Amazon: A Successful Company Built on Darwinistic Organizational Culture.
In order to confirm a consistent pattern and understand Amazon’s organizational behavior, we chose to retrieve data from various sources. We read news articles, watched YouTube videos, conducted in-person interviews, and simply asked people who have worked at the company to share their experience with the company in writing. By using different types of media, we can ensure that the information being collected is valid and strengthens our arguments and, later on, our ability to make suggestions for the company. With the New York Times article, we added to our generic knowledge of the Amazon work culture by reading from an established source. In addition, we collected the accounts of workers as well as executives in order to see if and to what extent there is a disconnect between leadership and employees. The use of a YouTube video from NBC that focuses on one individual’s story humanizes all involved and allows us to validate what has been said in our other news source. It also stirs one’s emotions and highlights the importance of our consulting work to make the workplace better for all. In-person interviews and written communication provide us with primary source data and allow us to get answers to more specific questions. In order to find people, we asked individuals, primarily from our hometowns or university, who have worked for Amazon to tell us about their experiences with the company. We formed a questionnaire, attached at the end, in which we first ask for overall impressions of Amazon, in order to see what information the respondents provide voluntarily. This allows us to see if the respondents feel similar or different about the job. If the raves or rants are similar, we may be able to conclude that the characteristics of working at Amazon are company-wide and that senior management is responsible for ensuring worker satisfaction. If what is said varies with a department or certain demographic, when we can focus on personalization and recommend strategies to engage with different people in different ways. We recorded data using tables to categorize responses as positive or negative, and further filtered based on different job characteristics such as pay or flexibility, to determine if the data collected pertains to a specific aspect of work or is more based on personal matters. After collecting the data in an unbiased way and recording the data in an organized manner, we summarized our findings and asked those who are still in the company as well as those in management positions for their thoughts. If there is a severe disconnect between everyone in the company, we can create an agenda centered around effective communication. Once we can ensure that no problems arise from a lack of understanding of what’s expected of the employees and management, then we can tackle problems related to motivation and doing whatever it takes to keep employees performing at their best. After that, we can focus on identifying and addressing other sources of conflict that cannot be addressed with communication and motivation, as we have learned in our last few lectures on organizational behavior.
Amazon: A Successful Company Built on Darwinistic Organizational Behavior
Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer founded by Jeff Bezos, is known globally for its quality services, affordable prices and its ability to cater to the needs of their customers, aspects which have led to its exponential growth from an online bookstore to a commercial empire consisting thousands of products. This company was selected for a case study in order to analyze the methods utilized to become one of the world’s leading companies, and to recognize the effects on the organizational culture. It is an extremely popular career destination for millenials and postgraduates, thus an interest was sparked as to why this company draws in thousands of this generation’s youngest and brightest minds. Prior to the research, it was hypothesized that Amazon’s methods, although seemingly effective, may have detrimental effects on employee wellbeing unseen to its consumer base.
Leadership
An organization’s success is affected by a leader’s capability to determine steps and behaviors necessary in order to push the organization forward. In that case, exploring the leadership of Amazon can provide insight into the organizational behavior as well as highlight the motivating, or negative, factors that propel employees into action.
Jeff Bezos displays transformational and transactional leadership, and is task-oriented. His transformational leadership style plays a major role in his company’s success in the early stages of its development. As a transformational leader, he consistently seeks innovation. By definition, transformational leadership is defined as behaviors that mobilize extra effort from followers through emphasis on change through articulating a new vision for the organization (Scandura, T. A). Bezos attempted to align his long-term goals with employee values, as to create interest for his team members and foster a commitment to drive team efforts beyond ordinary results. The exponential expansion of Amazon serves as a striking example of the effects of Bezos’ ability to inspire others to strive for progress and innovation.
Bezos’ transactional leadership style comprised the majority of his leadership personality. After the initial start, Amazon utilized psychological tools to extract the highest level of performance achievable from Amazonions. The company linked employees’ performances directly to the success of their assigned work. This direct method may seem intuitive in terms of achieving operational goals and business outcomes, but ruthless standards result in a tense, negative relationship between Bezos and his employees. Transactional leadership is based on a foundation of exchange between a leader and his group members. The focus of this type of leadership is to provide rewards and promotions in exchange for work efficiency, productivity and accomplishments (Scandura, T. A). Despite Bezo’s leadership driving Amazon to deliver massive revenues and build loyal customer base, his transactional leadership caused a stressful working environment where employees don’t feel any dedicated to the company. For example, the 14 leadership principles. As the company grew, Mr.Bezos decided to codify his ideas that related to the workplace, from partly counterintuitive, into simple instructions that were easily for new workers to learn and understand. Those finally becomes 14 leadership principles. But they are too ideal, as company grew bigger and bigger, those managers are inclined to focus more on the results that they lost sights of how they were obtained, and who made it happened. A proverbial used to say:” wind beneath the wings.” When managers are too emphasis on results combined with such high competitiveness (13th principle), a toxic environment is created inside Amazon. Empathy and kindness are not accepted in this circumstance. Another principle, “ Earning Trust”, trust may create from competence, but don’t forget it also comes from amicable communication.
