Week 5 Assignment: Organizational Structure and Culture

Organizational Change
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Organizational Change
Walmart is one of the largest chain stores with a net worth that comes up to $8 billion and above. This is a company that has domestic and international stores. However, the company has been experiencing some challenges with reference to the management approaches. This is relative to the fact that the company has been stuck on a number of management structures and interventions. Over the last few years, the stores have been rated as some of the most expensive. This is contrary to the current industry trend, where they have been considered as the cheapest in the past (Mourdoukoutas, 2016). The company has however been using outdated structure, culture and principally management strategies (Mourdoukoutas, 2016). This is relative to the fact that at the heart of any management strategies are the cultures and structure of the organization. This paper establishes changes in management that could be used to improve the performance of the company.
Organizational Structure and Culture
Organizational structure is a crucial part of business activities in that it determines aspects such as operations and even solving problems at the company, internally and externally. The organizational culture on the other hand is determinant of the way people responded to the challenges at the place of work. Aspects such as the resilience of the workforce are determined by the mindset which is further affected by the culture at the company. It is important to note that, the company has had much success when it comes to the strategies tied to the organizational culture and structure. However, the success has not been at per with the industry standards in the recent times and as such, it has been struggling (Lombardo, 2017).
The organizational structure at the company is definitively hierarchical. This is a structure that uses two main features; the function based definition and hierarchy. There are vertical lines of authority and command that is common throughout the organization. Looking at the company, other than the CEO the rest of the staff have a superior they report to. When the top management come up with decisions, they are then passed to the middle management, who then pass them down to the rest of the staff. In line of the function based definition of the organizational structure, there are various groups of workers who work on specific tasks (Brisson-Banks, 2010). This is established with reference to the department at the company. This is in reference to the various departments such as, marketing and technology among others. Each of the department is tasked with a certain set of functions which binds the various people in that department with certain goals and objectives. Using the hierarchical approach, the top management are able to easily affect the entire organization. However, there is a down side to the structure in that, it means that the organization’s lower management teams are not able to effect any changes. This is relative to the level of bureaucracy that is involved (Brisson-Banks, C. (2010). This indicates that the organization structure does not allow for flexibility. As such, most of the business practices that have been at the...