Analysis of the Amazon Culture - Research Paper

Introduction

Amazon is an online shopping company which is based in Washington. It is a multinational technology bound organization which majors in e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing. Besides, it is the largest e-commerce online marketplace and cloud computing platform in the entire universe as weighed by the income and market capitalization. Amazon is referred to as the largest retail shop in the world, and it carries a market value of 250 billion dollars. It was started in the year 1996 by Jeff Bezos who is the CEO. As such, the company provides its products and those that are provided by the third party sellers. The third party products are provided across several categories over its retail websites and through its portable applications.

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The organizational structure of Amazon .com Company is hierarchical. It has a senior management team that entails two CEOs, three vice presidents, and one universal controller, and they are all obliged to report to the CEO Bezos. Besides they have several segments which comprise of information technology, human resource, and various legal operations and the primary heads of divisions. The reason behind the hierarchical development structure of Amazon is the massive size of the industry. Regardless of the big size of Amazon, different from many other organizations with hierarchical organizational structure, Amazon rests on being extremely flexible to acclimate to regular deviations in the external market

The corporate culture of the Amazon Company is based on various systems of assumptions, morals, ethics, values, norms and attitudes that are demonstrated. The individual members of the company develop these cultures through their shared experience which facilitates them to determine the ideal meaning of the nearby environment and how they should behave in that particular surrounding (Taplin, 2017). In the current society, every organization has its own means and strategies of distinguishing themselves from the rest of the organizations. As such, they develop methods of countering competition in the market. Some of the organizations meander outside the market due to their lack of morals and ethics.

Amazon Company sticks to its morals and ethics which facilitates its stand out in the market. Besides, it has demonstrated that it can stand out and the ability to be socially responsible. Not only has Amazon portrayed its social responsibility ability, but also it has demonstrated its leadership capacity and skills. Amazon is socially viable because they give back to the communities that surround them (Tritt, & Teschner, 2019). The company has a simple logo which speaks more about the goods and services they provide. This carries the truth to the organization's standards, and several customers have testified from Forbes magazine that they sell everything just like from A to Z. Besides the magazine attests, there are several happy clients and customers with the goods and services offered by Amazon company (Rosman, 2017).

Amazon holds a strong and commendable ethical discipline. The company ensures that all the inputs and outputs of the company are up to the standards according to the world's bureau of standards. As such, testimonies from some the individual who have once worked at their artifacts portrays a high degree of ethics and discipline. There are various ways in which Amazon upholds ethics; number one, the company ensures that they comply with the rules, laws, and regulations of the legal department. This code of business conducts sets outs the fundamental guiding principles of the organization. Besides, the employees are called to follow some stipulated laws and rules in their undertaking within the company. As such, in case there is any employee with questions regarding the interpretation of the rules and regulations of the company, they are advised to seek guidance from the legal department.

Secondly, conflicts of interest are a significant concern in the company. As such, employees are guided to use their judgment to act at all cost and in every way in the best of interests of Amazon. The existence of a conflict of interest is where the employee's interest interferes with the best of interest of the company. Likewise, the federal laws of the state prohibit trading trades undertaken by individuals who might be carrying material information that is not generally exposed or know by the public. Amazon has adopted these trading guidelines where they are expected to review and follow specific instructions according to the Amazon .com. Besides, Amazon provides equal opportunity in all the aspects of employment and does not condone any unlawful unequal treatment or harassment of any kind. This means that the company provides equal employment to every individual who has qualified. This demonstrates how Amazon Company upholds strong ethical practices in its operations.

Furthermore, the Amazon Company withholds ethical and good leadership practices by ensuring that the price fixing does not exploit other competitor companies in the market. By doing this, they ensure that employees are restricted from discussing the prices or making an attempt to any informal agreement with any of their competitor regarding prices, discounts, business terms, and the general market segment and the passages in which the organization competes. Further, the Amazon Company ensures record keeping and financial integrity. The financial statements are recorded and retained in the Amazon books, accounts and in the well-kept financial statement, which are maintained in suitable detail. The statements are bound to reflect the organization's transactions and must adapt both to the applicable law and the company's structure of internal panels (Goran, LaBerge, & Srinivasan, 2017).

