The objective of this paper is to analyze the team dynamics and conflicts situation of Wal-Mart stores.  Wal-Mart employ’s a diverse group of people that demonstrates a wide variety of differences.  The demand of today’s employer’s is to increase employee morale, increase workplace motivation, and decrease employee turnovers.  This paper will identify some of the existing problems in the working environment of Wal-Mart stores, and this paper will contribute some constructive ways to improve and / or eliminate the problems identified.  Wal-Mart provides many communities with the luxury of their store it is at their best interest to provide their external and internal guest with the best service possible.  Wal-Mart has more than 6,500 stores worldwide with its growth and dominance team dynamics and conflict situation are of importance.  The store can continue to grow with the assistance of its guest from the inside and the outside.  It is possible when internal guest have the capability to continue to provide great customer’s service to their external guest.

Wal-Mart has more than 6,500 stores operating worldwide.  The company has grown with revenues generating internationally.  The place itself in which it operates contributes to the team behaviors.  Wal-Mart is a profitable organization, along with the location the store sales, research, and operations can also influence team dynamics.  “The secret of successful retailing is to give your customers what they want,” Sam wrote in his autobiography. 

In being a customer of Wal-Mart you like to be guaranteed satisfaction with what you buy friendly and knowledgeable customer service, convenient hours, and a pleasant shopping experience.  You love it when you visit a store the somehow exceeds your expectation, and you hate it when a store inconveniences you, gives you a hard time, or pretends you’re invisible.  The teams that provide the expectations of the customers are then made number one priority.

Wal-Mart is headquartered in Bentonville, AR and is the employer of over 1.8 million full and part time workers.  It operates stores along with Sam’s club membership warehouses in the U.S. and 15 foreign countries.  For Fiscal 2005, Wal-Mart had record revenues of $312.4 billion and net income of $11.2 billion. Wal-Mart has a great passion for customer satisfaction and “Every Day Low Prices.

Wal-Mart is a community store that employs a large numbers of workers.  The workers of Wal-Mart make up a wide variety of difference from age, culture, gender, personalities, and many more.  In a working environment of differences you will be challenged with team dynamics and conflict situations.  Team dynamics are influenced by many factors such as the context in which a team operates, the type of organization, the makeup of the team identity itself, and the mix of individuals.

Wal-Mart teams have an identity of their own.  The identity comes from the organizational culture, the team configuration, the nature of work, and the qualities of the individual.  There are so many teams of identity in Wal-Mart stores including project, executive management, committees, sales associates, and so on.  Each team has a character to fulfill a certain role in the organization.  Team dynamics is heavily influenced by the nature and purpose of the work to be done by the team. 

Wal-Mart individual team members are likely to have specific kinds of work to perform and specific roles on the team.  Individual members will influence the team dynamics to the extinct of when the composition of the team change, the team dynamics will change.  Wal-Mart’s worker’s that are a part of a team is individual’s first and a team member second.  They each bring different talents, perspectives, values, and experiences to the work team.

People of different personality types will have different perspectives on what constitutes good and adequate measurement.  In order for individual and personality differences to become an effective member of team work it will have to start with understanding ourselves and ways we are different form others on our teams.  No two people are the same; we each have different personalities, attitudes, and motivations.  When individuals know their own values to the team, they will be in a better position to value and capitalize on the contribution of the people who are different.  This attitude gives you the foundation to think in terms of a team verses individual interest. 

Wal-Mart has several areas that can possibly contribute to the success and / or to the failure of the organization.  I will assess some of the problems individually, and I will provide some suggestions to the problems I have encountered through research.  In the rest of this paper I will give some positive ways to fix the problems of team dynamics and conflict situations in future operations of Wal-Mart stores.

Work-group productivity deals with a group who interacts primarily to share information, make decisions, and work collectively to produce work of satisfaction to their employers.  After interviewing several of Wal-Mart employees of a local Wal-Mart, I discovered that some of the of the employees were only still a member of the Wal-Mart family because they needed a job to continue to feed their families.  Some were very happy to be there but some were not.

