Wal-Mart

Insert Name

Institution

Date of Submission

The organization name is Walmart in Canada. It is an organization established in 1994 with the take over of Woolco chain. Over years, Walmart Canada has doubled its stores in Canada and more than three times the number of associates, developing a strong, stable retail chain offering career opportunities. Its headquarters is in Mississauga, Ontario. The organization now operates an emergent network of above three hundred and thirty stores, including supercentres, traditional discount stores, and environmental exhibition store in Burlington (Schein, 1990).

Existing Vision

The existing vision for Wal-mart is, to be the world’s leading retailer.

Existing Mission

The existing mission for the company as described by Sam Walton, the founder of the company, is to let the people save their money in order for them to live better by lowering their cost of living.

Objectives

On the other hand, in the course of pursuing its strategies, Wal-mart has set some objectives to achieve along the way. They are measurable, specific, realistic, time bound. These objectives include enhancing profitability by increasing their profit margins, to improve their efficiency by lowering the costs, and to enhance growth by increasing its sales and assets. Besides, Wal-mart also strives to increase the wealth of the shareholder through appreciation of stock price and dividends.

The other objectives include the enhancement of reputation, market leadership, technology, and survival. It will enhance reputation by emerging the top firm in the world. On the other hand, the market leadership will be achieved by enlarging the market share. Lastly, innovation and creativity will boost technology while survival will be achieved by avoiding bankruptcy (Soderquist, 2005).

Walmart is sociologist’s organization, this is because it employs three main theoretical perspectives which offer them sociologists paradigms of the way the organization influences people and how people influence organization. Each perspective exceptionally conceptualizes organization, human behavior and social forces. This includes the symbolic interactions perspective, the conflict perspective and functionalist perspective. The symbolic interactionist perspective also referred to has symbolic interactionism directs Walmart to consider the details of every days’ life and symbols, their meaning, and how people interacts with one another (Schein, 2004).

The functionalist perspective also known as functionism, each organizational aspect is interdependent and contributes to organization’s functioning as a whole. Functionalists believes that organization held together by cohesion, social consensus in which all members of the organization agree upon, and together work to achieve, the best for organization as a whole. Finally, the conflict perspective which prevents organization in a varied light than the symbolic interactions and fuctionist (Schein, 1990).

Schein’s defines culture to be consisting of a range of levels from overt outside cultural manifestation to the deep underlying assumptions driving organization action. Walmart in reference to Schein’s cultural model, artifacts are the visible processes and structures, espoused values and beliefs to the Walmart goals, strategies and philosophies not forgetting underlying assumptions to the unconscious beliefs, thoughts, perceptions and individual feeling in the organization. This model helps in demonstrating the significance of culture to the organization since it unites or isolate people (Schein, 2004).

Leadership styles are ways, approaches and the manner of implementing plans, providing direction and motivating individuals. The major leadership styles include authoritarian or autocratic, delegative or free reign and participative or democratic styles. Walmart Canada uses democratic or participative leadership styles. This style Let’s work together to solve this. This style requires the leaders including at least one or more workers in their process of making decision. It involves determination of what needs to be done and how to do it. Nevertheless, the leadership maintains the authority of making the final decision. Walmart in using this style is a sign of strength rather than weakness that workers will respect (Schein, 1992).

SWOT Analysis

Strengths (Soderquist, 2005)

Its establishment as a powerful retail brand.

Wal-Mart has a reputation for valuing money, being convenient and providing a wide range of services and products all in one store.

The extensive global expansion by, for example, purchasing ASDA, the United Kingdom based retailer.

Wal-Mart embraces information technology for an enhanced international logistics system.

Wal-Mart has a proper management and development of human resource through training.

Weaknesses (Kipple et al., 2010)

Huge span of control is a major difficulty.

Lack of flexibility since it has different types of products as compared with the competitors who are specialized in some particular commodities.

The Wal-Mart stores are present in a few countries Worldwide.

Opportunities

The combination of grocery supermarket and a discount stores.

The incorporation of such specialty units as hair salon, eyeglass store, photo lab and dry cleaners.

The opening of the supercenters for seven days in a week and twenty four hours in a day.

The supplying of Sam’s Clubs and the supercenter stores via a distribution network separate from the discount stores of Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart has an extensive online business via such websites as samsclub.com and walmart.com, music download service and online pharmacy.

Threats (Kipple et al., 2010)

55% of Wal-Mart stores face competition from Kmart

Another 23% of the Wal-Mart stores face competition from Target.

This leadership style is mostly used when some information available and the workers have other parts this leadership style assumes that a leader is not expected to know everything thus need to use skillful and knowledgeable employees. This style has mutual benefit in that it allows workers to be part of the team and allowing the company makes better decisions with less resistance. For Wal-Mart, democratic style is advantages in that the participants produce high performance as a result of high motivation among the group members. Group member’s knowledge and experience helps in decision-making. Group members may feel extra commitment to group goals thus and less resistance to managerial actions. Personal abilities can be developed through participation. Group may be well informed due to high two way communication. This style also has disadvantages since individuals may dominate in the participation making disruptive contribution. The approach can be time consuming since leader uses of two-way communication. Other aspect affecting organizations’ environment performance includes weather which can affect organization performance either negatively or positively. Equipment is another aspect affecting performance, better equipment increases performance, but sometimes equipment might go wrong (Schein, 1992).

Walmart uses Internal channels of communication includes face-to-face meetings, news letters, internal emails, and memos, External channels of communication includes press release , Public relations statements, marketing materials and commercials. Despite having the best communication channels, unfortunately barriers do often occurs. This might be caused by number of factors such as system design, physical barriers faults or additional barriers (Yukl, 2002).

In conclusion the board of directors need to manage organizational culture, organizational leadership, organizational channels of communication and to address its barriers and to finally consistently evaluate organization performance to determine organization profitability at any given point in time. Some of the strategies that the company needs to use are as follows:

Open Door Policy whereby the managers are encouraged to open their doors to all employees.

Sundown Rule whereby the questions from customers, employees and suppliers are answered in the same manner at which they were received.

Grass Roots Process whereby the ideas and suggestions from the front lines and sales floor are captured.

Three Basic Beliefs & Values whereby the individual is respected, the customer is served and the excellence is striven.

10-Foot Rule whereby the employees are encouraged to make an eye contact, greet and offer to help a 10 feet customer who gets into the shop.

Servant Leadership whereby the leaders are encouraged to serve their team.

Wal-Mart Cheer to lift the morale of everyone in the morning.

References:

Schein, E.H.(1990). Innovative cultures and adaptive organisations, Sri Lanka Journal of Development Administration, 7(2), 9-39.

Schein, E.H.(2004). Organizational Culture and Leadership,Third edition. San Francisco:Jossey-Bass.

Schein,E.(1992).Organisational Culture and leadership.San Francisco,CA:Jossey-Bass

Yukl,G.(2002).Leadership in organizations.Upper Saddle River,NJ:Prentice-Hall,Inc.

Kipple A., Kipple A. and Wherry L. (2010). People of Walmart: Shop and Awe.

New York, NY: Sourcebooks, Inc.

Soderquist D. (2005). The Wal-Mart way: the inside story of the success of the world’s

largest company. New York, NY: Thomas Nelson Inc.