What Does The Organisational Structure For Tescos Look Like?

The organisational structure for Tesco is huge and complex, given that Tesco is such a large company with so many different levels. It delegates a lot of roles to a lot of people, and down the ladders of management there are many teams, sub teams, managers and sub managers that deal with all the issues that relate to the everyday success of Tesco as a business.

Tesco is a multi-national company, too, meaning that there are delegated roles that spread across the world, too. A flat organisational structure would simply not work for Tesco, as so many roles both financial, administrative and otherwise must be performed if it has any chance of surviving in the competitive market that it operates in.

Given that Tesco is already operating in the crowded market of ‘supermarket’s in the United States, taking on Wal Mart and other big competitors and currently not doing all that well, it’s important for Tesco to maintain an organisational structure that sees different teams and different departments focusing on their own problems and creating their own solutions - instead of implementing an autocratic leadership style that could potentially ruin their whole business plan.

As one of the world’s biggest supermarket chains, operating in an international market, it’s important for the company to remember that every department and every little branch of the company is incredibly important. Without its thousands of employees and without all of its departments, communication and other areas of internal procedures would completely fail. Hence, the organisational structure sees the company being incredibly grateful and cooperative with all different branches. When there are problems, these departments and branches work together, too, to ensure the success of the business no matter what. Just remember, the organistional structure for Tesco is relatively similar to all other large businesses out there.

Tesco Organisational structure

Tesco, the United Kingdom-based international supermarket chain which has its headquarters located in Cheshunt, England, was founded by Sir Jack Cohen in the year 1924. It is one of the prime examples of a decentralised organisational structure. Each store in the Tesco chain of supermarkets has a store manager who makes the decisions concerning the store he or she is managing. All the store managers in a region report to the regional manager.

A decentralised organisational structure has the following advantages: senior managers can concentrate on the most crucial decisions, decision making empowers and hence motivates the staff and increases their output, it gives people a better understanding of their work environment, including the colleagues and the customers and increases their knowledge and experience, responses to challenges and changes are much faster in a decentralised organisational structure and empowerment brings more responsibilities and brighter changes of accepting them and carrying them out more successfully.

Tesco has a flat hierarchical structure with just six levels between checkout staff and chief executive.
Sourced: www.321books.co.uk

The organisatinal structure for Tescos is referred to as a devolved or decentralised struture, in other words it is relatively flat.
What this means is that power is devolved 'down the line' and people at the lower end of the (overall) scale of power can make decisions about what happens within the store.
So Tesco's provide the framework and the blueprint for pricing, layout, staff terms etc, but others can operate flexibly to a certain degree within that structure.
Proponents of this style of management feel that this enables people who are close to the shop floor and close to the customers, to be able to make decisions and influence power, so that the customer is satisfied.
However, some critics of Tesco argue that this does not operate well in practice and in particular some of their buyers push farmers particularly within the third world so hard that they are effectively forced to live in poverty.

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