Organizational Design Project

on

Vodafone Idea Limited

Under guidance of Prof. Shibashis Mukherjee, IIM Bangalore

By Group 3, Section D:
Vrajesh Kumar Singh (1811438)
Chayan Baul (1911234)
Avinash Deka (1911242)
Rituparna Ghosh (1911246)
Yemineni Meghana (1911266)
Prasun Shekhar (1911289)
Sumit Shubham (1911291)

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 Contents

1. Introduction

2. Mission and Vision

3. Product Portfolio

4. Core Competencies

5. Organizational Structure and Hierarchy

6. Structural Dimension

7. Organizational Life cycle

8. Miles and Snow’s Strategy

9. Growth Opportunity

10. Growth Strategy

11. Impact of Environment

12. Organizational Culture

13. Perrow’s Model

14. Sources of Conflict

15. Way forward

16. References

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 Vodafone Idea Limited

Introduction of erstwhile Vodafone:

Vodafone developed as a joint venture in early 1980s, founded by Racal electronics limited. In

the early stages, Vodafone developed cellular network in United Kingdom and enjoyed

duopoly with one major competitor Cellnet. The company was a dominant player in the 1990s.

Vodafone entered India in 2000 by acquiring Delhi operations of Essar. In 2007, Vodafone

acquired controlling stake of 67% in Hutchison Essar. It gained full control of Essar in 2014

when government allowed 100% foreign direct investment in the telecom sector. Vodafone

invested heavily in the Indian market after its advent with a growing customer base. After a

considerable amount of investment by Vodafone, Indian market witnessed the entry of

Reliance Jio which changed the telecom market drastically providing tough competition to

existing players such as Vodafone, Idea, Airtel etc.

Introduction of erstwhile Idea Cellular Limited:

Idea cellular is an Aditya Birla Group company, founded in 1995. It was incorporated as Birla

Communications Limited. The company grew steadily to acquire a customer base of 2 million

in 2004. It became a pan-India service provider in 2009 with a subscriber base of above 57

million. Year 2010 marked Idea as the third largest mobile operator of India in terms of

revenue. The company grew at a moderate pace over the years to expand itself in the Indian

market with a subscriber base of 171 million in 2015 offering a wide range of services to the

Indian customers.

Owing to the presence of Airtel and the advent of Reliance Jio in 2016 changed market

dynamics putting pressure on competitors. In 2018, Vodafone and Idea merged to form

Vodafone Idea Limited.

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Vodafone Idea Limited:

The merger of Vodafone and Idea in 2018 created India’s biggest telecom service provider-

Vodafone Idea Limited having a customer base of over 408 million. The merger aims to tackle

Reliance Jio with improved infrastructure to provide superior service, improved tariffs and

fight for future.

The merger of two leading telecom service providers of the country would have witnessed a

variety of changes ranging from organization structure, culture to share values, mission and

goals.

The proposed project aims to study the effect of merger on performance, organization structure,

design, culture, phases of growth, changes in leadership and decision-making authorities and a

wide variety of parameters relevant to the ever-evolving telecom market of the country.

The merger of two companies was based on improving products and services, collaborating to

provide efficient service to a large market to customers. Following are some of the goals which

the two entities aim to achieve post-merger:

1. Better network: Improved and robust ecosystem of towers which will yield better

network coverage than before. The new entity aims at large spectrum portfolio and more

broadband carriers to cater efficient services in 2G, 3G and 4G platforms.

2. New Technology: The merged entity aims at better services in voice, data, mobile

payments, IoT and others.

3. Competitive offers: The changed market due to entry of Reliance Jio requires a highly

competitive skills to serve the ever-changing telecom market. The company aims to invest

huge sums for improving technology and tackling competition.

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Mission of Vodafone Idea Limited:

• Customers: Be the most loved brand by continuously raising the bar in delivering

simple, delightful experience and meaningful innovations, through new age technologies.

• Team: Be an inspirational, agile and exciting organization that challenges the status

quo, and champions a diverse team that has a winning attitude and thrives on delivering

customer excellence.

• Shareholders: Be the most valued company through smart leadership committed to

delivering sustainable growth, while adhering to the highest standards of governance and

compliance.

• Community: Be the most respected company by leveraging technology and purposeful

innovation to catalyze social prosperity, digital literacy and inclusivity.

Vision

Create world class digital experiences to connect and inspire every Indian to build a better

tomorrow.

