Workplace Culture the Sears Store I Am

Workplace Culture

The Sears store I am familiar with has some cultural strengths and weaknesses. Communication flows in a top-down way, because few employees in the store have any real authority. The store has assistant managers and managers for each department, and the managers report to people above them, but real control is highly centralized. New policies are communicated via memos put in each employee's mail slot. For complicated new procedures, such as the use of a new cash register, is done in formal classes.

The store represents a broad range of people including males and females of all ages, gay and straight, including Caucasians, African-American, Hispanic, Caucasian, and Asian. In the lunchroom, the same people eat together each day, with ethnic divisions obvious. Certain groups join certain others, but particular groups rarely intermingle. Conversation is rarely about work, possibly because most people have jobs with limited responsibility.

The store has minimum dress requirements. No blue jeans or sneakers are allowed. Midriffs cannot show. Extreme makeup, hairstyles and jewelry aren't allowed. All people speak standard English with customers, but when on breaks, people typically use more slang, idioms that reflect their cultural heritage, etc.

Technology plays an important role in the jobs of sales floor personnel. Today's cash registers are complex computers. The printout of key codes, laminated in plastic and kept at the computer for reference, is long and extensive. Even with that cue card, sales staff frequently have to ask help regarding how to handle such things as exchanges where the price of the two items are not the same. Technology involves the merchandise itself as well. Higher-priced clothing sometimes has a magnetic tag sewn into a seam as a theft-deterrent device. Pricing requires programming into the main computer so registers automatically compute discounts during sales. When that isn't done properly, it's a real mess.

The biggest cultural problem this company has relates to the lack of influence most people feel, along with poor conflict management. Perhaps because many employees have no real authority, a lot of people tend to jockey for position in negative ways, and it seems to be tolerated by the lower level management. Higher levels may not be aware of it, but as many as 30% of the sales floor people show a fair amount of indifference and resentment when immediate supervisors give them instructions (Dwan, 2003). Every once in a while, a new person seems to be targeted for a kind of hazing. These people typically don't stay very long. There doesn't seem to be anything wrong with their personality or skills. It's almost like a game.

Employees seem uninvolved with how well the store does because emphasis is all on total amount of sales each day. In addition, while immediate supervisors don't have much authority except to do things like straighten out cash register problems, it seems that they often are promoted based on who they are friend with rather than what skills they have (Namie, 2003). The ability to resolve conflicts does not seem to be part of their job description or training, so when there are conflicts between people they are just told to "work it out." They typically do not, however.

In some places, the management uses peer review teams to solve conflicts between employees (Clark, 2004), but that might not work at this store, because employees have little respect for those above them. It seems unlikely that any peer committee resolutions would have any kind of authority behind them (Clark, 2004). Sears is a top-down company, but the number of people at the bottom is very large, and supervision consists of making sure employees follow rules regarding dress and money-handling.

One other result of this is that there is a lot of petty pilfering. When some employees talk about work, they often whisper about things people have taken. There's a story about one sales staff who stole creatively. He bypassed the store's extensive theft deterrent system by taking things that weren't for sale: mugs from the kitchen, and a coat rack from the mailroom. He would laugh about this. It is said that he never got caught. If seen with a coat rack, it would have been assumed that he was moving it from one place to another until he ducked out the door with it. In the mail room, supposedly, they assumed it had been taken by another department and spent a fair amount of time visiting other departments trying to find it.