Submitted by: Submitted by PraiseNurgle453
Views: 10
Words: 1147
Pages: 5
Category: Business and Industry
Date Submitted: 04/08/2016 09:55 AM
Organizational Structure Paper
Wallace Pittman
MGT/230
June 30, 2014
George Love
Organizational Structure Paper
We all know Wal-Mart to be a titan among the retailing businesses, one of the largest to say the least. Serving millions of customers a week across the globe, how does it keep itself from falling apart. This paper will explore the organizational structure of Wal-Mart and it will be compared to two other companies for comparison. Organizational functions, such as marketing, human resources, and operations have affects on business's organizational structure and Wal-Mart is no exception. Those factors will be briefly discussed along with how organizational design helps determine which structure is best, in the case of Wal-Mart.
The question is how is Wal-Mart organized and how does it keep its vast retail store empire under control. I would think that the organizational structure of Wal-Mart Corporation is a formal, bureaucratic structure that has made some changes to its structure in 2010. Wal-Mart has three successful operating divisions which are Logistics, Real Estate and Store Operations and are under unified leadership team. This unified team is organized into three distinct geographic business units which are as follows: West, South and North. Seems very reminiscent of a wide spreading Matrix organization or perhaps a Geographic type.
In comparison to Wal-Mart, Google is known for their search engine, their web browser Google Chrome, as well as hardware such as Google glass, Nexus tablets and smart phones. Google is also a an Internet Service Provider, providing extremely fast fiber optic internet to a few select communities. For the most part they are hugely successful mainly in part of incredible leadership and their implementation of a Cross-Functional type of organizational structure. According to Ford and Randolph (1992), "A primary advantage of the cross-functional structure is that it solves an information processing problem....