The employees felt like in order to be employed at Wal-Mart you needed to be a single individual because the hours are very flexible, the pay is low, and they do not offer good benefits.  In summary, many feel they would make more of an effort to produce better work if they were being treated right.  They feel if they were getting paid they would not mind working.  Workers feel they are over worked and under paid.  My recommendation for Wal-Mart would be for them to consider pay increases to their employees and provide them with some decent, affordable benefits.  Some other ways Wal-Mart can improve productivity is to commit to organizational goals.  Communicate about the organizational goals and how the company is doing in relation to those goals needs to be frequent and timely.

Wal-Mart could set department goals as well as individual performance standards.  The individual department heads can assist employees in understanding how they can contribute to meeting the company and department goals.  Employees can become more committed to their jobs, management could assess work team strengths and weaknesses, and they could be provided with more training so the teams and individuals can become more productive.

Social influence is when another individual change the actions or thoughts of an individual.  There are so many social influences in the workplace to trigger individuals to comply willingly.  In most cases, individuals in the workplace are unaware of when they are being influenced.  After the research, the fellow co-workers mostly influenced other workers.  My recommendation in reference to social influence for the employee’s of Wal-Mart is to strive to be a leader instead of a follower.  I feel that the employees should engage in ways to improve their working environment instead of contributing to negativity.  When the employees contribute their opinions to the positive aspects about the company it eliminates conflicts in the long run.

Motivation is often used to describe certain sorts of behaviors.  Motivation can be defined as a concept used to describe the factors within an individual in which it arouses, maintains, and channel behaviors towards a goal.  Another way to say this is that motivation is goal-directed behavior.  Wal-Mart goal is to motivate their employees.  Wal-Mart is very much aware that if employees are not motivated that they can’t provide the customer satisfaction in which they have a great passion for.

Managers of the local Wal-Mart know that it is part of their jobs to get their work done through others; therefore, managers need to understand why do people do the things they do (that is, what motivates them?).  Managers can better assist employees to work towards the goals of the organization when they know what motivates them to work.  Motivators affect job satisfaction.  Managers of Wal-Mart could encourage employee motivations by advancement, recognition, familiar responsibility and / or proper additional training, and achievement.  These positive motivators will help the employees to achieve the designated goals of the store.

The habits of effective people are the measurements one are willing to take to produce effective work.  There are seven habits to effective people.  The habits that effective people use is being proactive, beginning with the end in mind, putting first thing first, thinking win-win, seek first to understand-then to be understood, synergize, and sharpen the saw. When team members become proactive they become motivated to take chances, and they become more eager to obtain and accomplish goals.  When thinking to begin with the end in mind it makes the team members more dedicated to bring all  their ideas and skills to the table so they could get the complete the task intended.  Putting first things first, encourages the team to approach matters in the order of its importance and it encourage them to apply direct effectiveness.  When employees think win-win it helps all parties involved to contribute to a solution, the ideas assist them in finding benefits, and it will increase the team productivity.  Seek first to understand-then to be understood helps people understand that they should strive to hear things first and then speak about them last.  In order to understand communication, you have to willing to listen.  Synergize ensures that the thoughts and ideas collectively of the team is better than the parts of one or two individuals.  Sharpen the saw seem to be a tool to help assist individuals in bringing new ideas and skills to the problems to reduce to thought of one solution fix all problems.    

Quality management is process improvement and employee involvement is the linch pin of process improvement.  Quality management requires management to give employees the encouragement to share ideas and act on what they suggest.  Wal-Mart has designed problem-solving teams at a local level and at a national level.  Wal-Mart has different teams for the different departments, different regions, and different stores.  When they are able to split up the problems in little squares and then bring it back together as a whole box that’s where the team efforts come into effect. 

Wal-Mart teams are consisted of six to seven members from different perspective departments depending upon the size of the department.  They are made up of people with diversity from the norm, they contain employees on different work levels, and the teams are volunteered rather than selected.  These group members come together to discuss department gripe, improvements, and suggestions.  It is said to have improved the quality of work the departments are producing mainly because the things that the non- members have mention to the members has be recognized and acted up on.  The group members main goals is to have the rest of the department to contribute their inputs in what they feel is going wrong through out the department it is impossible for the members to hear and see everything. 

