Leadership at Wal-Mart

Leadership at Wal-Mart

Introduction

Wal-Mart, the largest retail store of the United States, is also the largest retail chain throughout the world with more than 4150 facilities worldwide. On the basis of the ranked sales, Wal-Mart occupies top position among the influential and wealthiest corporations of the world by Fortune 500 index and the second most admired company by Fortune. The Wal-Mart leadership and management strategies contribute to the core success. During 1980s, extensive growth was observed in the Wal-Mart resulting due to the diversification of the company. The leadership style of Harold Lee Scott, CEO of Wal-Mart is inherited from the business legacy of Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart.

Leadership at Wal-Mart

According to Burns (1978), the leadership styles are of primarily two types: transformation leadership and transactional leadership. The transformational leadership refers to the change brought about in the people's lives and the society by a leadership style practiced by a leader. It points to the significant changes in follower's lives by providing fruitful and better leadership. The transactional leadership, on the other hand is focused on the occurrence of multiple transactions between the leader and his/her subordinates; the response of the leader whether reward or punishment on the basis of employees' performance and contribution. For Wal-Mart, a company being an increasingly successful and influential, it is essential to incorporate both the leadership styles. Transactional leadership of Wal-Mart manages the day to day transactions while the transformational leadership at Wal-Mart gives the vision and direction to the company.

Transformational leadership

Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart and a great visionary, incorporated transformational leadership at the core of Wal-Mart and it paid off in the form of success. The contributions of transformational leadership at Wal-Mart can be analyzed by following characteristics of Wal-Mart leaders.

Leaderships Visits to Wal-Mart Stores

An important feature of the leadership of Wal-Mart is the regular visits of the leadership of Wal-Mart, including the CEOs to the stores of Wal-Mart throughout the world, has significantly altered the way of working at Wal-Mart. This helps the leadership and the management to develop better understanding of the business and the ground realities and also have a significant impact on the employees' way of working within the organization.

Project Impact

From the adoption and the reversal pattern of project impact, it can be observed that the decisions undertaken by the leadership at Wal-Mart is not aversive rather aggressive and are based on preferences of the customers and their feedback and based on these feedbacks the project impact was launched and is then reversed with the decline in the number of customers at the store.

Decision Making Capabilities

Tough decision making capabilities of the organizational leadership are significant in the organizational success. The Wal-Mart decision to shut down its operations and admit defeat in Germany was a complex decision and was costing huge loss to the company. This decision also changed the operational view of Wal-Mart.

Developing Leadership Pipeline

The major emphasis by the core leadership of Wal-Mart is on building a leadership pipeline. The development of talented and new leaders, capable ...