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Introduction

In any organisation, the organisational design is dependent on six elements - work specialisation, departmentalisation, chain of command, the span of control, centralisation, and formalisation. The above factors help the leadership to establish overall structure and respond to the changes in the business environment. Robbins and Coulter (2016) argued that the above is applicable to all organisations- irrespective of the industry or size or any other factor. The above argument is tested for Qantas Airlines as below. 

Analysis of Qantas

Robbins and Coulter (2016) described the six elements as follows- The first element is the work specialisation, which describes how the tasks and duties are assigned along with different positions and hierarchy in an organisation. For Qantas, every employee has been assigned different roles as per their position and hierarchy in the organisation. For Ex- A Customer Care Executive has a different role in comparison to a technical executive. The second element is departmentalisation where the work is broken down based on factors like product, function, and geography. Qantas has different divisions- domestic, international, low-cost, and loyalty program based on different functions. The third element is the chain of command which shows the direction in which the order flows in an organisation. There can be a traditional or flexible chain of command in an organisation. In Qantas, there is a unidirectional chain of command as the middle and lower management follows the command of the senior management.  The fourth element is the span of control, which focuses on a manager’s capacity to supervise people. For Qantas, the actual data is not available, however, the management has designed the organisation in such a manner that no manager faces difficulty in supervising people. The fifth element is the level of centralisation which is concerned with the degree to which decision making is done at the top level or at different levels. In Qantas, whilst the day to day decisions are taken at different levels, the strategic decisions are taken by division heads and by the board of directors of the organisation. The sixth element is the formalisation of elements which show the extent to which the roles have been formalised. In the case of Qantas, all the processes are well defined (Qantas, 2019).