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Values

• Speed: Efficient working along with speed

• Trust: A culture that fosters trust in stakeholders

• Bold: Adopts a bold outlook and is not afraid of failures

• Digital: Focuses on technology to make things simpler for customers and company

• Passion: Acts with passion for brand and customers

Milestones:

Great place to work- Vodafone India ranked 20th in the LinkedIn Top Attractors 2017

Award- The only telecom service provider to be featured.

Brand Leadership-

• Vodafone India amongst the Top 10 Most Trusted Brands in India by Brand Trust

Report 2018.

• Recognized among the top 10 Most Admired Marketers – Brand Equity Most Loved

Brands

Business Services

• CIO Choice 2018 Award winner

• Vodafone Business Services recognized as the chosen leader for Telecom Carrier -

Leased Lines & Mobile Access (fourth year in a row).

• Vodafone was ranked second in the Service Category at the CII LEAN National

Competition 2018 for Business Excellence

Product Portfolio

Product Portfolio is the basket of all the products and services that a company has to offer. It

is the sum of all the products the company has been offering from its start and the product it

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has been adding up to meet the changing demand, preferences and technology. It can be

grouped into products, product lines and Individual products suited to the target market.

Drawing an analogy that as the organisation comprises of different departments but, together

they work for the common good of the organisation, in the same way, the product lines are

designed and managed to provide maximum profits to the company. Portfolio management has

become an important department in organisations as well.

Importance of Product Portfolio

1. Coordination among various departments: The various departments of the organisation

works together to produce various products and thus the product portfolio foster’s synergy

between various departments of the organisation.

2. Product and Technology Innovation: Regular analysis of the product portfolio gives an

idea and strategy to come up with a new variant of a particular product or to launch a

completely new product. It also gives feedback on the present technology used in the

product and is the innovation of new technology is required.

3. Efficient fund Management: The feedback from product portfolio management can

help efficient fund management as the management would know about the investments,

sales and profit from a product line. Thus, an efficient allocation of fund is achieved.

4. Implementation of feedback on products, product lines, individual products: Gaining

feedback and implementation of the same for the various product is possible when there

is a clear demarcation of the products in the basket.

5. Identify the target market: Product portfolio’s performance in various markets and with

various user groups helps identify the target market for the product.

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Vodafone’s Product Portfolio

1. Basic Plans:

a. Prepaid Plans: Monthly prepaid plans for the subscribers are available with

various options. There is also a basic minimum amount of recharge each

subscriber has to do in a month to remain active on the network. This was done

to ensure that the telecom operator has an active subscriber and it generates small

revenue to overcome the expenses it has to do on the subscriber to keep it

on the network. Also, the industry has been bleeding money, and this would ensure

that they don’t run into losses.

b. Post-paid Plans: It has postpaid plans which have subscribers from corporate,

business and professional background generally. This plan provides a constant

revenue to the company as this segment is characterised by fewer switchers.

c. Family Post Paid Plans: It is an innovative product being offered by Vodafone

Idea Limited. This plan is an offering to the family as the end-users. It allows a

family to share their postpaid plans. This not only ensures improved revenue but

also maintain a constant subscriber base.

2. Internet:

a. 4G plans along with the monthly package: This product is designed to

provide 4G data along with the monthly package.

b. Broadband plans: Vodafone had also ventured into fibre-net and broadband

services to offices and households.

c. Dongles & Mobile WiFi: They have dongles to access internet for laptops.

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 3. Content:

a. Collaboration with On-Demand video platforms: The company has

recognised the need for content over the 4G network. The consumption of content

is on the rise, which directly means an increase in the use of Mobile Data. Thus, the

company has collaborated with on-demand content providers like Amazon Prime

Videos, Zee5, Netflix to offer services at lower rates.

b. Vodafone Play, games and caller tunes.

Core Competencies:

1. Assets and Infrastructure: The merger entity that is Vodafone Idea has become the

leading operator in terms of assets and infrastructure together.

a. Total spectrum holding of 1860 MHz

b. 198,000 GSM mobile towers and rooftop towers

c. 376,000 Broadband sites

d. 340,000 kms of Fibre cable connections

2. Market Share: Leading in terms of total active subscribers, inclusive of all 2G, 3G,

4G subscribers.

a. 38% customer share

b. 32% revenue market share

3. Efficient Supply chain and operations: The company after the merger has a good

reach in both rural and urban area. Idea had a very good presence in rural India, and

Vodafone had good coverage in an urban and semi-urban area.

a. 480,000 Enhanced coverage in rural and urban areas.

b. 1.4 Million retail touch down points, 11100 branded stores.

