Hierarchical Organizational Structure and Ethical Issues in Wal-Mart (Essay Sample)

Ethical Issues in Organizations
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WAL-MART STORES
Vision: To stand out as the best retailer in the hearts and minds of consumers and employees.
Mission: Offer exclusive services at a friendly price for the consumers.
Strategy: Wal-Mart uses cost management and effective strategy. Its products and services are low priced, making it a suitable for most of its target audience. They achieve this through cost and wage reduction, as well as maintaining high sales volume along with carrying out operations on large-scale.
Product/service: Wal-Mart offers financial, pharmaceutical, wireless, photo lab and retail services. It provides its customers with private label products which are relatively low priced compared to its competitors in the same line.
Business model: Wal-Mart has an advanced supply chain, qualified drivers, and a number of trucks. It has a direct link with the manufacturers and also partners with small and local farmers from all over Canada.
Organizational Structure
Wal-Mart uses a hierarchical organizational structure which has two features:
* Hierarchical: every employee except the CEO has a superior manager. Middle managers implement directives coming from the top level.
* Function based: there are different departments in Wal-Mart that perform various functions; for example, IT (handles technical issues), Marketing (positioning products in the market, determining marketing schemes and strategies) and Human Resource (hiring, training of employees).
What Happened
In 2007 Chalace Epley Lowry, then an employee in the Communications department at Wal-Mart found herself without a job after being in the company for only a few months. The then vice president of Corporate Communications, Mona Williams, asked Lowry to copy papers which (Lowry) figured might be stock related. She found out later that the company was planning a large amount of stock buyback, and was alarmed that may be the vice president had traded on insider information. She decided to talk to the then supervisor, Sarah Clark who told her to inform the company’s ethics office.
The ethics office did not handle the issue well, and went ahead to disclose Lowry’s identity to Williams, which is unethical given that the two were in the same department. Lowry argued that she was not given an option as to whether her identity should be disclosed or not and thought it was part of the requirements for filing a complaint.
Wal-Mart said there was no wrong-doing on the issue, and that Lowry was just