Is Wal-Mart's stated vision aligned with the needs of their stakeholders?

Melissa Stacy

MGT 499
MOD 1

Wal-Mart, the world largest and most successful corporation, also has the unflattering reputation of being so uncaring that it now symbolizes corporate social irresponsibility in the eyes of many Americans. Wal-Mart's problems with its own employees are not just perceptual but fundamentally due to the company's targeting and positioning choice: the delivery of always low prices to customers has meant that such stakeholder groups as employees have had to be squeezed.
How did a company heralded as a hero as recently as in 2000 become a corporate monster only a few years later? The company's current predicament was not only foreseeable, but a logical consequence of its strategic choices, through its unbalanced approach to stakeholder commitment.
Wal-Mart views its shareholders, consumers, and the community as their most important group of stakeholders, while employees are its second most important one. Wal-Mart has recently begun focusing on providing an explanation related for the company's poor performance with its self-declared second most important stakeholder group: its employees.
Wal-Mart is being sued for what some workers say is widespread bad practice in forcing workers to do extra work "off the clock"- unpaid. Wal-Mart's policies forbid the practice, but managers under intense pressure to cut costs have allegedly resorted to it in order to cope. The lawsuits contend that the company has cheated Wal-Mart employees and workers at its warehouse-store division, Sam's Club, out of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The company argues that the off-the-clock phenomenon is an infrequent and isolated problem considering that the company has 3,250 stores and a million employees in the United States.
Wal-Mart has aggressively