企業會采取有不同的管理理念用來實現他們的目標。每個管理理念對企業生產力或服務交付都有直接或間接的影響。這些管理概念包括:團隊合作、態度、個性、價值觀和個人行為,以及還有更多的其他方面(“Cliffnotes”,2013)。加拿大的沃爾瑪把這些管理概念運用在公司的運營操作上。本文研究對不同管理概念的使用和它們如何影響員工工作以及公司工人的工作效率。基于企業內部目前的工作條件下，本文將給出一些意見以幫助加拿大沃爾瑪公司創造出更好的工作條件。
 
介紹—Introduction
 
每個企業都有他們的目標，企業內部制定的一些策略將有助于企業實現他們的目標。本文是關于一個對加拿大沃爾瑪使用管理概念的研究。使用直接訪談和直接觀察的途徑來收集一些數據。表明這些管理概念是如何幫助企業解決在工作上遇到的問題,以及迎接挑戰的最好策略。
 
Organizations have different concepts that they employ to achieve their goals and objectives. Each of these concepts has a direct or indirect impact on the productivity or service delivery of the organization. Some of these concepts include: team work, attitude, personality, values, and individual behavior, and many more ("Cliffnotes", 2013). Wal-Mart Canada employs such concepts in the corporation's working. This paper studies the different concepts employed and how they impact on the productivity of employees as well as their co workers. Recommendations are made to better the working conditions based on the findings of the present working conditions within the organization.
 
介紹—Introduction
 
Every organization has its goals and objectives. Policies are made within the organization that will help in achieving these goals. In meeting these objectives, several challenges are met. This paper is about a research of the concepts used in Wal-Mart Canada. The data was collected by use of direct interviews as well as direct observation. It shows how well these concepts are working for them, the problems encountered and the best way to go about the challenges.
 
加拿大的沃爾瑪公司—Wal-Mart Canada
 
Wal-Mart Canada came up in 1994 when the Woolco chain was acquired. Its origins go back in 1962 when the F.W. Woolworth Company Ltd. opened the first Woolco department store in Windsor, Ontario Canada as well as the U.S. Sam Walton also opened Walton's 5&10 in Rogers, Arkansas. Both chains grew in North America, and Woolworth Company sold the Woolco stores in the U.S. to Wal-Mart by 1983. The 122 Canadian Woolco stores were acquired by Wal-Mart in 1994. It has its headquarters in Mississauga, Ontario ("Wal-Mart Canada", 2013).
 
It now has over 370 stores and is still growing. These include: supercentres, traditional discount stores as well as an environmental demonstration store located in Burlington, Ontario. The stores have about 100,000 varied products including home décor and apparel, grocery and electronics and specialty services like garden centers, pharmacies as well as vision centres. It has many different carrier opportunities having about 90,000 associates. Waterstone Human Capital Inc. placed its corporate culture among the best 10 in Canada. Wal-Mart's mission is to help Canadians save money so as to better their livelihood ("Wal-Mart Canada", 2013). The company currently has operations in 28 countries under 60 banners, serving members and customers over 200 million times weekly at over 9000 retail stores.#p#分頁標題#e#
 
Wal-Mart Canada supports different charities and organizations, which helps in building a stronger bond between the company and the community. Particularly, the company supports programs that are developed to help families to have access to healthcare, safety and education. This is usually done locally, to address local issues. Some of the national partners in charity that are supported are Children's Miracle Network, Canadian Red Cross, Breakfast Clubs of Canada and Evergreen ("Wal-Mart Canada", 2013).
 
企業的主要管理概念—Major Concepts of Organization
 
積極性—Motivation
 
This refers to the forces in a person which affect his intensity (commitment to achieve a goal), direction (path taken to engage efforts on the basis of goals) and their voluntary behavior, persistence (continuing with the same effort over time). Motivation is one of the factors that influence performance of individuals in an organization. This factor is sometimes called employee engagement (the cognitive and emotional motivation of a person, particularly a focused, persistent, intense and purposive effort directed to goals related to work). It is the emotional commitment to, satisfaction with and involvement with work. The level of engagement of employees can be determined by how well they understand the vision, how clear their roles in the vision are to them, perceived ability for one to complete a task and the belief that there are sufficient resources at their disposal to complete a task. A high level of motivation improves the sales, profit, employee retention as well as customer service (Maslow, 1943).