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 c. 387 million active subscriber base as registered on Visitor Location Register

(VAR)

4. Vodafone is headquartered in the United Kingdom, it has access to the latest

technologies and bringing technology from outside India to Indian markets would be

simple.

Organisation Structure & Hierarchy:

The Vodafone Idea Ltd. has gone through a merger which has resulted a substantial change in

the structure. The structure has been specifically designed to tackle the threat of external

environment, with the increasing rise of threat from other players in the market like Jio. To

address this problem, the management has decided to come up with a flatter structure. This

flatter structure will give the most beneficial to the organisation. However, the introduction of

this new structure has faced criticism from the organisation’s employee and the issues raised

by this new structure is mentioned below. The structure released by Vodafone Idea Ltd. during

mid 2019 is shown below.

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The structure is headed with CEO being at the top, the second level are the CXOs

which compromise of CTO (Chief Technology Officer), CMO (Chief Marketing Officer),

COO (Chief Operating Officer), etc. The CIO (Chief Information technology Officer) has been

placed below CTO. For all other CXOs the below level includes Senior Vice-President

then Vice-President. General Manager is placed below Vice President and finally and the

bottom end of the hierarchy is Manager.

Though the current management have come up with flatter hierarchy structure to tackle the

external environment. This new flatter structure comes with its own problems. To make the

structure flatter, management has removed bands in the hierarchy and due to which lot of

employees are asked to work in the same band when earlier they were not. Due to which many

employees got demoted and asked to work on lower band and similarly many lower band

employees were also promoted to higher band. Also, these employees in their previous

organisation of Vodafone and Idea had different pay scale for same designation in the new

structure. All these restructures of designation caused unrest among the employees.

Looking at all those problems raised and unsatisfaction of the employees, the top management

of Vodafone Idea ltd has promised to come up with a better hierarchy structure in the future.

Structural Dimensions:

In this section, we look at the structural dimensions of Vodafone Idea Ltd. based on the

four major parameters.

1. Formalization – After the merger there is high documentation and formalization for the

regulations and policy in the company while the documentation for the procedures and job

description is yet to have the proper formalization and standardization.

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2. Specialization – Since the merger, as mentioned above due to flatter hierarchy many

employees of different bands from two organisation have been asked to work on same level.

This has created unrest among the employees. All these has contributed of having very less

chance for employees to switch their work domain. Any work which requires a high speciality

like the IT work is outsourced. Though the management has promised to provide opportunity

to variability in the work, currently the specialization is moderate to high in the company.

3. Hierarchy – The main objective of the new structure is to create a flatter hierarchy so that

it is more suitable to tackle the threat of external environment. Post-merger the no of levels in

the hierarchy has been reduced.

4.Centralisation - During our interviews, we have come with the conclusion that most of the

decisions are taken at the Vice-President level & even the General manager has also informed

us that any decision which would have any major impact were taken only by the higher

levels. Hence, the currently the organisation is highly centralised with most decisions taken at

higher level.

Organizational Life Cycle:

As workload increases in an organization, past approaches to problems start failing. Teams

may get overwhelmed with their current work, and managers who were previously effective

start making mistakes as their span of control expands. System starts to feel jolts of turbulence,

and this could lead to failure unless a way towards growth is discovered

The “Greiner Curve” can be used as a reference to think about the crisis that organizations

experience. With the help of it, one can realize the root cause of the variety of problems that

an organization is likely to experience in the fast growing business. Even beyond that, problems

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can be anticipated before they occur using this model, so organizations can meet them with

solutions they prepare.

Greiner’s Growth Model

As an organization grows, the different phases that it goes through can be explained by the

Greiner’s Growth Model. Companies from small design shops to giant manufacturers, real

estate companies to service firms, all experience these variety of stages. Every growth stage is

faced by some sort of “crisis” and some sort of major change is needed for the organization to

keep on growing.

“Crisis” can be defined more as a turning point, but for a lot of people it can create a sense of

dread and create panic. But when you look from a broader sense, there is no real need for panic

as these crisis stages can have a planned approach and that is the reason why we call these

points as “transitions”.

This model was originally proposed by Larry E. Greiner in 1972 with five stages of growth.

But in 1998, a sixth phase was added in an updated version. We believe Vodafone Idea is

currently in the 6th phase of its life cycle which is explained below:

Phase 6: Growth through Extra-Organizational Solutions

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The newly added sixth phase recommends that growth may continue through mergers,

outsourcing etc. The crisis that the company faces is of “Identity” and the way forward is to

create a new image of the company to separate it from its competitors.

