Walgreens and CVS

 

 

 

 

 

                                                              Walgreens and CVS

                        

Name:Class:Professor,Assignment:Date:

 

 

Walgreens and CVS

Organizational culture refers to the collection of values, expectations, and practices that inform an organization (Groysberg et al., 2018). This study discusses the history and culture of Walgreen and CVS organizations, respectively. The study further recommends whether CVS should purchase Walgreen Company. The Study shows that the CVS should purchase Walgreen Company since it shares similar values and cultural backgrounds despite the objective cultural differences.

Walgreen

Walgreen is an American pharmacy corporation founded in 1901 with its headquarters in Illinois, USA (Greenwood and Ingram, 2018). By the end of the year 1998, the company had more than 1000 stores in the US. The company launched an online store in 1999 to offer convenient healthcare and pharmaceutical services to its customers. This facilitated a global expansion of the organization. By the end of 2002, De Silva (2018) demonstrate that the organization becomes the first drugstore to offer multiple language labels. Today, the organization offers approximately 14 languages printed labels. In 2007, Walgreen organization experienced an immense expansion. This was signified when the organization acquired Take Care Health Systems. Additionally, in 2008, the organization completed the acquisition of Worksite care providers, Whole Management, and CHD Meridian Healthcare. In 2010, the organization also completed the acquisition of Duane Reade drugstore in New York. By 2014, the organization was operating in every part of the world after a merger with Alliance Boots corporation. The merger with the two companies led to the development of two international organization Walgreen Boot Alliance which combined two leading pharmaceutical corporations.  Kerridge’s (2016) report indicates that the company operated more 92500 pharmacy stores globally.

Walgreens organization culture represents the organization’s embedded philosophies and ideologies to support the organizational goals and objectives in consumer loyalty. According to Greenwood and Ingram (2018), Walgreen’s organizational culture ensures that all the organizational employees share a common purpose, which is embedded with the companies’ purpose. The alignment of the goals, behaviors, and the deep-rooted ideologies and philosophies enables the organizational employees to perform better, ensure good commitment with the organization, and put more effort in achieving organizational goals.

Various cultural elements guide the operations of Walgreen cooperation. Kerridge (2016) indicates that Walgreens’s core elements include diversity, quality, collaboration, accountability, leadership, and integrity. The organizational culture is both mean and goal-oriented. De Silva (2018) indicates that the organization’s culture is goal-oriented since it ensures that the companies’ employees must adapt and integrate ethical ways during their professional practices. Additionally, the organization is goal-oriented since it encourages the employees to give their best while exercising their professional duties with minimal supervision.

Walgreens’ cultural elements are essential in its success. Weinstein (2017) Diversity and collaboration cultural element helps the organization achieve global recognition, utilize opportunities for a merger with other companies, and open more branches globally. For instance, the organization utilizes every opportunity of a merger to diversify its operations in many locations. Quality and integrity cultural element helps the organization to offer high-quality services to its clients and ensure that the organization maintained its competitive edge. Leadership and accountability help the organization maintain good communication practices in all the management levels of the organization and maintain ethical practices of the organization

‘s employees.

CVS Store

The Goldstein brothers and Raph founded CVS Store in Lowell, Massachusetts. Later the organization was sold to Melville Corporation based in Rye, New York (Guo and Eschenbrenner, 2018). By 1967, CVS Corporation had 17stores. In 1997, the organization acquired more than 2000 Revco stores. In 2007, Tilzer et al., (2019) show that the company completed its merger with Caremark Rx Inc. creating an organization named CVS Caremark. In 2019, the company had widened its operations in more than 9950 stores and locations globally.

CVS’s corporate culture emphasizes on corporate citizenship and stakeholder support. CVS organization culture enhances a corporate image, health care, and pharmacy branding. Board (2019) shows that the main cultural elements of the CVS Company include: focusing on giving back, encouragement of professional and personal growth, and embodiment of crucial values in collaboration, innovation, caring, accountability, and integrity.

CVS Health Company focuses on giving back to consumers, employees, and other organizational stakeholders. This aim resonates with the wellbeing of the employees and corporate social responsibility approaches. Additionally, the organization’s core values of collaboration, innovation, and integrity support the cultural element of giving. For instance, the corporate culture encourages collaboration between various departments, such as IT, to increase healthcare operations’ innovative solutions. Also, the organizational culture enhances human resource development through abilities, knowledge, abilities. This also facilitates giving back to the employees, communities, and consumers. For instance, professional growth through organizational culture enhances human resources skills among the workers and the capabilities in solving the community challenges.