My suggestions to the teams of Wal-Mart is to continue to take advantage of the suggestions that the department members are given, and they should act on the suggestion that are possible that produces positive aspects for the department.  Management should try to challenge the non-members to become members if or when needed.  Managers should also continue to be interesting in helping the department to be the best they could possibly be.

Power and politics deals with the usage of power, power refers to a capacity that one person has to influence the behavior of another so the other person does something he or she would not otherwise do.  Politics refers to activities that are not required as a part of one’s formal role in the organization, but that influence, or attempt to influence, the distribution of advantages and disadvantages within the organization.  Wal-Mart has recently and I am sure in the past experience a great deal of employee power and politics. 

The local Wal-Mart had a few of their un-loyal employees engaging in wrongful activities some of their own free will and some by the influence of others.  When employees in organization convert their power into action, they are engaged in politics.  Those with good political skills have the ability to use their bases of power affectivity. 

Our local Wal-Mart recently discovered that they had a supervisor and two associates that were trying to clean them out.  The three was really in deep.  The supervisor and one of the associates had been doing it all the time but they were interesting in recruiting a third member to take some of the pressure off of them.  They would have family members come through their line and ring up only a portion of what they had, and then they would have them to return all the unpaid goods.  When the supervisor was present she would be the one to over ride the transaction for the person to get cash then they would split the money. 

Wal-Mart managers had started to watch the three to make sure that their suspicions were correct.  It is not necessary to say that they all were fired and charged with theft of property.  It was said that that the second associate really did not want to participate in the scam, but she was forced from the threats of the supervisor using her power.  The supervisor has demonstrated coercive power or punishment power.  This type of power is when A (the supervisor) has power over B (the associate) because A (the supervisor) can administer some form of punishment to B (the associate).  This power does not necessarily rest on physical threats but may be exercised through reliance on verbal facility, the ability to grant or withhold support, and the ability to bully, humiliate, or deny promotional advancement.

My suggestion in this situation would be for the associate’s not to contribute to a situation in which their personal values and beliefs are against.  You can not allow your superiors to manipulate you in doing things that you know are wrong.  You have to do what is right.  When you are forced on the job because of fear you have to figure out a way to get out.  I am sure that your boss have a boss, and you may have to go through your chain of command if thing don’t smooth out on their own.  I think the first thing an associate could do is try to use the avoidance style to stay out of trouble.      

Perception and attribution deal with a person’s mental image of the world.  It is what is opposed to what it “should be”.  Attribution refers to how people in situation like the workplace construct explanation of other people’s behavior.  Information cues for attribution of information gathering include consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.  I assume that when Wal-Mart managers hire their supervisors and associates to do the jobs intended they feel they have hired good people to carry out the store’s mission “Every Day Low Prices” and good customer satisfaction.  The manager’s feel like the others will do what they are supposed to be doing rather than doing what they want to do.  I think instead of some employee’s working for the best interest of the organization they are working for the best interest of themselves.  Managers have wishfully thinking that they could run a smooth operation without the bumps to some failures.  I think that they just have to be more careful as to who they are giving power to.

High performance teams are teams that are created with a mission and/or purpose in mind.  The mission or purpose should be expressed in the form of written charter.  Over time these teams develop their own set of norms.   Wal-Mart high performance teams are the teams that will take the store to the next level.  These teams are the teams that will reduce cost, increase productivity; shorten the time for new developments, and to get products to market a little faster.  High performance teams are essentially the people who will save the day.

When building high performance teams in Wal-Mart it is not about the individuals people skills, abilities, and knowledge.  It’s about their commitment to the store and to their selves.  It is not necessarily about putting together the right team.  It’s about putting together the right challenge.  Wal-Mart high performance teams works on a wide variety of issues with one of the main concerns targeting the theft of property from employees.  These teams get together to come up with better ways to detect when employees are leaving the store with their inventory.  They have installed more cameras and have put in some additional things in line that the interviewee could talk about.

