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Jeff Bezos, the richest man on earth is the founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of global e-commerce behemoth, Amazon.com Inc. Despite the controversies surrounding Jeff Bezos' leadership, and the culture norms followed at Amazon, the company is only forecasted to propel higher.
In this report, Jeff Bezos' leadership style and the Organizational Culture that has been pursued at Amazon would be critically evaluated. The key discussion throughout the report would be an argument whether Bezos' is a transformational or a toxic leader and the workplace culture his actions has prompted.
Both arguments would be backed up with evidence from the case study and from literature based research.
Transformational leadership is a process whereby leaders and followers raise one another to higher levels of morality and motivation. (Burns 1978) One of the best leadership qualities of the multi-billionaire is that he is remarkably motivational. He is well known for motivating his employees' without being too personally close to them. He encourages his staff to break the walls of their limitations and go beyond their potentials.
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“ She followed all my directions. It was really easy to contact her and respond very fast as well. ”
This lead to increased productivity at Amazon, allowing the organization to achieve higher levels of output.
Bezos is also prodigiously customer-oriented. He emboldens his employees' to emphasize on customers' needs and demands. The most important factor that has made Amazon successful by far is their compulsive focus on the customer as opposed to obsession over the competitor. (Bezos, 2013) Amazon strives to determine trends and changes in consumer preferences, and applies these preferences in its online retail and related services.
Amazon maintains its effectiveness in satisfying customers is attributable to this characteristic of Amazons corporate culture. Jeff encourages his employees' to offer fast, hassle-free ordering and delivery.
However, at times, the employees of Amazon found their boss' motivational tactics to be insensitive and desperate. In order to bring about the extreme expectations he has set out for his employees', Bezos propels them way over the line. His style of micromanaging his employees and expecting them to push themselves to meet his unrealistic demands establishes himself as a leader who is insensitive and thick-skinned. He has high expectations for his employees and doesn't apologize for it. In his Wall Street Journal article, Richard Brandt shares a story from the early days of Amazon, "By 1999, Amazon had 500 employees who were assigned to answer emails. They were each expected to answer 12 emails per minute, and was threatened to be fired when that number dropped below 7" (Bedarkar, Pandita, 2016). As a consequence, an environment of fear and insecurity has been created at Amazon. Employees feel disempowered as they are not to get results in ways that work for them. This makes them feel less accountable for their results and less engaged causing decrease in output and high rates of employee turnover.
Transformational leaders are leaders who "raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize people with exceptional talent and willingly move them throughout the organization." As a transformational leader, Jeff was always in search for the best for his team. Bezos doesn't believe in making a hire, simply for the sake of filling an open role. A Fast Company profile revealed that he once told a colleague, "I'd rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person" (Andersen, 2019). This quality of Jeff has resulted in Amazon hiring people with brilliant skillset, who would leave no stones unturned to reach the company goals.
The business moguls' compulsive drive to satisfy his customers, and high expectations of employees working for him, can show him to be a micromanager (Wikins, 2014). However, as a transformational leader, Bezos encourage his employees to develop and build new ideas and creative solutions for all business-related issues. This quality of Bezos' leadership has led to the environment of Amazons workplace to be an appreciably accepting place of everyone's thoughts resulting in more employee involvement and empowerment.
While promoting dauntlessness among his staff, Bezos encourages them to take risks when it comes to bringing in new ideas and innovations into the business. This character of the organizational culture allows Amazon to figure out the best practicable ideas to solve issues or enhance their business (Alvesson, 2016). At most organizations, employees must gather numerous yeses from his supervisors before pursuing an idea. At Amazon, supervisors are not allowed to turn down any ideas. (Tucker, 2018) Involving employees, empowering them and bringing them into the brainstorming process provides the opportunity for enhanced morale, more productivity, healthier coworker relationships and creative thinking.
Be that as it may, Jeff is known for his obsession over stimulating critical thinking and encouraging followers to take the initiative in presenting new ideas and solutions. He is inconsiderate over the ideas that are presented to him which he does not agrees with. Presenting to Jeff is a gauntlet that tends to send people back to the cave to lick their wounds and stay out of the sunlight for a while (Yegge, 2011). by doing so, Jeff is promoting the idea that employees' thoughts and initiatives are disregarded resulting in less employee allegiance.
As the world's top-notch E-commerce business, Amazon searches fresh talent. The staff evaluation system, Organizational and Leadership review that has been practiced at Amazon was implemented at the company to satisfy Bezos' enlarging aspiration to keeping the best men in his devoted workforce. However, this has lead the work culture at the company to become cynically hostile. It caused extreme chaos and negatively competitive nature among the employees'. They are turned against each other preventing teamwork and understanding amidst themselves.
Working for Jeff Bezos isn't always a walk in the park. As many of his employees' will attest, Bezos is extremely difficult to work for· he is capable of the same kind of acerbic outbursts as Apple's later founder Steve Jobs (Brandt, 2011). A toxic organization is one that erodes, disables and destroys the physiological, psychosocial and spiritual wellbeing of its employees' in permanent and deliberate ways. In other words, the organization becomes metaphorically a "poison pill" for employees' (Veldsman, 2016). By having high expectations of his employees', Bezos has created an incredibly efficient machine to rise to his standards. Without his penchant for continuously raising the bar for his employees', this would have never been accomplished.
transformational leader. (2019, Dec 09). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/transformational-leader-example-essay
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