Organizational Culture at Amazon - Case Study Example

Organizational Leadership and Performance. Student’s Name Institution Organizational Leadership and Performance. Company’s organizational culture. The organizational culture at Amazon is characterized by several factors. The elements of organizational culture noticeable at Amazon include the company vision, its values, the practices, people, and narrative. Amazon as an organization expresses these elements uniquely to define its particular environmental social and psychological behaviours. Organizational cultural elements are a product of various factors including product, history, strategy, technology, market, management style, and type of employees (Aspray & Ceruzzi, 2008). The interplay of these elements determines the organizational performance trend in the eyes of the competitors, customers, and the industry (Saunders, 1999). Vision is the first element of Amazon’s corporate culture. Vision. A vision statement is the starting point of any great organizational culture. A vision statement is a set of phrases that provide the guide to the company’s purpose and values. Primarily, vision statement helps guide the orientation of the employees in their decisions. Besides, clear vision statements can also help guide the orientation of company’s stakeholders, for example, suppliers and customers (Pfister, 2009). The general purpose of the vision statement is to explain the future endeavours of the company. Summed form of Amazon’s mission statement is to provide customer oriented services for buying any product online. The corporate vision statement is one of the methods of articulating the company’s core cultural statement. The vision statement of a company prescribes how the company can influence the organizational relationships and behaviours for efficient goal accomplishment. Company’s vision also encompasses its cultural vocabulary. These are words that make a reflection of the company’s corporate culture (Stone, 2013). The vision statement also makes a reference to the company’s model behaviour, in the attempt to avoid cultural drifts in the company. In this perspective, the vision is the phrasal method of expressing the leadership style of the management. Values. Organizational values are central to the company’s culture. Organizational values are the elements of the organization that provides the mindset and behavioural conduct of the company to achieve its vision (Alvesson, 2002). In most organizations, the values are created to revolve around some simple areas of business like clients, employees or professionalism, amongst others. However, their originality is not as important as their authenticity. Some organizations have the unwritten set of values that every member must subscribe. The values of Amazon are based on customer obsession. Amazon’s organizational culture has a characteristic high level of customer obsession. The company’s business practices seek to improve the customer experience, provide customer satisfaction, and ultimately increase the company’s grip on the customers. Amazon has reportedly been involved in losses because of low margin pricing strategies. Another aspect exhibited in Amazon’s customer obsession is their customer service system. The firm has an excellent customer support systems for addressing all the customer inquiries. Besides its set of values encompass innovation, as characterized by its massive diversification into numerous areas of business. The Amazon Kindle system is one of the major innovative products of Amazon that demonstrate its high regard for innovation (Stone, 2013). Organizational practices. Organizational practices are the corporate systems onto which the corporate values are enshrined. They are the visible ways that demonstrate the grip of the organization onto its values. A company with high value for infrastructure needs to demonstrate its grip on that value by heavy investments in infrastructure (Alvesson & Sveningsson, 2008). This investment should be done without any fear of the repercussions because their implementation is done under sound policies and reviews. Amazon’s corporate practices are characterized by teamwork, customer services, innovation and cheap product pricing. These practices align with the firm’s value system of its culture. Amazon’s workforce in small teams with specific leaders. Newly recruited workers join various work teams depending on their areas of professional specialization (Thamhain, 2014). These new team members are trained and mentored to become real players where they contribute to innovation and customer service. Amazon is also continuously redefining is business through innovation. Amazon Kindle is the premier self-publishing platform for eBook writers. This innovative product aims at edging out the book publishers by providing simple and affordable publishing services to the writers. Besides, Amazon has innovatively diversified its areas of business to include electronics, clothing, digital products and digital products, amongst others. These products are produced with different levels of joint business alliances. For Amazon to support its customer orientation, it has created high-level customer support systems where the inquiries of all manner are handled professionally and promptly handled on the customer’s preferences. The pricing strategies employed by Amazon makes it fall among the cheapest online retail platforms (Stone, 2013). The sole aim of Amazon’s low-profit margin pricing strategies is to increase its market share without loosening its grip on its existing customers. People. People make a paramount aspect of the organizational culture. Companies build coherent cultures through people who share its core values and others with the ability and willingness to embrace the company’s values (Driskill & Brenton, 2005). The success of an organizational culture is determined by recruitment practices, leadership and motivation amongst other factors (Johnson, 2012). Companies with stringent recruitment requirements have a chance of scanning the job candidates for their suitability for the organizational culture. It also helps spot candidates with difficult tendencies that can challenge or even disrupt a healthy organizational culture. Besides, leadership is that other aspect that determine the role of individuals in the development of healthy organizational cultures. Leaders primarily play the role of behavioural motivators (Zerwas, 2014). At Amazon, people play a major role in the company’s organizational culture. Amazon’s organizational structure has key roles that guide the company’s practices under the organizational values to achieve the goals of the vision. In the executive management, Amazon has several sections such as finance, human resources, technology and customer service, headed by strong believers in the company’s values. These individuals provide leadership and motivation to the workforce towards embracing the company’s practices. The head of the technology department at Amazon provides leadership towards the production of innovative products. Besides, the finance and business section of Amazon is headed by individuals who drive the application