The Amazon Company has various leadership challenges. These challenges include individual challenges among the employees, how they orchestrated their leadership and the followership culture (Striphas, 2015). Firstly, there senior leaders in the company have exaggerated and outspoken leadership. This character is portrayed by one of their top leader's management style which is massively influenced by this abrasive personality. Moreover, he has the habit of telling everybody what they should do yet they are aware of what is expected of them. This causes some employees to feel outgoing than others, and as a result, the performance becomes poor amongst themselves. As such employees were forced to persistently attest their worth, outdo their colleges and to undermine their careers further.

Dhir (2019), asserts that insensitive management is another challenge facing the leadership in the Amazon Company. A testimony from employees who had been working with the Amazon displayed that they endured great personal hardships, which included illnesses like cancer, miscarriage for the women and several other crises, they said that they were unfairly judged and were not given time to recover instead they were forced out of the company. The unfair treatment by the leader in charge then denied some of the potential employees from performing to the best of their ability (Mierke & Williamson, 2017). As such, unfair systems of ranking among the employees in the company displays the overlaying leadership challenge facing the Amazon Company. The company holds annual employees review where the managers determine and discuss the rankings of the subordinates. The review ends up leaving the senior employees retaining their position even when some of them never performed as expected to leave the junior employees still in their position.

Transformational leaders are those leaders who are capable of equipping people and even the society at large to conform their goals to those of the leader (Mierke & Williamson, 2017). There are various attributes of transformational leaders. As such, Bezos the CEO of Amazon company brings about the transformational leader unlike to the transactional leader. Firstly charisma is one of the significant quality of a transformational leader who transforms the industry and society at large. Charismatic leaders can inspire and motivate confidence and protected the commitment of others to them. Bezos has encouraged a large number of individuals of what Amazon Company can become. Amazon quickly expanded from being a book retailer to offering more than fifteen million products today. To add to that the company has extended into providing cloud services and Prime membership program (Kantor, & Streitfied, 2015)

It has been noted that not an ordinary leader can be able to come up with an organization that has transformed the face of modern business than a transformational leader like Bezos. Another attribute of a transformational leader is challenging the position quo and assisting individuals in developing how they think. Bezos inspired his team to think further beyond the retail bookselling, after a few years Amazon begun to expand the methods of products delivery, the types of products they produced and established a worldwide online delivery. A transformational leader inspires independence and ingenuity in his followers. Amazon is looked and considered to be a company where this quality has been practiced by the CEO, and hence it's good and speeded growth. A transformational leader should be at a position to figure out what motivates his or her employees. However, Bezos has failed in contemplating this attribute of transformational leadership. Most of the employees in his company are not motivated, and therefore they tend to perform with less motivation.

My recommendations for the future of Amazon is that the principal leaders of the company should engage with the reviewers directly and in a non-defensive manner. This will facilitate the leadership of the company reason being that the reviewers play an important role in ranking of Amazon (Taplin, 2017). Secondly, I would recommend that social media teams should be motivated by the managers so that their performance is better than the previous one. This is because it is clear that the social media team play a very significant role in the expansion of the Amazon .com. Hence the senior leaders should be able to see that and award the team by motivating them by salary increment or promoting them to higher ranks in the company.

Lastly, the mixed organizational structure can be split into several individual departments which will be able to cater to each area. By doing this, each will be awarded a specific task, and at the end of the day, he or she will perform better compared to the teamwork, where some employees tend to relax because they are working as a team. I believe that with those few changes, Amazon will be able to make double the profit it makes currently in the next two to three years. In conclusion, it is evident that the Amazon Company has incapacitated the transactional leadership attributes and also have embraced the ethical administration of its operations. As such, this has been the reason behind its fast growth.

References

Dhir, S. (2019). The changing nature of work, leadership, and organizational culture in future ready organizations. Retrieved from https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/2064

Goran, J., LaBerge, L., & Srinivasan, R. (2017). Culture for a digital age. McKinsey Mckinsey Quarterly, 10. Retrieved from https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/digital-mckinsey/our-insights/culture-for-a-digital-age

Kantor, J., & Streitfied, D. (2015). Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big ideas in a Bruising Workplace. New York Times, 15, 74-80.

Mierke, J., & Williamson, V. (2017). A framework for achieving organizational culture change. Library, Leadership & Management, 31(2), 40-56. doi:10.4324/9781315688404-3

Rossman, J. E. (2017). The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Pr...