Wal-Mart is one of the leaders in the retail industry Essay

Wal-Mart is one of the leaders in the retail industry. Today, the company keeps progressing, in spite of the recent economic recession. Nevertheless, to keep progressing, Wal-Mart needs to develop its core competence and skills of its employees. In such a way, the company can keep growing developing existing skills and core competence and acquiring new ones. At the same time, it is obvious that the core competence of the company and skills of its personnel affect the organizational performance consistently because they have a considerable impact on the organizational culture, structure, style, marketing strategy and systems.
In actuality, Wal-Mart’s key skills and core competence imply the development of flexibility, which are essential in the contemporary business environment. However, the company apparently suffers from the lack of flexibility because its current key skills and core competence are focused on the development of business and sales en masse. As the matter of fact, Wal-Mart is one of the most successful retailers in the US. Therefore, the company focuses on sales as its core competence. However, it is obvious that this competence need consistent improvements because the company has to be flexible enough to be able to adapt to operate in a highly competitive and changing business environment.
At this point, it is important to dwell upon key staff characteristics of Wal-Mart. In actuality, Wal-Mart pays a lot of attention to sales and views them as the major priority of the company. In such a situation, the personnel of the company often turns out to be in a disadvantageous position because employees may have poor wages and poor promotion opportunities, especially female employees. At the same time, they have to work hard to maximize the effectiveness of their performance and to improve the organizational performance. In such a way, employees suffer from discrimination and poor conditions of work that leads to the growing job dissatisfaction. In response to this problem the company introduces more part-time jobs but, in a long-run perspective, this strategy cannot solve the existing problems within Wal-Mart, unless the company shifts its core competence toward flexibility. Nevertheless, employees working in the company are good in selling but they are poorly motivated. At the same time, the company offers customers products at low prices that attract customers and that are one of the major competitive advantages of Wal-Mart.
At the moment, the core competence of the company and key skills of employees operate successfully, although they have already started to cause serious troubles Wal-Mart have to deal with now. Even though the sale rates of the company is still high, Wal-Mart faces the growing job dissatisfaction that deteriorates relationships within the company. Employees of the company being dissatisfied with their position in the company tend to deteriorate their performance. As a result, the company fails to improve its organizational performance consistently. Instead, Wal-Mart faces a risk of the deterioration of its company-customer relationships. If the situation remains unchanged, Wal-Mart may face substantial problems because the deterioration of the company-customer relationships and poor employees’ performance can undermine the steady business development of Wal-Mart.
In such a situation, it is hardly possible to underestimate the impact of the core competence and key staff characteristics on the organization’s structure, strategy, style and systems. In this respect, it is important to place emphasis on the fact that the organizational structure grows more and more complex as Walk-Mart shifts toward part-time jobs, whereas the effectiveness of the sales-oriented business strategy and core competence of the company becomes less effective. In such a situation, the company has to develop the strategy of increasing sales to use the core competence and, simultaneously, maintain the steady growth but, taking into consideration, the deteriorating employees’ performance this goal becomes hardly achievable. In such a situation, Wal-Mart needs to improve its management and leadership style along with the improvement of internal systems and business processes to keep the core competence being effective. Otherwise, the company may face substantial problems and fail to afford the competitive struggle.
In such a situation, it is possible to suggest some recommendations to Wal-Mart. First, the company should reconsider its core competence and focus on the development of flexibility of the company instead of maximizing its sale rates, what the company has done successfully till present days. Second, the company should attempt to improve the company relationships with employees and the development of flexibility may be very helpful in this regard. Moreover, the company should pay a particular attention to the problem of the effective management and leadership because, at the moment, the management and leadership style fails to bring considerable improvements in the internal organizational culture and relationships within the company.
Thus, it proves beyond a doubt that Wal-Mart needs substantial changes in its core competence and employees’ skills because the company fails to maintain positive marketing performance. In such a situation, Wal-Mart should shift from accelerating its sale rates, which the company has done successfully, to the development flexibility.