Organizational Behavior

Case Analysis of Wal-Marts World

Case Summary
As the worlds largest retailer, its difficult for Wal-Mart to maintain its corporate culture across all of its 4000 stores, 1.5 billion employees. In the past, Sam Walton who is the Wal-Mart founder started the Saturday Meeting, which was helpful for Wal-Mart to operate the company and maintain its corporate cultureclose-knit, solidarity, efficient, high formalization, frugality. However, with the development of Wal-Mart, tremendous attendance at the Saturday Meeting made it bored and difficult to maintain its culture. Also the increased public scrutiny brings to the biggest obstacle to Wal-Mart being the worlds largest company. For example, controversies over Wal-Marts anti-union position, its hiring and promotion practices, and its

Organizational Behavior
treatment of employees make it increasingly difficult for Wal-Mart to maintain its friendly, affordable image. So how to deal with the negative things may be the key problem for Wal-Mart to enjoy continued success.

Wal-Marts Culture
The seven primary characteristics are: innovation and risk taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness and stability. Then let me use the seven characteristics to capture the essence of Wal-Marts culture. 1. Innovation and risk taking. Wal-Mart is encouraging employees to be innovative and take risk. Risk comes with innovation, but people don't giving up innovation for the unknown risk. 2. Attention to detail. Many companies can keep advantage in the market because of paying great attention on details. So does Wal-Mart, such as the greeter's performancewhile smiling ,how many teeth will be exposed. 3. Outcome orientation. Management focuses on the results or outcomes rather on the processes to achieve those outcomes. But if too much paying attention on outcome can result some bad thing, because the process sometimes is important, and never should be ignored. 4. People orientation. Wal-Mart is a service organization, and the employees must get along well with customers. Only when all employees know how the management decisions come from and affect, they can do their job well. 5. Team orientation. In Wal-Mart, employees don't call staffs rather partners. Every employee can take part in the management decision. Team decision makes many good ideas to make progress of Wal-Mart's feet. 6. Aggressiveness. Wal-Mart's leader will ask why they don't have them when he found some products are selling well in other competitors' stores, and at once ask their stores to sell this kind of products. The leaders make decisions quickly, and take actions fast. 7. Stability. In Wal-Mart, there are a lot of products coming or going into his store, so it doesn't keep stability in the sale plans for a long time. When some products are selling in other stores, Wal-Mart will get the information at first time, and managers have a meeting together and makes decision to change the sale plan. The more employees accept the organization's key values and the greater their commitment to those values, the stronger the culture is. So Wal-Marts culture is strong. The strong culture of Wal-Mart has some functions to contribute to its longterm performance. Firstly, Wal-Marts managers respect everyone, and think about their advices. So employees' working hard can be praised and rewarded, and they form a positive value concept. Secondly, strong culture can condense the employees. Wal-Marts frugality culture affect many its employees. Thirdly, strong culture leads to organizational goals. Fourthly, it is more helpful to standardize employees, because it is intangible and informal. Fifthly, it moderates the relationship in WalMart between people and people, relationship and relationship, people and relationship. Recently some bad affection occurs in Wal-Mart. In the period of Sam Walton, Wal-

Organizational Behavior
Mart respects its employees and keeps a friendly impact to all the people. In the recent years, it employs the illegal immigrants for keeping the costs low. And Wal-Mart thinks greatly of the increasing achievement, but overlook to construct the company such as the impact, employee's attitudes and so on. There may be some suggestions of me to maintain and improve Wal-Mart's culture, such as strengthening the training for entrepreneur, carrying on socialization and improving the internal environment in the organization.

Characteristics of Wal-Mart's organizational structure

1. The organizational structure of Wal-Mart In management, there are two kinds of organizational structures, mechanistic organization and organic organization. I think Wal-Mart's organizational structure is mechanistic and the reasons are below. a. High work specialization. In Wal-Mart, each employee is a unit because everyone has a specific job, which makes it highly efficient. b. Rigid departmentalization. Customer departmentalization makes Wal-Mart set several positions, such as retail account manager, wholesale accounts manager, governments accounts manager, can satisfy customer's need and deal with problems, but also limit view of organizational goals. c. Clear chain of command. The chain of command is the continuous line of authority that extends from upper organizational levels to the lowest levels and clarifies who reports to whom, which is obvious in Wal-Mart. d. Centralization and high formalization. Wal-Mart is the organization of centralization. The scale of Wal-Mart is very big and a lot of managers cannot make decisions. Many decisions must be made by specific people. 2. The affection of Wal-Marts structure Wal-Mart is a mechanistic organizational structure which tends to be efficiency machines and rely heavily on rules, regulation, standardized tasks, and similar controls. This is also the character of the retailer. The kind of structure has good and bad affection to Wal-Mart. Work specialization makes Wal-Mart's efficiency highly, so it can keep the strategy of everyday low price. The clear chain of command makes it show the responsibilities and duties clearly. High formalization makes employees do their work orderly, and is good for managing. But the fixed departments have no enough ability to forecast the need of customers, and prohibit the exchange information among several departments. Narrow span of command also is a problem. Enlarging the span of control may decrease the conflicts. Centralization is bad for developing nowadays. The larger company scope, the more difficulties to manage. Decentralizing decision making and employee empowerment may be good solutions.

Organizational Behavior

Recommendations to Improve Employee's Attitudes

People popularly think Wal-Marts negative press doesnt benefit its employees. When employees feel they don't be accepted by the leaders, especially, the basic rights such as freedom, getting enough pay, equality, they don't have enough morale to do their jobs, and this affects the other people, which may keep organizational commitment. At last, the produce efficiency will decrease, the ability of competition of companies turns to become weak, and people start to leave the company. Also, the employees attitudes affect the customers, making the company be in trouble. If Wal-Mart wants to keep the continued success in the world, it has to find solutions to the above problems and the negative publicity that results. My recommendations to improve employee job satisfaction are below. 1. Make the need of employee together with organization goals, and satisfy their need as far as possible. 2. Let the employees join the decisions that should be made by upper managers, so they have the master's sense of responsibility. 3. Encourage employee to put forward a rationalization suggestion, the manager helps them carry out for satisfying the employee's sense of achievement. 4. Create a good work environment for the employee. There are two aspects, one is the external environment, including the work and rest environment, and the other is internal environment including culture human relationship. 5. Management by walking around. 6. Value employee training. 7. Build up an encouraging of spirit mechanism.