Paper Example on Success of Amazon

Introduction

Amazon started as a very small company in 1994 selling books through its online bookstore. The business continued to expand until 1997. In 1998, the Amazon management decided to expand the business further and take on additional activities besides books sale. From 1998 until 2004, Amazon continued to extend its business and became able to sell thousands of products (Wallace, 2016). From 2005 to 2011, Amazon expanded other businesses and opened web services with the development of the e-book service enabling the customers to purchase and read books from the e-book site. In 2017, Amazon started to engage with software engineers and handle complicated challenges in computing. By this time, the company had almost 269,000 employees for technical innovation and technical programmes development (Schneider, 2017).

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During the years 2011-2017, the company opened new windows for business, such as Amazon Prime video and music. At the same time, while adding to its online services, it opened Amazon restaurant services to deliver food to the customers. In addition, it started open sales stores to provide items with unmatched prices, as this was a pioneering venture in the online marketing and business field.

Amazon is one of the largest global online retailers. It offers a vast range of merchandise, including books, electronic devices, and other products, through the company's websites. The company had a revenue of about US$135,987 million for the financial year ending December 2016. A business magazine has included the company among the top 100 American companies. In addition, it was included among the top 20 most valuable brands and top 100 most important brands in the world in 2016. With a company of this magnitude, it would be relatively easy to find sources of information and researches on its achievements and success.

The success of Amazon depends on the kind of leadership the organization has. In the last decades, several theoretical and empirical models have been created relating to leadership (Jacobsen & House, 2001). Leadership in Amazon is widely discussed and examined because there is a need for transformation in both the employees and the organization in general. Leadership is important in various areas and has become essential in every aspect of life from politics to business (Kala, 2014). Leadership has different meanings according to recent literature. It could be first defined as the ability of an individual to influence others in the right direction or towards a common goal (Northouse, 2007). In most cases, they are in two parts namely to direct workers and to influence others to achieve shared goals. Leadership has evolved from a classical type of leadership to current modern types of leadership. Classical leadership is the oldest style of leadership where executives command other followers to act towards a given direction even if it is against their wishes. The followers have no authority to question because they fear their leaders. This kind of leadership style may only work if the followers accept to be dictated upon by top management but it cannot work when the leaders have no power to control every step other workers make (Zhang, 2010). Another leadership style that emerges after classical leadership style is transactional leadership when there was a problem with human interaction. It was brought to improve the association between the executives and the employees. It requires the workers to interact and negotiate an agreement that they involved in. In this condition, great leaders have the authority to reward the employees well to gain motivation (Bass & Avolio, 1993). There are other people that understand that transactional leadership style requires correcting employees or allowing for the participation of leaders in solving certain issues that require their attention (Bass, 1985; Avery, 2004). In transactional leadership, leaders treat every employee as an individual and they mainly concentrate on their personal needs and motives. In relation to Avery (2004), it solves some of the problems of classical leadership style as it allows participation of all the employees in the organization. Although transactional leadership has had some advantages, there are some limitations seen when it was being applied in Amazon before introducing transformational leadership. It also has some limitations as the employee's view of leadership monitoring as strenuous and reduces their potential to perform at their level best. Transactional leadership sometimes does not work effectively when there is a rapid change and when there is uncertainty especially when there is a need for serious commitments.

Amazon company introduced transformational leadership after its visionary leaders have seen the need to encourage the employees to be committed to the future vision of the company. This kind of leadership was introduced in the 1980s and it became popular in the last two decades as the most effective leadership approach that can be used to understand the effectiveness of leaders. It is the best leadership style for Amazon and other companies that can transform the company norms and employee's values in such a way that the employees are motivated to a level that they can perform beyond their expectations (Yukl, 1989). This leadership style enhances the employee's involvement towards achieving a common goal (Bass, 1994) thus ensuring that every individual worker is first engaged on their jobs and finally to the organization in which they work for. Most companies have developed a stronger preference for the transformational leadership style in the last three decades because it motivates workers and also makes workers to focus on future goals (Simic, 1998). For the business to change the way it does business, it is necessary to implement transformational leadership because it is the only way that the business can use to implement radical change. Radical changes such as rapid technological change, industrial volatility, and high competition can only be implemented using transformational leadership. Radical changes require the introduction of new organization structure, downsizing of the organization and these changes reduce employee's satisfaction. To overcome these challenges, transformational leadership should be used to ensure that these changes are implemented without reducing the work morale of workers. It can also increase the loyalty of employees by gaining trust in the work of every individual worker (Griffin, 2003). Due to the fact that most firms want to solve their opposing challenges of establishing a new course of actions that can help them implement change at the same time increasing work morale of workers, it is essential to introduce new leadership style (Conger, 1999). Transformational leadership satisfies human needs by increasing their level of needs from low to high (Kelly, 2003; Yukl, 1989). This kind of leaders also increases work morale of employees so that they can achieve their own interest for a collective goal and ensure that all the followers meet their personal needs through appealing for a higher need like love. It is believed that transformational leadership has the capacity to increase trust, appreciation, loyalty, and respect amongst the employees (Barbuto, 2005). For transformational leadership to work effectively, there is a need for the leaders to work closely with all employees instead of only a few workers for all workers to realize their self-actualization. Chekwa (2001) argues that transformational leadership style relates to the self-reflective exchange of norms and traditions by the executives and other employees in such a way that the employee and their leaders are responsible for improving the achievement of each other to a point that one cannot believe.

Transformational leadership mainly focuses on employee's engagement. It is currently in interest as most organizations use it to motivate workers. Employee engagement is used in various contexts such as psychological condition, traits, and conducts (Macey & Schneider, 2008). The term is sometimes used to reflect a distinct feature which comprises of emotion, cognitive and behaviors that reflect the performance of an individual employee (Saks, 2006). Employee engagement takes place when every worker understands what they expect, have sufficient resources to accomp...