This is exactly what Vodafone and Idea did to target the Indian market, they merged into a new

entity and pooled in their resources to combat the new competition. The longer a phase would

last, the harder it is to transition, but Vodafone-Idea has been able to successfully

surpass that.

Miles and Snow’s Strategy

This typology is one of the most important classifications that an organization needs to go

through. There are 4 broad regions: Defender, Prospector, Analyzer and Reactors. After

analysing Vodafone Idea’s current standpoint, we believe the company is somewhere between

an Analyzer and a Defender. Both are explained below:

Defender

These are relatively stable companies who are operating with a model to defend their current

market share. There is seldom much need to make any changes to the organization structure or

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deviate from the current existing operation. As a mature company, Vodafone Idea has almost

all its procedure defined, and this gives it an element of a defender. But since it’s in an

extremely unstable telecom market, we can’t define it as having a full-on Defender strategy.

Analyzer

An analyzer is a company that tunes its products depending on its competitors. In a more

“dynamic” domain, they will not usually make the first moves. Similarly, after the advent of

Reliance Jio, the market is extremely dynamic with different companies launching new

products regularly. In such a market, an essence of an analyser is needed to combat the new

changes. With Vodafone Idea continuously evaluating its competitors and offering different

plans and dynamically changing discounts to its customers, we believe an element of Analyzer

is evident in Vodafone Idea.

Growth Opportunity

As the number of new subscribers grow all over India, it was expected that Vodafone or Idea

would be able to target only 40% of this new customer base as individual companies, but now

after the merger with their consolidated resources it is expected that Vodafone Idea can capture

or at least target more than 60% of this new subscriber base.

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Further, even though new competitors like Jio have taken over the market share in terms of

total subscribers, it is interesting to note that in terms of 4G subscribers specifically, the market

share of Jio has been steadily decreasing while that of Vodafone Idea has been increasing over

the last few quarters. This is mainly due to the old 2G/3G consumers of Vodafone Idea

converting to 4G sims for better service.

Growth Strategy

The main focus of Vodafone Idea to combat the current unstable market is on cost cutting.

Circle and Zonal office infrastructures are being consolidated. The number of sales and

distributors have been significantly cut down, further a lot of underperforming branded retail

stores of both Vodafone and Idea have been shut down.

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The company is focusing more on acquisitions of active users, and the focus has been shifted

to acquiring higher end value consumers. Centralised credit and collection is also leading to

lower costs, bad debts and churn. Simplifying portfolio is also helping to lower the number of

calls to call centres per customer. Vodafone Idea is also following combined advertising and

business promotion to build a unified distribution and retail infrastructure.

Impact of Environment:

Organizational environment is defined as everything that exists outside the organizational

boundary (external to the organization) and has the potential to influence all or parts of the

organization.

There are broadly 2 types of environments:

1. Task environment

Task Environment includes the sectors with which an organization interacts directly on a

frequent basis and they have the ability to directly influence the organizational goals and

performance.

Examples:

Industry competitors:

For Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, the then 1st, 2nd and 3rd largest telecom operators in the

country, entrance of Reliance Jio into the market in September 2016 was a major blow and

the scale of it was not anticipated. This had a major impact on the telecom industry and has

led to many changes in the Indian telecom industry. All the small players like DoCoMo,

Aircel, etc. Have been acquired by other players and lot of consolidation activities

happened. One of the most important factors of interest is the merger between Vodafone

India Limited and Idea Cellular Limited, initiated for talks in 2017 and the merged entity has

emerged into the market in September 2018.

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Post-merger, the new entity took about 9 months to come up with the re-organization process

and bring all the employees of both the organizations under one organizational structure.

Market Consumers:

The consumers’ attitude towards mobile communications has changed over the last 3 years

where they have the option to choose from various telecom players products and have an upper

hand.

2. General Environment:

This includes the environment factors that have indirect impact on the

organization like government, socio-cultural factors.

Environmental Uncertainty:

Environmental uncertainty stems from having insufficient information about the external

environment to the organizations. External elements include factors like new technologies,

aggressive competitors, government regulations, industry changes, competitors, suppliers, etc.

There are two reasons for uncertainty:

1. Complexity of external domain (Simple-Complex domain)

Complexity of domain is majorly defined by the heterogeneity or number and

dissimilarities of external elements.

