive rules to share the same relationship with the technology

Woodward surveyed 100 manufacturing firms in order to learn how they organized. She developed a scale and organized the firms accordingly to technical complexity of manufacturing process. The three basic technology groups are Small Batch and unit production, Large Batch and mass production and Continuous process production. According to her, the Small Batch Production relies heavily on the human operator; it is thus not highly mechanized. Large Batch Production is a manufacturing process characterized by long production runs of standardized parts and in Continuous-process Production, whole process is mechanized.

In this review, Mahindra and Mahindra is the organization of our interest. We will be checking the validity of all the findings pertaining to this paper on this organization.

Mahindra & Mahindra Limited is the flagship company of the Mahindra group with around US $6.7 billion. Mahindra Group was set up in 1945 and since then, the group has grown steadily in size and stature and evolved into a Group that occupies a premier position in almost all key sectors of the economy. It deals in a variety of services like automotive, farm equipment, financial services, trade and logistics, automotive components, IT and infrastructure

The company later branched out into manufacture of light commercial vehicles (LCVs) and agricultural tractors, rapidly growing from being a manufacturer of army vehicles and tractors to an automobile major with a growing global market. At present, M&M is the leader in the utility vehicle (UV) segment in India with its flagship UV, the Scorpio.

With the time and technological advancements the organisation has changed its function-oriented structure to process and team oriented strategic business units. The existing assembly line system was changed to a continuous manufacturing system, which was the first of its kind in the automobile sector in India. It was done to improve the efficiency of the system.

Charles Perrow model specified two dimensions of departmental activities that were relevant to organization structure and processes. Perrow argued that control and coordination methods should vary with technology type. The more routine the technology, the more structured the organization should be. Conversely, non-routine technologies require greater structural flexibility.

Automobile division of Mahindra comes under large scale continuous production organization. As per the findings of the study, it is a technologically complex