Market Performance of Wal-Mart in Canada - Essay Example

Wal-Mart is a 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 the organization. Each perspective exceptionally conceptualizes organization, human behaviour and social forces. This includes the symbolic interactions perspective, the conflict perspective and the functionalist perspective. The symbolic interactionist perspective also referred to as symbolic interactionism,  directs Wal-Mart to consider the details of every days life and symbols, their meaning, and how people interact with one another (Schein, 2004).

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

Schein defines culture to be consisting of a range of levels from overt outside cultural manifestation to the deep underlying assumptions driving organisational action. Wal-Mart about Schein’s cultural model, artefacts are the visible processes and structures, espoused values and beliefs to the Wal-Mart goals, strategies and philosophies not forgetting underlying assumptions to the unconscious beliefs, thoughts, perceptions and individual feelings in the organization. This model helps in demonstrating the significance of culture to the organization since it unites or isolates 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, delegative or free reign and participative or democratic styles. Wal-Mart Canada uses democratic or participative leadership styles. This style Let's work together to solve this. This style requires leaders to include at least one or more workers in their process of making decisions. It involves the determination of what needs to be done and how to do it. Nevertheless, the leadership maintains the authority of making the final decision. Wal-Mart in using this style is a sign of strength rather than weakness that workers will respect (Schein, 1992).

This leadership style is mostly used when some information is available and the workers have other parts this leadership style assumes that a leader is not expected to know everything and thus needs to use skilful and knowledgeable employees. This style has mutual benefit in that it allows workers to be part of the team and allows the company makes better decisions with less resistance.

The democratic style is advantageous in that the participants produce a high performance as a result of high motivation among the group members. Group members’ knowledge and experience help in decision-making. Group members may feel an extra commitment to group goals thus and less resistance to managerial actions. Personal abilities can be developed through participation. The group may be well informed due to high two-way communication. This style also has disadvantages since individuals may dominate the participation making a disruptive contribution. The approach can be time-consuming since the leader uses two-way communication. Other aspect affecting organizations’ environmental 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).

Wal-Mart uses Internal channels of communication including face-to-face meetings, newsletters, internal emails, and memos, External channels of communication include press releases, Public relations statements, marketing materials and commercials. Despite having the best communication channels, unfortunately, barriers do often occur. This might be caused by several factors such as system design, physical barriers faults or additional barriers (Yukl, 2002).

In conclusion, I would like to recommend the board of directors manage organizational culture, organizational leadership, and organizational channels of communication and address its barriers and finally consistently evaluate organization performance to determine organization profitability at any given point in time.