Motivation is driven by setting goals, employee involvement, development opportunity and empowerment, communication about organization (to understand the organization), fairness, enough resources for task completion and an appealing vision of the company. These are the driving forces that can be created by the organization. On the individual level, people can be motivated due to drive for status (especially if the work is done alongside others, hence the need to stand out), social interaction and defense against psychological and physiological harm. A drive is an innate and universal brain function which leads to emotions that give the energy for acting on environment. It generates emotions that become needs. Needs are emotions directed towards certain goals to rectify imbalances. For instance, if one wants to stand out among the employees so as to be promoted, they are motivated to work harder, improve their performance and ultimately that of the organization (Lawrence & Nohria, 2002).
 
加拿大沃爾瑪公司的現狀—Current Situation at Wal-Mart Canada
 
Some of the employees are not very motivated to work due to little or no compensation for extra work put in, low wages, small raises and difficulty to advance and transfer in departments. They feel that the work they do is worth more than what they are paid and promotions come very rarely. There have also been complaints of the management's poor treatment to the staff. These are the most outstanding factors that have affected the motivation of employees negatively over the years (Glassdoor, 2013).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
意見—Recommendations
 
These factors could be handled by the management by use of job rotation, job enrichment and job enlargement. Rotation of employees in different departments like maybe weekly, kills boredom and also helps in acquiring of new skills. It also reduces health risks for those employees who do heavy work like loading and offloading delivery trucks. Enrichment is about allowing the employees to schedule, coordinate and plan for their own work. Currently, this is done by supervisors. This increases the felt responsibility and hence sense of ownership in regard to the products or services. This boosts motivation levels as well as job satisfaction. It can also be achieved by a combination of tasks requiring high interdependence in a job. Enlargement involves adding tasks to an already existing job. Task variety motivates employees with knowledge and freedom of structuring their own work (Loughty &Moore, 2001).
 
The supervisors should also value their employees and put them first. A happy employee will result to a happy customer. This is because the kind of treatment experienced results in different types of emotions and attitudes towards their work place and job. Emotions will influence how one behaves at work, decisions made, attitude and perceptions. This will influence their performance of the individuals and the organization. If negative emotions are instilled in employees, they develop negative attitudes which will hinder them from serving the customers efficiently, and the customers leave dissatisfied. This could cause the company to lose their market (Goleman, 2001).
 
能力—Ability
 
These are the learned capabilities and natural aptitudes required for a successful completion of tasks. Natural aptitudes are these physical and mental talents that an employee possess and can hence perform better by learning particular tasks faster. Learned capabilities are the skills and knowledge that an individual possesses currently, and they can fade away with time in the event that they are not regularly put to practice; for example, languages. When a person applies for a job, their competency level for the job is used to make decisions on who to hire. Competency is the characteristic in an individual that enable them to have a superior performance over others. Such characteristics include behavior, skill, aptitude, knowledge, personality and values.

Competency is the result of these skills in action. A person with skills either acquired or natural in a particular area is better able to perform a task satisfactorily. For instance, extravert individuals should be placed in the sales and management departments since they will be required to interact with people so as to influence them. Agreeable individuals on the other hand, will perform better in jobs which require cooperation and helping each other like customer relations. People who are open minded to different dimensions of personality have a tendency to be adaptable to situations and are also creative (McShane & Glinow, 2012).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
加拿大沃爾瑪公司的現狀—Current Situation at Wal-Mart Canada
 
There are many different departments in the organization's stores, all of which require different types of skills and qualification. Examples are grocery associates, pharmacy managers, and shoe sales associate, cake decorators and many more. All of these tasks require different skills to complete successfully. For instance, a shoe sales job requires someone who is very eloquent and very convincing to sell the shoes to customers. Cake decorators should be artistic while pharmacy managers should have some knowledge in medicine. The recruitment process in the organization involves a personality test and a skill test. The working hours are however very long for each individual, which has seen some complaints from both previous and current employees (Glassdoor, 2013).
 
