TOPIC: Amazon Organization

TOPIC: Amazon Organization

1. Introduction

There are so many organizations in the world that foster business impacts on one’s economy. Amazon’s organization is not an exception. It is an American multinational technology company found in Seattle and has an approximation of 750,000 employees (Castro, 2013). This company focuses majorly on e-commerce, cloud computing, among others (Wang, 2013). It has greatly influenced the economy and cultural forces in the world, along with other companies like Apple. It is the largest internet company by revenue in the world as a whole. It has been ranked as the second-largest private employer in the United States. This company was founded by Jeff Bezos in July 1994 (Lang et al., 2012). This company majorly deals with various products like Amazon prime, retail goods, consumer electronics, among others. It also offers various Web services like networking, management tools, among others.

1.1. Roles of manager and leader in Amazon

Managers and leaders are important people in any business organization. These managers play key roles which include, planning, organizing, problem-solving, cheerleading, among others (Rothaermel, 2016).In planning roles, the manager looks at ways to achieve a goal of interest. Jeff Bezos used his planning mandate of the company to set up ways that could make him achieve his goal of being the best company in the world. This helped him improve his promotion offerings in his product sales. Through his role of being a manager, he organized his team into small groups that could manage various business units effectively. In the created groups, he assigned different roles to the heads of each group. Through the staffing role, the CEO of Amazon recruited so many employees in his company, and this helped in quick service delivery to the company, and he used the human resource department majorly to help achieve his goal for the company. The leading role of the manager helps him a guide, encourage, and motivate his employees by assisting them to solve the problems affecting the company. The manager should continuously check the progress of the company from the results it provides and takes corrective actions to make sure that his company is still in progress towards achieving its main goal.

1.2. Amazon organization structure

This company applies the hierarchical structure of an organization that helps the company greatly achieve its objectives. This structure comprises of Senior management team that involves three CEOs and three senior vice presidents who play important roles in the business and all of them being accountable to their Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. This organization structure has contributed to the company being on the top light. This structure has been organized into twelve levels of hierarchy, where at level twelve is occupied by the chief CEO (Mason, 2010). The eleventh level is occupied by the two CEOs and about 20 senior leaders, and these act as overseers in the other businesses creating a smooth collaboration across businesses and ensures that they identify others’ strengths. All vice presidents are made to occupy the tenth level. Directors and senior managers occupy the 8^th and 7^th position level, where the senior managers are functional heads. Managers and specific contributors occupy levels 6, 5, and 4, respectively, and play a role in providing a workforce for small businesses. Support staffs are also not an exception, and they occupy levels 1, 2, and 3together with other workers. Through this organization structure, decision making has been facilitated, and employees feel they own the company since they can see the impacts of the work they do.

This organizational structure comprises key elements such as flexibility of the business, its stability, and its hierarchical corporate structure. This is made efficient by the small team groups created Jeff Bezos, who introduced a two-pizza rule where business meetings were to be held in small groups. This company also ensures stability in its management through the organization due to its exposure in the market for a long time; it easily succeeds. This company’s vision is being the earth’s most customer-centric company and builds a place where people can come and discover anything that they may want to buy online and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest prices possible. Its mission is to serve consumers through online and also physical stores and focus on selection, price, and convenience.

2. Challenges facing the company and their consequences

Every business undergoes various challenges, and the Amazon company is not an exception. Amazon has been facing the greatest challenges recently; for instance, keeping up E-commerce growth. The first part of the e-commerce business lost some of its steam with the company indicating only 10% growth per year (Min and Wolfinbarger, 2005). The international performance of the company has been a great challenge in the Amazon organization. This company experiences weak returns in the international segment where it posted lighter than expected growth. Keeping rivals at bay is another challenge facing the company. Its rivals, such as Walmart, got more aggressive in their efforts to siphon market share from Amazon, and this forced Amazon to pull back on promotions and price matching, unlike its rivals. This caused brick and mortar competition to increase, and this gave their rivals an added advantage due to Amazon’s less aggressive stance (Formolo and Bosse, 2017).

Balancing of the investments against profits is a challenge in Amazon’s company. It was proved that the company hardly plows its earnings back into the business (Bunker, 1988). This was influenced by new initiatives like in healthcare. They were dealing with more intense government scrutiny that affected the growth of this company. This was caused by the presence of new congress in the United States, and their new presence affected the implemented regulations and taxation efforts of the company. This change promoted large tax breaks in the company, and this made the company be criticized over the year, posting a negative impact on the company.

Amazon also experiences a challenge of the gender pay gap where males are the majority in the company, and few females and their payments are different. It was noted that males in the company were the highly paid employees (Grote and Segerstedt, 2015) and also the majority in the higher levels of the company. This issue was facilitated by unequal representation in the company where only three of the Amazons 11 board members were women. Sustainability also affects the company, especially climate change. The company majorly uses its energy from renewable sources, and the gases emitted can impost great problems in the environment. This issue is no longer a challenge in Amazon since it recycles and reuses its packaging materials making environment friendly to both employees and even for all the citizens.

