Walmart's Organizational Structure

Walmart’s Organizational Structure

Walmart is a large international corporation that has stores located in 27 different countries worldwide and employs 2.2 million associates in their stores. Walmart’s corporation consists of superstores that sell grocery and general merchandise items, express stores that are smaller stores and are used in smaller towns, or in big cities where space is limited. They also have Sam’s Club which is a member’s only store that sells items in bulk at warehouse pricing. With a corporation the size of Walmart management needs to reflect the worldwide scope of the stores that they have. Having the proper organizational structure in place helps keep a company like Walmart continue to grow and streamline the company to make it efficient as possible. This paper with look at the organizational structure while comparing it do other structure models, it will also look at the organizational functions and designs that influence the decision on which organizational structure to use.

Walmart’s store numbers are staggering; in the United States only Walmart has a total of 3,804 retail locations that made a total of $260 billion in 2011. Walmart international has 4,557 locations for net sales of $109 billion. The Sam’s Club has a total of 609 locations and made a net amount of $49 billion (Walmart, n.d.). With the amount of locations and the amount of money that is made by this corporation the structure Walmart has chosen is the divisional structure. Walmart uses both the product and geographic divisions in their organizational structure. They have divided the corporation into three different lines Walmart U.S., Walmart international, and Sam’s Club, allowing each division to work independent of each other and within the US and international division Walmart has created sub divisions to breakdown the vast number of stores that are within each these two divisions.

Internationally Walmart breaks this division down into the countries that have stores located in them such as Japan, Brazil, India, and by regions like Mexico and Central America, and Latin America (“Walmart”, 2012). This gives the control to have specific leaders that know about the each culture and to be able to handle issues and items that may be need in one country where they may not be in demand in other countries or may not be the same issue. Walmart has subsidiaries in this group such as ASDA stores which is the name they use for their stores in the United Kingdom. Within the U.S they divide not only by geographic areas but also by products they offer with general merchandise and food having separate divisions (“Walmart”, 2012).

When taking a look at the functional structure you do see some similarities to the divisional plan that Walmart uses departmentalization in their structure to break down individual tasks within the company that way the company can have people focus