CVS organizational key cultural elements are imperative to organizational success. Devita et al., (2017) assert that the organizational corporate culture emphasis on the organizational core values like corroboration and innovation enhances organizational resources and capabilities that support the corporate business model, intensive strategy for growth, and generic approaches to competitive advantages. For instance, business innovation leads to effective and efficient operations. Additionally, innovation leads to improved consumer satisfaction and convenience, which develops a competitive advantage in the retail pharmacy and healthcare markets. Hence, it has long term effects on the value creation that benefits the consumers. In this case, CVS organization culture benefits help in maximizing competitiveness and satisfaction to the clients.

Whether CVS should purchase Walgreens

CVS Company should purchase the Walgreens Company, else, a merger between the companies can be initiated by the two organizations to widen the scope of operations. Bearskin et al. (2018) demonstrate that a merger or acquisition of two companies should be initiated without the interference of the respective companies’ normal operations. Additionally, the cost of a merger should also be minimal. This can only be possible if the companies share the same philosophies and ideologies in their cultural background.  In this case, CVS and Walgreens have many organization has many similar organization cultural backgrounds. Walgreens organizational culture is guided by specific elements of its core values, which include diversity, quality, collaboration, accountability, leadership, and integrity. On the other hand, CVS’s cultural background focuses on giving back, encouraging professional and personal growth, and embodiment of crucial values in collaboration, innovation, caring, accountability, and integrity. Therefore, the operations of the two organizations are guided by the same cultural element. However, there is a difference in the cultural objectives of the two organizations. CVS’s cultural objective is geared towards maintaining a competitive edge within the health and pharmaceutical industry, while Walgreen is a cultural objective that is guided by consumer satisfaction in the industry. In this regard, purchase, merger, and acquisition can be initiated by CVS Company on the Walgreen organization.

Conclusion

Organizational cultures help an organization achieve the organization’s main goals and objectives, as stated in the values, mission, and vision of the respective companies. The corporate culture guides all the operations in an organization. Understanding the organization’s culture helps the organization formulate strategies that will enhance its scope of operations and maintain a competitive strategy in the industry. Although there was a difference in Walgreen and CVS health companies’ organizational cultural objectives, many cultural elements are similar. This is a crucial consideration when consideration acquisition and organizational mergers. It is cheap to merge Companies that have similar cultural backgrounds. There is minimal interference during the acquisition or merging process on the organization’s operations. For these reasons, cultural consideration should be a key issue when considering the organizational merger.

 

 

 

Reference List

Bereskin, F., Byun, S. K., Officer, M. S., & Oh, J. M. (2018). The effect of cultural similarity on mergers and acquisitions: Evidence from corporate social responsibility. Journal of financial and quantitative analysis, 53(5), 1995-2039.

Board, T. W. C. A. (2019). Wright, Marsha v. Tennessee CVS Pharmacy, LLC.

Canady, V. A. (2020). Walgreens pharmacists complete first phase of MH training. Mental Health Weekly, 30(22), 4-5.

De Silva, T. (2018). BEST PRACTICE IN PHARMACY MANAGEMENT. Journal of Pharmacy Management• Volume, 34(3), 85.

Devita, J. T., Rocchio, J., Berton, L., Patel, S., Amin, V., Davis, T. G., & Macy, R. (2017). U.S. Patent No. 9,532,928. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Greenwood, A., & Ingram, H. (2018). Sources and Resources ‘The People’s Chemists’: The Walgreens Boots Alliance Archive. Social History of Medicine, 31(4), 857-869.

Groysberg, B., Lee, J., Price, J., & Cheng, J. (2018). The leader’s guide to corporate culture. Harvard Business Review, 96(1), 44-52.

Guo, K. H., & Eschenbrenner, B. L. (2018). CVS Pharmacy: An instructional case of internal controls for regulatory compliance and IT risks. Journal of Accounting Education, 42, 17-26.

Kerridge, G. (2016). Reconceptualising organizational identity: a critical realist and historical case study of Walgreens Boots Alliance (1892-2002) (Doctoral dissertation, University of Warwick).

Tilzer, B., Humphreys, D. W., & Gupta, R. (2019). U.S. Patent No. 10,275,574. Washington, DC: U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Weinstein, M. D. (2017). Walgreens Donates $5,000 for Pharmacy Diversity Scholarship.