Background
Amazon is one of the most promising e-commerce and cloud computing organisation in the US, which was founded by Jeff Bezos during 1994. By sales Amazon is recorded as the largest internet based retailer and also a prominent cloud service provider, accounting about 15% of the total online sales in the US (Stone, 2013).
According to a report by Anitha et al. (2014), stakeholders like employees, are the key factors responsible for organisational success. This is the reason that company are not only concerned for improvement of competencies of employees, but are also concerned with factors like using motivational strategies, promoting them for self-enlightenment, and valuing their perspectives. The reason is mainly linked with the objective to sustain low employee turnover, maintaining a good organisational behaviour for the worthy workplace environment, and thereby motivating employees to bring innovative solutions.
In the present case study, the report examines organisational behaviour accounted at Amazon. This deals with the basic framework in conjunction vision of chairman, line managers, and group leaders that are responsible for acting as motivator or stressor for employees. Likewise, the report also includes recommendation such that the workplace environment can be turned into effective and productive place.
Initially, the company was a bookseller and later it dealt with a variety of business of digital media and other consumer goods. Amazon obtained the third rank in the most admired companies in the world of CNN 2012, owing to its technology-intensive work procedures, as well as successful online retailing based on cloud ventures (Lin, 2015).
The company aims at working with the white-collar employees for gaining competitive advantage. However, there is certain evidence regarding the bruising working conditions at the workplace of amazon. The given report shows the managerial issues within the company and its impact on the Amazon’s productivity, which in mostly acting as a stressor and that the employees were pushed to their limit to bring productivity (Thorpe and O’Gorman, 2016).
Team culture
It is being said that life inside Amazon’s corporate office is a total mystery, where even the low-level employees are forced to sign a confidentiality agreement. The employees are motivated to send secret message or mail to other’s managers (Kuo and Tsai, 2017). Likewise, all the members are permitted to make extreme critics for newer ideas and presentation. These provisions are believed to be effective in managing efficiency at workplace. In contrast, this is responsible for the generation of negative emotion at the workplace such that creating conflict among employees, seeking the opportunity to make negative negotiations, and discontinuing effective communication channels (Kaplan, 2014).
Case study analysis – Issues and problems
Organisational behaviour
The key component that is requisite for any organisation is represented in Figure 1, which dictates that effective organisational behaviour must seek suitable working procedures that can allow space as well as time for improvement and bringing innovative solutions. Next, to this, there exists keen requirement to promote the team management (Allcorn, 2015). This is essential for maintaining a good working spirit as well as effective coordination among the team members, which is clearly reflective for not being implemented at Amazon. Lastly, the success of the company is determined based on providing values to their employees, such as offering them promotion, acknowledging their contribution to organisational success, and offering them value return to promote positive workplace environment. All these points are found to be missing with the only existing company’s theme to extract maximum productivity from employees without supplementing any value return to their employees (Sultan, 2013, pp.160).
Figure 1: Key components of organisational behaviour include following considerations.
Amazon uses the monitoring techniques for tracking the employee’s performance and other loading and unloading of goods. It has been found and examined from various sources that there exists hellish and inhumane working condition in the warehouses of Amazon. One of the major complaints from the employees is that the warehouses are too hot to work and suitable conditions like air-conditioner, ventilation, and safety management were only included after proper conduct by Health and Safety organisation of State (Tucker, Ogunfowora and Ehr, 2016, pp.1228). After the revelation of the brutal workplace during the summertime condition in 2012, the company proposed a plan to invest an amount of $52 million towards installing air conditions in U.S.
Power basis within the organisation
At amazon, the managers were provided authority to strictly review the employee performance. Moreover, the employees were also sent e-mails or message 24×7 and are expected to give a response. Such working condition is acting as stressor as employees are not allowed to have their own space and time for the personal requirement. According to Bezos, all the employees were given prior condition while recruitment for having a tough working condition which is mainly aimed to achieve the higher competitive level and excellence in terms of organisational objective (Blader, 2016).
Moreover, the employees are here encouraged to tear apart and criticise each other ideas during meetings. The internal phone directory initiates colleagues for sending secret feedback to each other’s bosses, which is often done to sabotage others. Apart from these, the storage system of amazon is highly chaos to maximise the efficiency of the storage capacity (Turner and Danks, 2014, pp.24).
Solution
Improvement in terms of implementing effective workplace environment
The first requirement for maintaining effective workplace environment is to create a health and motivating working conditions for the employees. Amazon should try to maintain the structural the structural consistency to make the employees feel less anxiety. The company can join the work time and the out-of-time by offering the community engagement opportunities as a meaningful and beneficial purpose. It will be a paid volunteer time for the employees which will act as an incentive for getting involved in major community causes (Gupta and Jain, 2014, pp.22).
Another critical requirement that is requisite at Amazon is to maintain a worthy relationship and working link between the employer and employee. The clear negotiations between employer are to devise suitable action plan according to available resources, expertise, time constraints, and suitability of project. Likewise, the staff must be engaged in positive construction for the improvement of the plan, and that the feedback session must be constructive (Doh, 2015, pp.112). Similarly, the managers are requisite to promote encouragement and motivation such that employee can be engaged effectively in the projects. This will also include the use of motivational tools, involvement into the project, and providing positive feedback and suggestions. An overview of working relationship between employee and employers is provided in Figure 2.
Figure 2: The effective working relationship between employer and employee.