意見—Recommendations
 
Wal-Mart Canada should sharpen employees' abilities by team work. Teams will also help identify hidden talents in other employees, which were overlooked or not obvious during the interview process. These talents could then be tapped and used in the different departments. A team is when two people or more come together and influence one another, with a mutual accountability to achievement of common goals. These goals are associated with objectives of the organization (Rousseau, Aube, & Savoie, 2006).
 
Teams are seen as social entities within organizations. When the right conditions exist, teams help to make better decisions; there is a higher level of motivation in the work force and products and services are better produced. With teams, the different tasks can be allocated to different people according to their specialization, so as to coordinate better with higher efficiency and minimal errors. The members of these teams should be similar in personality and skills so as to increase the efficiency of the team. Each employee's performance will increase due to working side to side with others whom they will be compared to. Sharing of information within teams also helps one to acquire new skills from colleagues of doing the job, for maximum efficiency. Having a certain ability in a certain area means that they easily adapt to any new ways to do something in that area (Rousseau, Aube & Savoie, 2006).
 
角色認知—Role Perception
 
This is the level of understanding of one's duties in an organization. When you have an idea of what you are expected to do, you will have a guidance of where to direct your effort so as to improve coordination with co-workers. All the employees need to know and understand their tasks. They should also know and understand which tasks to prioritize over others, as well as the expectations on performance in terms of quality and quantity. They should also know what behavior is acceptable or preferred for the completion of the tasks. With all this information at hand, employees will not waste time wondering what do to when at work, or doing jobs meant for others. They will also not inconvenience other employees who depend on them for some tasks to be fully accomplished. Furthermore, the procedures employed in the tasks will be those that will yield maximum results only. This will boost the performance of the organization (Luft, 1984).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
加拿大沃爾瑪公司的現狀—Current Situation at Wal-Mart Canada
 
In the event that some managers are not strict enough with the staff members, the staff can take advantage of that and not do their jobs as required, causing an inconvenience to the whole store. This is especially seen when the stronger members of staff who are committed to their jobs, end up doing the tasks left by the weak members. Sometimes, the other members cannot do their jobs because they rely on a particular task which has not been done. This causes some members to constantly quit and hence the employee retention record is not so good. This means that there are always vacancies for new members to join the stores. The managers end up spending a lot of time training the new members, who also takes a longer time to get to know their colleagues and coordinate better with them in performing tasks. This time could have been used to focus on other important aspects of the job (Glassdoor, 2013).
 
意見—Recommendations
 
This could be handled by improving communication about the business to the employees. The employee should know what the company aims to achieve, and know what role he or she has to play towards the achievement of the goals by the organization. This could be done by holding training sessions where all departments get an outline of their job descriptions and how their jobs affect any of the other departments in the stores. The employees should know of all the inconveniences caused to other departments in the event that their job quality or quantity is not of the required level. This way, they will be keen to complete tasks in time and efficiently, as they will feel obliged to do so for the sake of the other members who will be gauging their work. The managers should then go ahead and incorporate practical lessons in these training sessions whereby the employees get to try out the different methods available to accomplish tasks, and then judge for themselves which method is best suited for a task so as to get maximum results (Loughty & Moore, 2001).
 
情境因素—Situational Factors
 
External factors may hinder or support task goals. These are the conditions which employees have no immediate control over, and which have an effect on their performance and behavior at work. Such situations may include economic factors, or taste of the customers. Factors which can be controlled include budgets, time, people and facilities available.
 
Situations at the work place have an effect on the employee performance. Different people react in different ways to situations. The reaction depends on one's personality. This is the relative pattern of endurance of thoughts, behaviors and emotions that characterize individuals, together with processes of psychology that explain those characteristics. These characteristics can be established with what we do or say, and they can be similar in some people and different in others (Goleman, 2001; McShane & Glinow, 2012).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
One's personality will determine his or her well being as it influences the kind of emotional reactions directed to the job. Such instances include how to cope with work related stress and also choice of career paths which will make an individual happy. If one encounters negative experiences at work, they develop negative emotions and attitudes towards that work place. This in turn lowers their level of motivation and commitment to the job. They will be unhappy and this translates to poor performance. However, if the situations are favorable to employees, they develop positive attitudes towards their job and their performance improves (Goleman, 2001; McShane & Glinow, 2012).
 
