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TRADER JOE’S
Description:
Trader Joe’s has become a multi-billion dollar national chain partly through its ability to find cheap real estate, skip name brands and smartly manage its supply chain. It’s also due to its workforce management practices. Below, excerpts from a book Trader Joe’s Adventure, review the company’s management compensation, encouragement of multitasking, screening and wages, careful use of money, fun culture, sense that its people are its brand, and communication style.
Learning Objective:
Our focus with this case is on immersing students in the fundamentals of organizational culture. Organizational culture is defined as a complex set of shared beliefs, guiding values, behavioral norms, and basic assumptions acquired over time that shape our thinking and behavior; they are part of the social fabric of the organization—its genetic code. As such, culture drives the organization and guides the behavior of everyone in that organization—how they think, feel, and act. In other words, the culture forms a behavior template. Davis and Landa succinctly captured the essence of culture when they say,

The factors which define culture are in part internal, deriving from the unique character of the organization and, in part external, determined by the background and experiences managers and employees bring to the enterprise. Culture is a major determinant of productivity; it shapes organizational responses to external pressures; and suppresses or enhances the cooperative effort level of the workforce. Culture has a significant bottom-line effect on organizational effectiveness, profitability, and shareholder value. [1]

With this in mind, let’s explore together this fascinating case study and look at defining TJ’s culture (both visible and not so visible artifacts, how the culture can be nurtured and sustained, and how this culture