My suggestion for the mangers would be for them to continue to do the things that they have in place and to possibly do more background checks on the people that they are hiring.  It is probably impossible to catch them all because every time they think they have it all figured out the crooks find a way to bet them.  Wal-Mart management teams could make it a little more difficult for them.  When the theft is decreased the low prices for the customers will continue to increase.   

Wal-Mart Stores Inc is phasing out its layaway scheme due to declining use and increase costs.  The giant US retailer said it would expand other financing options to make up for the gap following the phase out.  Layaway enables low income consumers to pay their purchases in installments for more than 60 days with minimum interest. 

Effective and ineffective team roles deal with the percentage of dedication of the team members.  Characteristics of effective teams play a vital role in the success of the team.  Effective teams have a clear unity if purpose, the members are self-conscious about its own operations, the members has set clear and demanding performance goals, the atmosphere tend to be a bit more informal where the team members can be comfortable and relaxed, everyone participates, people are free in expressing their feelings as well as their ideas, and there are disagreements and this is viewed to be a good thing. 

Ineffective teams displays low unity of purpose, the members have low or ambiguous performance goals for itself, the atmosphere is likely to reflect either indifference, a few people tend to dominate, personal feeling are hidden, and disagreements are not generally dealt effectively by the group.  In the Wal-Mart atmosphere (per the assistance manager Patricia Davis) their team goals appear to be traveling down the right road.  The teams are effective, and all the teams’ members that are on the team desire to make a positive different to their store. 

When the teams come together they have free discussion of the objective until all the members have committed themselves to the objective; therefore, making the objectives meaningful to each member.  The team then takes the extra time to explicitly discuss the process they will use to effectively achieve its objective.  The good things about effective group says Patricia “The teams members are involved and interested in the purpose that’s what makes the purpose of us all coming together worth while because we know we going to make a better working environment for our employees”.  Patricia also stated that when team member meet or exceed the expectation of the other team members it makes them bond every closer.  Each individual is respectful of the mechanics of the team: arriving on time, coming to the meeting on time, and completing the task that was assigned.

My suggestion for Wal-Mart is that they should continue to recruit effective team members in the fashion as they have in the past.  Teams start to become ineffective when members are appointed rather than being given the opportunity to volunteer.  Some people don’t have team set minds when they are forced to participate in something that they are not interesting in they tend to contribute way off points, gripe to avoid moving forward to the intended purpose of the meeting, arrive late, come unprepared, and makes no efforts in completing the assigned task.  It seems to me that the teams of the local Wal-Mart really want to make a better teams impression.  I think the individual employees is the ones that the draws the job out to be something different than what it really is.

Group decision-making techniques deals with the reasoning process in which can be rational or irrational, and can be based on explicit assumptions or tacit assumptions.  The most common form of group decision-making takes places in face-to-face interacting groups.  Group decision-making techniques are the way managers chose to interact with their employees for decision being made.  Examples include brainstorming, the nominal group technique, and electronic meetings.

Wal-Mart’s management said that they are now in the process of trying to integrate technology more.  In the mean while, most of their meeting is conducted in the traditional fashion.  In some cases when time is running a little short they use a technique called fist to five.  This technique is quick and is used to asses the feelings of the team.  They have certain meaning for the number of fingers a person holds up, while the fist means, “no way, I’ll fight the idea”.

My suggestion to management is to integrate a wider variety of group decision-making techniques.  One in particular would be consensus.  Consensus is an informal group accepted process of deciding together; the whole team will have the opportunity to be involved, the team members can comprise, and they would agree to the extent that all the members of the team could at least “live” with the decision.   

Communication process is when the sender initiates a message by encoding a thought then the message is the actual product from the senders.  The channel is the medium in which the message travels.  The receiver then decodes the message, make noise to represent the communication barriers that distort the clarity of the message, and then give the sender feedback. Wal-Mart represent downward and upward communication patterns because the managers of the store and regions communication with the low level employees to inform them of the store goals and expectations.  Managers and supervisors also communicate with the employees to give them their daily job instruction, inform them of new products, and to inform the employees of new policies and procedures.  In most cases, Managers do not tell the employees this information in person but they use the form of memos, employee information boards, and employee task sheets.