Depends on the number and dissimilarity of the external elements like Competitors, Suppliers,

Government regulations. For Vodafone Idea, important factors that contribute to

the Complex domain are discussed below:

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a. Government Regulations:

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and Department of Telecommunications

(DoT) time and again come up with various regulations, some of which have the power

to change the strategies of telecom operators. For example, the e-KYC (Electronic Know

Your Customer) regulation brought by the Government had brought the companies on

their toes to ensure that the eKYC machines are present in all the touch points by the

deadline. And this also makes it easy to acquire customers if the eKYC process is

incorporated in the IT systems sooner.

b. Customers:

Customers in our country are slow to adapt to new technologies or when there is handset

compatibility required for new technology as compared to other countries.

c. Other Factors:

Some other factors like any change in technology requires changes in the Infrastructure

heavy industry which leads to increase technology adoption time and also huge costs of

implementation. In India, by the time any new technology is implemented pan India, US

already introduces the next generation technology in their market.

2. Stability of external domain (Stable -Unstable dimension)

The rate of change in the external environment defines the stability of the industry.

Instability occurs when:

a. Consumer interests shift

b. New technologies are introduced

c. Competitors react with aggressive moves

In case of Vodafone Idea Limited, important factors that contribute to make its external

environment unstable are new technologies and aggressive competitors which are

discussed below in detail:

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 a. New technologies:

VoLTE (Voice over LTE) technology introduced by Jio enables voice calls over data

network. This technology requires mobile handset compatibility to function.

Hence almost all the telecom players in the country back then, around 3 years ago in

2016 when this technology was at its peak, faced a bottleneck to bring this VoLTE

service live for their customers. But Jio had worked around this by introducing an in-

house Reliance Jio mobile phone series called ‘Life’ which came at a nominal price of

Rs. 1500 and has made voice calls free. While voice calling generated about 40% of

revenues for all the telecom operators at that point, this was a table turning move

by Jio.

b. Aggressive Competitors:

Again, Jio was the biggest threat amongst the competitors as Jio was in a loss

leadership phase and gave away free introductory services to customers for 6 months to

build the customer base. It has become difficult for Vodafone to compensate for free

services with high quality services and had to reduce prices to be able to stay in the

market.

Hence Vodafone Idea in the Unstable and complex domain and therefore falls in the High

Uncertainty region. As per the theory we have studied, below are the factors that the

organizations in high uncertainty region should take control of:

1. Organic structure, teamwork; participative, decentralized

2. Many departs. differentiated, extensive boundary spanning

3. Many integrating roles

4. Extensive planning, forecasting; high speed response

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Vodafone Idea is following all the factors except Organic structure and decentralized way of

working. Mostly because it is an old organization and a big organization and has grown to

follow a mechanistic structure and follows the decentralized working style. But the

strong integrating roles, planning, extensive boundary spanning and high-speed response are

compensating for the same.

Organisational Culture:

As per the interview taken and secondary research done by us, we have studied and tried t find

the best organisational fit for this new merger born company. As we know the merger was

targeted to solve the threat from external environment, but still now most of the focus is going

on to build the formulation of merger.

As per organisational cultural chart, the organisational culture of Vodafone-Idea ltd. falls

somewhere between bureaucratic culture and also some of adaptability culture. More

specifically, the organisational culture of Vodafone-Idea ltd. is moving from bureaucratic

culture to adaptability culture.

Some of the specified reasons why it falls under bureaucratic and adaptability are mentioned

below.

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Bureaucratic Culture

• Organization is busy with merger, sorting & creation of internal orientation and

stable environment.

• New ideas & initiatives are not given priority at this stage.

• Approachability to higher management is low, restricted to two levels below CXOs.

• Rewards & recognition are less.

• Opportunity to change of work domain is less as due to merger lot of people have come

in same bands and also no. of levels also been reduced.

Adaptability Culture

• Merger is focused to tackle the external environment.

• Focus is to build a merger that will enable innovation & creativity.

• No. of vertical hierarchy has been reduced.

Perrow’s Model

Perrow’s work analyses how Technology relates to different organisational characteristics. The

advantage of Perrow’s framework is that it can be applied to a wide variety of tasks and beyond

core technologies. He defined the tasks into two dimensions – Task Variability and Task

Analysability. Task Variability refers to the degree to which a task is routinised and similar

(variable), or it requires some kind of exceptions (non-variable). Task Analysability refers to

the degree to which non-formal procedures are required to meet non-standardized exception

(Analysable), or it requires employees to improvise to produce solutions (non-analysable).

He grouped tasks as, Routine, Engineering, Craft, Non-Routine.