2.1. Solutions to the problem

In life, every problem has a solution, and Amazon, too, got solutions to its most prevalent problems.  To curb the issue brought about by the gender pay gap, the company brought an equality pay where both males and females were now paid equally, and also representation in the higher levels was made inclusive. In the sustainability problem, the company came up with different strategies where it reused and recycled its packaging materials, and also manufacture of electrically driven vehicles helped reduce the amount of carbon emitted into the environment, and this solved the problem of sustainability and climate change. In order to balance the company’s investments and profits, the company decided to reduce the number of investments, and they major in at a time. To help the company keep its rivals at bay, the company decided to increase its aggressiveness stance in order to help it survive in the brick and mortar competition. This helped the company greatly improve its promotions. To keep the E-commerce growth, the company has made great improvements in the e-commerce business. Amazon’s international segments have promoted greater than expected growth in recent years, and this was as a result of the changes made in their international segments.

3. Leadership styles of the leader and skills

Jeff Bezos uses various leadership styles and also his skills in promoting the success of the Amazon organization. He uses the Autocratic leadership style, where he monitors everything by himself. This helps him identify quickly any emerging issue in any of the company’s portion in the business. He also uses a strategic leadership style where he delivers both special and unique strategies that greatly promote success to his organization. Team leadership style has been the greatest style used by Jeff, where he opted to form small groups to manage a small business, and this led to the faster growth of the small businesses. This aspect was influenced by the two-pizza rule that he implemented. He also possesses a cross-cultural leadership style, charismatic, and visionary leadership styles. He uses various skills in running his organization, where he prioritizes customer service by evaluating the feeling of the customer about their business decision.

He also employs the skill of being a little crazy where he thinks outside the box where he says that invention requires long term willingness to be misunderstood. He also explained that crazy decisions could lead to innovations that can promote success in leadership. He also applies the idea that can last for long. Having long term thought for the company helped him work hard, aiming at making his business great in the whole world. He also put strategies where he made the employees think like owners, and this promoted more employees to join his company; this caused a great growth in the company. He has employed various skills to help promote growth in the company. These skills include being an inventor, focusing on the progress and not failure, building a culture that’s right for the company, being perseverance, and resilience, among others. These skills provided a platform for the success of the company.

4. Conclusion

Amazon organization is the best company in the world, offering the best products and customer services. Its employees are also well paid. The organizational structure of the company is a key element towards the success of the company, and any starting business can try and implement the structure since it could be of great help to its quick growth. Leadership skills and styles should be a key consideration in anyone who wants to be a leader or a manager in any business arena. These skills will help the individual run his or her company effectively and be able to identify problems in any of the business segments early in advance and also act accordingly. To emerge the best in business, you have to think differently from the others and also take advantage of the natural resources around. Prioritization of the consumer should be key and also making your employees feel like owners of the business makes them give their best in the company. Every company should set higher dreams that it aims to achieve and be part of their vision and mission, and this will always give the company a great push towards achieving its objectives. How any company reacts to the challenges affecting it determines where that company will be in the near future, and so every company or business should look for proper ways to deal with their problem, challenges should never be a standing block for the progress of the company.

5. References

Bunker, S.G., 1988. Underdeveloping the Amazon: Extraction, unequal exchange, and the failure of the modern state. University of Chicago Press.

De Castro, F., 2013. Between cooperation and conflict: the implementation of agro-extractive settlements in the lower Amazon floodplain. In Human-Environment Interactions (pp. 213-234). Springer, Dordrecht.

Formolo, D., and Bosse, T., 2017, July. Human vs. computer performance in voice-based recognition of interpersonal stance. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 672-686). Springer, Cham.

Lang, S., Tinder, L., Zimmerman, J., and Harrison, J.S., 2012. Amazon. Com: Offering Everything from A to Z.

Mason, Z.J., Amazon Technologies Inc, 2010. Predictive analysis of browse activity data of users of a database access system in which items are arranged in a hierarchy. U.S. Patent 7,836,051.

Min, S., and Wolfinbarger, M., 2005. Market share, profit margin, and marketing efficiency of early movers, bricks and clicks, and specialists in e-commerce. Journal of Business Research, 58(8), pp.1030-1039.

Rothaermel, F.T., 2016. Strategic management: concepts (Vol. 2). McGraw-Hill Education.

Segerstedt, A., and Grote, U., 2015. Protected area certificates: Gaining ground for better ecosystem protection?. Environmental Management, 55(6), pp.1418-1432.

Wang, D., 2013. Influences of cloud computing on e-commerce businesses and industry.