The upward form of communications comes from the lower level employees to the managers and supervisors.  It’s used to provide feedback to upper management in an informative way.  Examples would include things like progress toward department and store goals and current problems to be addressed.  This form of communications keeps managers and supervisors aware of how the employees feel about their jobs, coworkers, and the organization in general.

My suggestion for Wal-Mart communications process is that every once in a while try having live meeting with the low-level employees maybe twice a year.  This will give the lower level employees an opportunity to know who is who on the management team.  Live communication meeting also gives the people the would not otherwise have anything to say a chance to voice their opinion.  When memos are posted in most jobs setting on bulletin boards some read it and some don’t with most being the majority of not reading it.  It is essential that management meet with their employees to prevent them from being intimidated of the presence.

Giving and receiving feedback deals with the check on how successful managers and supervisors have transferred a message and how well the lower employees received the messages.  Feedback is also usually to communicate for or against a proposed topic.  Wal-Mart utilizes suggestion boxes for the employees to drop a suggestion or a comment in.  The teams of the store get the ones that are addressed to the specific department and go through them to address the problems.  Wal-Mart also have a place on their web site that’s allows employees to voice their comments and suggestion on wal-martfacts.com.

Wal-Mart seems to have some of the most used form of giving and receiving feedback already in place.  I would suggested that they continue to use the method s that they are using, and they should make sure that the comments and suggestions of the lower employees are been used.  Actions of suggestions will continue to give managers and supervisors head up when they are not around and lower level employees will not feel that they are just wasting their time giving their feedback.       Leadership, management, and loyalty deals with the ability to influence a group toward the achievement of goals, willingness to protect and save face of another person, and successfully fulfilling the objectives of the organizations in which you are in charges of employees below you.  I assume that Wal-Mart’s leadership and management teams for the most are part are very productive with the exception of a few bad apples.  The management tends strive to achieve the goals and objectives of the store.  They work very diligently to achieve very high performance goals of the organization.  Managers that are true to Sam Walton passion of “Every Day Low Prices” and customer satisfaction are very loyal to the company.

I think that Wal-Mart have some very dedicated managers of leadership.  They have employees that have been dedicated to the mission and continue to work to keep the mission possible.  It is their loyalty to the company that enables them to continue to do so.

Conflict and negotiation deal with the process that begins with a person putting in an effort purposely made to offset the efforts of another person by some form of blocking that will in result in frustrating that person in attaining his or her goals or furthering his or her interest.  Negotiation is the process in which two or more parties exchange goods or services and attempt to agree.  Wal-Mart is a battling conflict with their employees about pay wages and health benefits.  Wal-Mart also announces changes to offer more health insurance coverage faster for part=time workers. 

Conflicts can stimulate learning and change, guard against lethargy and a tendency towards “group think” and encourage innovation by forcing parties to search for solution to the underlying problems. Wal-Mart has taken the initiative to accommodate their part- time employees they sought there was problem with their benefits and have now came up with resolution to fix the conflict. It originally was taking to long for part-time employees to utilize health benefits they had to have worked a certain amount of hours before they became qualified.

Conflict-resolution processes facilitate critical thinking on the part of employees and, therefore facilitate individual development, cooperation and teamwork, and organizational effectiveness.  Wal-Mart can benefits from conflict in the workplace.  The goal of today’s organization is to find constructive ways to deals with conflicts verses over looking them as in the past.

In conclusion organizations in today’s growing environment will most certainly encounter team dynamics and conflict situations.  Management teams just need to learn effective strategies to solve the problems.  The key is to balance the organization with greater individual responsibility, trust and internal support, and control.  Organizations have to get involved with their employees to know first hand what motivates their teams. When managers have a general idea of what keeps the fire burning a business it is a signal of growth for the individuals as well as the organization.  The rapidly changing market continues to challenge the retailers of today.  Retailer’s must recognize that customers are being offered a must wider variety of shopping choices therefore they must provide the best customer services in which it is applicable to internal and external guest.