But, we can not exclude that Jeff Bezo is a charismatic leader. By Max Weber, Charisma is an individual personality that is different from ordinary people and treated as endowed with supernatural or at least specifically exceptional qualities. He is a leader who exudes power, energy and passion. He pursued his vision for the company with high intensity and demonstrated a capability of inspiring others and ability to influence people to behave in certain ways he wanted. He always focused on a long-term strategies and achieving high goals. When he started his business, he had a long term thought of making his company great and international and he succeeded. The reason why he made it possible is because he understood the vital roles of internet in the future.
The executive of Amazon has both transformational and transactional type of leadership. He is also a well-know charisma leader with task-oriented. Under his leadership, Amazon expanded tremendously, but at the meantime, created a stressful work environment for its employees. There is an area of improvement for Jeff Bezos, if he can coordinate both of his leadership in a perfect way, Amazon may have a better and sustainable life.
Power and Politics: Social Darwinism
Jeff Bezos has created a competitive work environment dominated by social darwinism. No employee ever feels that their job is safe, as it is not uncommon for employees to undermine one another in order to advance their own career, or merely protect their own position in the company. One company veteran said that when starting a new team, you must “drown someone in the deep end of the pool” in order to recruit his subordinates. Amazon’s Organizational Level Review, a debate among managers to evaluate their employees, is the most striking example of social darwinism within the company. Managers meet to rank employees, beginning with lower-level and moving up the management chain, with each round resulting in managers leaving the room to have their own performance evaluated by those who are left. Although evaluations are crucial for growth and development of strong employees, managers must choose “sacrificial lambs” to protect subordinates they deem too valuable to lose. A former marketer, and participant in the Organizational Level Review, commented “You learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus.” Actual talent is often lost as managers must play a deadly balance game of meeting quotas and keeping invaluable employees. Another example that exemplifies the blatant food chain within the company is the willingness of employees to form secret pacts and conspire to either accelerate or destroy one’s success. Amazon has an Anytime Feedback Tool that allows employees to comment on the performance of colleagues to management. The tool is known by employees as “a river of intrigue and scheming.” Groups of employees would either target a colleague with several entries of criticisms, or would join together to praise one another in an attempt to increase their rankings during evaluations (Kanter, J. & Streitfeld, D, 2015). This workplace norm of only protecting yourself is extremely detrimental to forming a successful team dynamic. No department is able to work cohesively when its collective employees feel as though their individual success, the factor that determines the length of their career at Amazon, is far more important than the success of the department as a whole. Successful teams have team identification and psychological safety, but both are nonexistent in a work environment where each employee has to worry about others edging him or her out. Unfortunately, Amazon twisted Darwin’s idea that only the fittest survive into only those who can partake in political scheming survive.
Amazon’s political climate can be described as a meritocracy, where power belongs to those who exhibit their extreme ability to perform, or at least those whom other employees view as performing to the high standards that the company has established, both through a explicit leadership principles and workplace norms. Although performance is an essential factor in evaluating an employee, those who have designated some attention to their personal life, such as expecting mothers, or others who are experiencing a crisis, such as an employee diagnosed with cancer, are placed at an extreme disadvantage. A prime example of this is former employee Molly Jay, who had a history of high performance ratings until she was forced to work less hours in order to travel to care for her father, who was dying from cancer. She was not allowed to transfer to another, less stressful position that would allow her to accommodate the new responsibilities in her personal life, she was called a “problem” by her boss, and eventually was forced out of the company by taking an unpaid leave. Jay commented, “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness.” Another notable example was a manager telling a woman, who the previous day had miscarried twins, that she had to leave on the a business trip that evening because “the work is still going to need to get done.” An HR executive commented on the employees whom she had to place on performance improvement plans, including a woman who had just delivered a stillborn child (Kantor, J. & Streitfeld, D, 2015). These recounts, although shocking, do not highlight the impact of such callous employee treatment like the story of Vicky Shannon Allen, who fell from Amazon’s success into homelessness. She was required to process an average of 600 items an hour, and was injured under these extreme standards of working, but Amazon refused to send her to a doctor or to pay workers’ compensation. Unable to work due to an injury sustained from trying to keep up with insane production norms, Allen was unable to maintain a steady income, and she became homeless, sleeping in her car parked in the Amazon lot (NBC News, 2018). Frankly said, there is no air of political correctness within this company: the employee does not matter, only his or her performance. Due to the lack of flexibility for personal crises and the unrealistic standards, Amazon employee tenure is usually less than one year (Johnson, 2018). Norms characteristically exert a strong pressure to conform, but when the norm is structured upon unrealistic, and nearly inhumane, practices of placing work above all else, and the pressure comes from the threat of losing a job, they can be more detrimental than productive in creating a cohesive company dynamic.