Current Situation at Wal-Mart Canada
 
At Wal-Mart Canada, the situational factors are not motivational to employees. Most of them complain of mistreatment by the superiors. They feel disrespected and undervalued. Their opinions are rarely taken into account too. The other factor is the fact that most employees feel that they work more for less pay. They also rarely get raises in their salaries. This has made them less motivated in their jobs, because they know there is nothing to look forward to. They are not happy at work given the disrespect by superiors, and this gloominess translates to their work and lowers their performance. Sometimes, the poor job done is intentional to get back at the managers if the employees are upset by something caused by the management. This ultimately affects the performance of the organization, and also contributes poorly to the reputation of the stores to the public (Glassdoor, 2013).
 
Recommendation
 
Luckily, the organization has already put in place plans to better the compensation for workers, and to regulate better the hours put in to work per day. There are also reward schemes coming along, where the individual efforts of the workers will be recognized. This would promote self concept. These are individual beliefs and evaluations. The different concepts under self concept will better the performance in the following ways: self enhancement will push employees to perform better due to the desire for recognition and value (Maslow, 1943).
 
Another way would be to minimize the number of members in teams formed, so that the members can coordinate easily and can be managed easily. The teams should be big enough to facilitate competency as well as perspective, and should also be small enough for meaningful involvement and coordination. This way, individual efforts in teams will be more easily recognized and awarded, and it will be easier to hold someone responsible for a problem. If the teams are too large, sometimes it might result in social loafing. This is a situation whereby there is less effort from individuals and hence less performance, since the individuals feel that their individual work will not be easily noticed. Moreover, in these teams, the tasks assigned to members should be interesting enough for motivation purposes; the members need to be valued and the objectives need to be important. These are the ways in which the team should be effective to the performance of the organization (Loughty & Moore, 2001).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
The teams are important for coordination, cooperation, communication and comfort. For instance, if an employee goes through a bad experience at work or even out of work, the team members will be there to offer their support and comfort. This way, the employee will feel more at ease, and will better handle the stress in them, such that their performance at work will not be affected or the effect will be minimal. This will boost the level of overall performance of the organization (Loughty & Moore, 2001).
 
Attitude
 
These are behavioral intentions, assessed feelings and belief clusters directed towards an object, event or person. An individual perceives the world, and then uses the information gathered to subconsciously create emotions to go with it depending on whether or not the info supports the innate drive. Attitude at work is shaped by the emotional experiences caused by a series of certain events. Positive emotions cause favorable attitude whereas negative emotions result in negative attitude towards the organization or the job. This will then influence the behavior of the employees at work. People have different values in life. Values are evaluative beliefs which are stable and guide our choice or preference for action, courses or outcomes given the different situations. These values play a role in determining the attitude of employees at the work place. Depending on whether or not the events at work are in alignment with the values, the attitude developed will be in accordance with the emotions developed by the situation. Furthermore, values guide our choices of actions or decisions, in the event that there are many different options regarding a certain situation at work. The performance will thus be affected by the attitude developed based on values (Jones, 1991).
 
Current Situation at Wal-Mart Canada
 
The organization targets families to better their living by providing products and services at affordable prices. However, some product in the store are thrown away daily, after they have expired. Some employees ask for the products before hand, knowing they will eventually be thrown away but the management denies them the chance to have them. Moreover, the managers will gossip about such employees and eventually the whole store will know about the employee's situation. This discourages employees and makes them develop a negative attitude towards the work place. It is also not a good reflection of the so called values to care for domestic families. Their actions contrast their goals, vision and mission, which might have been the reason why some employees came to work there (Glassdoor, 2013).
 
Recommendations
 
The stores should make sure to act in accordance to their goals and ethical values set. For instance, they should prioritize the families of employees to lead by example to the other families, so as to attract customers. The families of employees should be well taken care of, so that the employees are motivated and will have the desire to do the same for the other families (Jones, 1991).#p#分頁標題#e#
 
總結—Conclusion
 
The behavior of employees is crucial to the performance of any organization. The employee's needs should thus be a priority to the managers of any corporation. Managers should therefore be fully equipped with different kinds of organizational concepts, to satisfy the needs of the employees and those of the customers as well as the organization as a whole.