1. Routine technologies involve standard operating procedures coupled with systematic

procedures for dealing with exceptions, thus, low variability and high analysability.

Assembly line is a good example to it.

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 2. Non-Routine There is no set procedure to meet the uncertainty (low analysability), and

the tasks are not the same, it has high variability.

3. Craft, it has variability and standard procedure for most of the tasks, but at times, the

employees need to innovate and invent solutions.

4. Engineering, It has high variability as the work cannot be standardised according to

set procedures. But the Analysability is high because the work can be automated and the

solutions can be set and predefined.

According to our inferences from the interviews conducted of the Vodafone Idea

Ltd. employees, we found that the tasks there is of Engineering type, characterised by high

analysability and high variability. The employees have to address variety of tasks hence highly

variable. But the organisation over the years have developed set standard procedure to tackle

the tasks and problems. Since it is a big organisation with different departments, there are

always some people who would have seen a type of problem and already has a solution to it.

Sources of Conflict:

We analysed the possible sources of conflict in Vodafone Idea ltd. and the same has been

presented below under the four headings.

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• Goal Incompatibility:

Before the merger the similar departments of Vodafone and Idea has different strategies

on how they function. However, after merger people from two groups have come

together with different strategies which have created confusion. More over the roles of

all departments have not been clearly defined. As a measure to tackle the external

environment, the bands have been decreased which has resulted confusion between

people and the department itself.

• Differentiation:

Differentiation occurs when the departmental norms and rules are enforced upon people

which hinders their ability and aptitude consistent. Due to merger, the no. of levels has

been decreased and people of upper bands and lower bands earlier are now asked to

work on the same level. Also new rules and formulation are made, all these factors have

caused in differentiation.

• Task Interdependence:

For a telecom company like Vodafone Idea, many departments are interconnected and

depend on each other for smooth functioning. This has resulted a clear reciprocal

interdependence. This high interdependence sometimes create conflicts between

departments as proper and mechanical mode of communication is yet to be established

in this new hierarchy.

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 • Limited Resources:

The merger has resulted in the formation of one of the largest telecom company in India,

as both Vodafone and Idea has high presence and customer base initially, Vodafone has

high customer base in the urban market and Idea has a string presence in the domestic

market. The merger of both has resulted in the formation of a company which will have

customer from both side of the spectrum. But due to external threats like Jio, the profit

margin of the company is taking a hit and to run a huge infrastructure and large number

of staffs, it needs continuous revenue. The merger is hoping to come up with a well-

defined strategy to use these current limited resources to overcome this threat.

Way Forward

Post the turmoil that Vodafone and Idea faced in the market after the entry of Jio into the market

with predatory pricing, the need to bounce back as an organisation and new strategies.

They have to remove scepticism among the employees and help them to gain their maximum

efficiency. Also, the organisation needs to work on feedback from employees and the stake-

holders after the restructuring of the organisation. It has to gain back its lost market in the

industry and also venture into latest technologies to continue to remain relevant with changing

technology, demographics and preferences of the consumers. Here are few points upon which

the organisation can build its strategy.

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 1. Indian market has immense growth opportunity. Because of the size of market, Indian

market is very attractive market. There is opportunity in field of high-speed internet and

broadband sector. With the advent of IOT the number of connected devices has been

increasing and thus Vodafone Idea needs to be watchful to tap into those segments.

2. The company should accelerate the delivery of benefits of merger to its employees. Till

now it has gained some success in this. For example, it has introduced work from home

option for its employees, thus making the work a little flexible. The organization should

continue to deliver the benefits to its employees in similar manner.

3. Focus on strategic markets is the need of the hour. Today the subscriber is not satisfied

with just mobile calling and the internet. It needs further value-added services like content,

games, etc. to keep them engaged over the internet. Thus, Vodafone Idea should venture

into it or can collaborate with emerging players in the content segment.

4. Vodafone Idea has largest assets in 4G, so they should strategize to bring more

subscribers on-board to their network.

5. They should raise fresh capital and be ready with their new plan to embrace 5G

technology and provide it immediately to consumers as an when it is ready. This would

give a first mover advantage to the company.

References:

1. https://www.ideacellular.com/about-us/history

2. https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/vodafone-india-all-you-want-to-know-

about-telcos-journey-here/596209/

3. https://discover.vodafone.in/about-us/home?section=consumer

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4. https://www.livemint.com/Companies/rPju0LUcHUizRBbXH7ecdL/How-Mukesh-

Ambanis-Reliance-Jio-shook-up-Indias-telecom-ma.html

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