Mechanism is introduced to organisations that organisational structure comprises a set of vertical positions and relationships, which is able to reduce the inefficiency and maintain the identity of organisations. (Knights and Willmott 2007: 197) In other words, organisations are generally divided into three level of hierarchy - the big boss, some managers and the workers. Decisions are mainly made by different managers who have specialist knowledge and experiences on particular areas. Workers are following orders to finish their tasks in certain period of time, of course, some workers need to have special knowledge and skills. The big boss or the board are responsible for hiring senior managers and auditing. (Boddy 2008:333) Similarly, this process can be described as the process of fulfilling the expectations of the top of the hierarchy. The whole process also can be called ‘ a top-down approach’. This short writing is going to state that the basic and vital elements of maintaining mechanistic organisation are from the distribution of power and authority.
It may be argued that organisational culture could be one of the key issues to maintain mechanism in organisations, because it focuses on worker emotion, which may improve the performance. However, if we go deeper, it is easy to find out that the distribution of power and authority are the essences in a top-down approach. In order to fit the characteristics of organisations, the structure of the organisation is pre-design. Even though there may be some changes in the structure during the process, the majority of structure will not change because the purpose of pre-designing structure is to clear state the power and authority system in organisation to run business. If the whole structure is changed, it is not resulted in the distribution of power and authority but because the big boss did not chose the right method to the organisation by considering certain contingencies. (Boddy 2008:334)
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