Change and Management Styles

Wal-Mart and Target are the biggest retailers in the United States. These companies have created the image of prosperous giants with a goal of constant development, innovations, and improvements. However, the leadership style of each company differs, and it is directly connected with the organizational cultures, which shape the companies’ orientation and way of development.

Wal-Mart organizational culture can be described by four principles, which shape its main beliefs. These components include serving to customers, respect for the individual, strive for excellence and action with integrity. Wal-Mart as well as many other big companies set the customers’ satisfaction in the first place. Nevertheless, the company understands that the key to success are employees. Wal-Mart prices the contribution of each employee and promotes honesty and fairness as the primary virtues.

Target is the second largest retailer behind Wal-Mart. However, the company pays much attention to its employees’ issues. Teamwork is the Target’s main priority since the success of the company is connected to the performance of its employees. According to this fact, the company promotes friendly, fun and collaborative principles of work (Loeb, 2014). The biggest advantage of Target organizational culture is the encouraging of innovations, ideas, and contributions from all employees. Every individual has an opportunity to share his/her vision with a company’s manager. In this way, Target encourages its employees to participate in the company’s development and improvement.

Each of the introduced companies has its specific leadership style, which has both advantages and disadvantages. The implementations of changes in the existing leadership style will have different consequences. For instance, if I want to apply my transactional leadership style to both companies, I will face some challenges. Wal-Mart leadership style is similar to mine as the company uses the same principles. However, Target is rather conservative about its leadership style and transactional leadership will not be approved by top managers. The company is used to follow the autocratic leadership principles. Despite the fact that Target takes into account the employees’ ideas, and encourages them to participate in the company’s development, the final decision always belongs to the company’s managers. According to this fact, the transactional leadership style will face some challenges in this company. Hence, in order to implement changes in Wal-Mart and Target, I should apply the specific strategy for each case.

In Wal-Mart, my leadership style will be limited by the ability to change the autocratic system to democratic because it contradicts to the main principles of autocratic leadership style, where the entire authority belongs to a leader. According to this fact, the principles of my transactional leadership style will be implemented only partially and the changes cannot contradict to the basic principles of the autocratic system.

The Target organizational culture will also have an impact on my leadership style since this company is particularly conservative, though it is less autocratic than Wal-Mart. The main challenge that my leadership style may face is the resistance to some radical changes, especially when one leadership style is necessary to change to another. In fact, there will be no difficulties with choosing a certain leadership style, but its implementation will be a complex task.

Taking into consideration the specifics of the organizational culture in Wal-Mart and Target, it can be mentioned that the implementation of a new leadership style with opposite principles will be viewed as a challenge. In case of Wal-Mart, this challenge is introduced as the company’s autocratic style of management. On the contrary, the Target company is able to accept a different leadership style, but the changes will take some time since the rapid shifts are beyond the company’s principles.

About the author:
Madeline Packer is a freelancer at https://essaysempire.com/ She writes essays on various topics, especially she likes to write on topics that interest her very much, most of them are deeply social topics. She writes works on various topics, you can find them at the service we mentioned early, and more information on how to write a scientific paper, articles, and reviews.