Recommendations for Improvement
Amazon’s main issues lie within its inability to form genuine motivation outside of the threat of termination, the extreme employee turnover, the ability of employees to provide false feedback to enhance their own evaluation, and the inability of successful teams to form. Amazon seems to function on an expectancy theory model, in which employees believe their performance, or at least their perceived performance, has a direct link to their longevity at the company. However, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs should be implemented so that the highest employee performance can occur, as currently the physiological, safety and belonging needs are not being properly fulfilled. Employees must work extreme hours, thus their physiological need of sleep is ignored, they constantly feel as though their job is at threat, thus a lack of safety, and that their co-workers have the ability to destroy their career, thus a lack of belonging. In response to these issues, Amazon should implement a maximum cap on hours, offer programs and benefits for those experiencing personal crises, and alter the quota system within the Organizational Level Review so that valuable talent is not lost to the dark side of social Darwinism. A maximum cap has a downside of a possible decrease in productivity, but this can be counteracted by hiring new employees to not only fill the gap, but also offer a stream of a new ideas and talent to the company. Programs for employees in need may increase costs, however it decreases employee turnover, and an employee who is retained is an employee who has more training in and knowledge of Amazon than a new hire. Altering a quota system may require some trial and error in order to form a system that maintains invaluable employees but still removes dead weight, but a system that removes the threat of “sacrificial lambs” will make employees feel as though they will remain at Amazon, and thus they will perform for a company in which they see their future at, a company with which they identify. In order to motivate employees after removing the constant threat of termination, Amazon should implement Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory. In the previous recommendation, Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs implementation concurrently removes the hygienes of poor working conditions and tense relationships with co-workers. However, it is believed that increasing motivators has a more substantial effect on motivation than removing hygienes, thus Amazon should increase positive employee recognition, and redefine a culture that supports achievement instead of one that elicits fear when one employee achieves. Currently, employees receive attention when they are not working up to par with the unrealistic expectations, however recognition needs to occur when employees meet goals. It can be as simple as a warehouse manager providing a comment on how great an employee’s performance was on a day when he or she packaged more goods than the expected quota. A possible achievement program that does not elicit detrimental competition may be one in which employees can earn additional days off by reaching certain long-term goals. Thus, this motivates employees to succeed while not making other employees feel as though they have to undermine each other to also see personal success. Ideally, these recommendations, once implemented, will retain Amazon’s current productivity while improving the work environment and placing a larger emphasis on employee well-being.
References
Amazon. Amazon’s global career site. Retrieved from https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
Bezos, J. P. (1997). Amazon’s Shareholders Annual Report. Retrieved from https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm
De castro, E. (2015, November 16). The History of Amazon. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-boKBaWkQdo&t=56s
Johnson, Tim. (2018, June). The Real Problem With Tech Professionals: High Turnover. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil
/2018/06/29/the-real-problem-with-tech-professionals-high-turnover/#576af9894201
Kanter, J. & Streitfeld, D. (2015, August). Inside Amazon: Wrestling big ideas in a bruising workplace. New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08
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NBC News. (2018, September 2). Amazon employees speak out about workplace conditions [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvdyxXhVNRE
Molla, R. (2017). Amazon could be responsible for nearly half of US e-commerce sales in 2017. Retrieved from https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/30/amazon-could-be-responsible-for-
about-half-of-2017-us-e-commerce-sales.html
Scandura, T. A. (2018). Essentials of organizational behavior: An evidence-based approach. Los Angeles: SAGE.