Improvement of performativity
The workers of amazon are not allowed to bring anything including the cell phones to the warehouse. Amazon implements added layer of security like the airport for its employees at each checkpoint, which often creates a rush among the employees to avoid these security lines. Instead of this, the company can devise suitable guidelines, which must be followed for smooth conduct and positive environment at the workplace (Goncalves, 2015, pp.34).
They are provided with only 30 minutes for lunch break, and out of which half of the time is wasted in security checking and the employee is given only 10 minutes of time for eating. According to the Supreme Court decision in 2014, the employees are not even paid for standing in the queue to be scanned. Instead of such strictness, the company must offer paid time such that employee can feel relaxed and that they can continue for achieving organisational objectives (Nowak, 2016, pp.189). The most important consideration in this regard is that employee turnover and their dissatisfaction at the workplace can also be minimised with such provisions.
Improving managerial role.
According to Mintzberg management theory, the managers must seek opportunities to improvement their skills with practical application and understanding of the various situation, rather than pushing the employees (figure 3).
Instead of pushing employees, the manager must be an effective role in terms of interpersonal relationship builder with employees, accurate information sharing and transferring, and ethical decision-making competencies. According to Goncalves et al. (2015, pp.34), such standards are not only effective in improving the working attitude among employees but are also effective in the accurate usage of resources and bringing improvement to work outcomes.
Figure 3: Mintzberg fundamentals for improvement of managerial roles.
Motivational tools for employees
The motivation of employee is important because, (i) it will encourage employees to bring innovation to the work outcomes; (ii) it will make optimal utilisation of resources such that cost effectiveness and productivity can be achieved at a superior level. In this consideration, using Herzberg’s two-factor theory is effective, that can bring job satisfaction, effective communication relationship (work responsibility realisation) and productive working conditions for Amazon (Oh and Syn, 2015, pp.2045). Key points included in this element are given in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Herzberg’s motivational (two-factor) theory for employees.
Effective power management
According to Bozeman et al. (2015, pp.700), the maintenance of effective power frame among managers and leaders is essential as it will have the corresponding impact on employee’ performance. Thus, issues like secret messaging, strict security checking, non-paid scanning time, and illness recovery time must be handled with relaxation for benefit of employees. Similarly, the authority to individual employees must be provided in part that they can make constructive feedback and improvement to existing plans, rather than pulling or pushing each other.
References
Allcorn, S., 2015. Understanding Organisational Dynamics and Leadership: A Comparison of Four Perspectives. Organisational and Social Dynamics, 15(2), pp.181-209.
Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management. [Assessed from https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/IJPPM-01-2013-0008 Dated 11 Apr 2017].
Blader, S.L., Shirako, A. and Chen, Y.R., 2016. Looking Out From the Top Differential Effects of Status and Power on Perspective Taking. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, p.0146167216636628.
Bozeman, B. and Su, X., 2015. Public service motivation concepts and theory: A critique. Public Administration Review, 75(5), pp.700-710.
Doh, J.P., Littell, B. and Quigley, N.R., 2015. CSR and sustainability in emerging markets: Societal, institutional, and organizational influences. Organizational Dynamics, 44(2), pp.112-120.
Goncalves, J., Hosio, S., Rogstadius, J., Karapanos, E. and Kostakos, V., 2015. Motivating participation and improving quality of contribution in ubiquitous crowdsourcing. Computer Networks, 90, pp.34-48.
Gupta, S. and Jain, S.K., 2014. The 5S and kaizen concept for overall improvement of the organisation: a case study. International Journal of Lean Enterprise Research, 1(1), pp.22-40.
Kaplan, S., 2014. Coping better with organisational change. Government News, 34(2), p.36.
Kuo, T. and Tsai, G.Y., 2017. The effects of employee perceived organisational culture on performance: the moderating effects of management maturity. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, pp.1-17.
Lin, A.C., 2015. Facilitating Cultural and Creative Industries to Engage the Internet Era: A New E-Commerce Strategic Framework. American Journal of Economics, 5(5), pp.534-539.
Nowak, R., 2016. The multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life: uncovering the performative hybridity of the iconic object. Journal for Cultural Research, 20(2), pp.189-203.
Oh, S. and Syn, S.Y., 2015. Motivations for sharing information and social support in social media: A comparative analysis of Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, YouTube, and Flickr. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 66(10), pp.2045-2060.
Stone, B., 2013. The everything store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon. Random House. [Assessed from https://ebsp.s3.amazonaws.com/pdf/theeverythingstorey_s.pdf Dated 11 Apr 2017].
Sultan, N., 2013. Knowledge management in the age of cloud computing and Web 2.0: Experiencing the power of disruptive innovations. International journal of information management, 33(1), pp.160-165.
Thorpe, A. and O’Gorman, R., 2016. Memo To Jeff Bezos: The Most Productive Workers Are Team Players, Not Selfish Individualists. This View of Life Magazine. [Assessed from https://www.cabrillo.edu/~cclose/docs/Case%20Study%203%20Fa15%20-%20Aristotle.pdf Dated 11 Apr 2017].
Tucker, S., Ogunfowora, B. and Ehr, D., 2016. Safety in the c-suite: How chief executive officers influence organizational safety climate and employee injuries. Journal of applied psychology, 101(9), p.1228.
Turner, J.R. and Danks, S., 2014. Case study research: A valuable learning tool for performance improvement professionals. Performance Improvement, 53(4), pp.24-31.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