of innovative customer services and costing approaches. Jeff Bezos provides the ultimate level of leadership and motivation, as the founder of Amazon, allowing the company’s workforce to act as the carriers of corporate culture (Stone, 2013). Narrative. A corporate narrative comprises the history and business encounters of the company. It is the unique story of any specific company upon which its success is built. The company’s ability to expose its history and model it into a narrative helps create its culture. The narrative can be created as a formal or an informal piece. Formal corporate narratives comprise of numerous resources created to tell the company’s story (Heinemann & Schwarzl, 2010). A good example of a formal corporate narrative is that of Coca-Cola. On the other hand, informal narratives comprise of informal tales told about the history of a company as exemplified in the case of Apple Inc., and Steve Jobs. Corporate narratives contribute most to the ongoing culture of the organization. Their power as part of the ongoing culture is best demonstrated if they are well identified, shaped and then retold (Schabracq, 2007). Much of Amazon’s narrative revolve around Jeff Bezos. The company was established in the year 1994 as an online bookstore. Since its beginning, the firm has recorded a lot of diversification to encompass a plethora of commodities and products. Besides, Jeff Bezos has provided leadership to the company innovations making it play consistently the global leading role in online retailing. By the year 2005, Amazon had already secured a market comprising of 49 million users (Stone, 2013). Amazon story also includes strategic alliances with producers of digital and electronic products. The alliances enable the company to access diverse products for its insatiable market. The tremendous growth of Amazon has influenced its decision to establishing websites for different countries such as US and UK (Hill, 2014). Other aspects of amazon’s narrative include strong leadership, teamwork, and customer orientation. Place or geographical location. Place or geographical location pf the company makes an important aspect of the company’s culture (Woodside, 2010). It creates a conducive environment for work and human interactions, which is important in shaping the corporate culture. The difference in the places is one of the factors that create cultural variations of companies located in different countries (Martin, 2002). If the geographical location of a firm is made of a cultural system that corroborates its culture it may end up creating a strong culture and vice versa. Aesthetic design, architecture, and geography are important factors of the culture because they influence peoples’ behaviours and values at the workplace. Geographical locations of a company can be physical or virtue and determine the clustering of firms in specific areas of business. Amazon occupies the virtue places online through various websites for different global regions (Stone, 2013). In the UK, Amazon UK occupies space. In that website, the products featured complement the UK populace as well as the EU region. Amazon also has several other websites for various regions allowing it to align its internal culture with the surrounding social cultures (Tellis, 2012). The online location of Amazon stands out because it is the leader and premier in the e-commerce platforms. How amazon’s culture helps or hinders the organisation’s performance. Organizational culture and facilitate or deter the performance of the organization. The positive impacts of the organizational culture include high levels of motivation among the workers, increase in profits, workforce retention and increase in market share, amongst others. On the other hand, the negative impacts of organizational culture include a general mal-functional business. The influence of the culture of Amazon can be examined through consideration of the components of the company’s culture. Impacts of Amazon’s vision on the company’s performance. Amazon’s vision is oriented towards owning online shopping, providing an infinite range of selection, lowest as well as prompt delivery. Amazon’s vision benefits the performance of the company through different ways. One of the benefits is that it creates positive public relations for the company. Its vision to have drones-centred delivery systems creates a public perception that Amazon is adaptable and can use the most effective means of transport to take the products to the customers (Fisk, 2010). Besides, the vision statement of Amazon helps increase the sales. Its consideration of the use of drones for delivery allows the holidaymakers consider buying the Amazon’s products because the remoteness does not hinder access to the company’s product. Besides, its ability to deliver the products to a wide geographical area makes it the preferred source of various products by the holiday planners (Stone, 2013). The vision statement of Amazon also makes it possible to have improvements in the stock performance. The inclusion of drones in the delivery of Amazon’s product, and the increased consideration of continuous price reduction creates a market for the company as well as hope for high stock turnover rate. The clear vision of the company also improves the morale of the workforce (Lewis & Dart, 2010). It also improves the loyalty of the company’s human resource. Furthermore, the company’s vision of using the most innovative technologies to serve the customers puts competitive pressure on its partners. An example is an instance where Amazon announced its endeavours to use drones, prompting UPS to develop an interest in the same. Impacts of Amazon’s values on the company’s performance. Amazon Inc. is an institution that values customers and innovation. Its value system has a characteristic high regard for customers and innovation. These aspects of the organizational culture have had various impacts on the performance of the company. High value for customers in Amazon impacts the performance of Amazon in several diverse ways. One impact is that it has resulted in the increase of the company’s customer base and hence the market share. Over all the years of the Amazon’s business, it worked to increase its market share while as well as retaining the existing ones (Stone, 2013). The company developed customer relations policies to make it the most customer-centred e-retail entity on the web. The customer-centred culture of Amazon has paid off through an ever-increasing customer base. Amazon holds the largest e-retail market share in the US, UK, and Canada. On the downside, Amazon has severally suffered financial losses because of its high value of customers. The company has a tendency of selling the products cheaply to attract and retain customers with a long-term goal of benefiting from a large market share. In that perspective, Amazon’s high value for the customers increases its risk of losses in the short run. The high value of innovation is the aspect that makes Amazon thrive in the e-retail market as a leader. It is through innovative strategies that the company has developed a diverse range of products for the offer to the diverse online consumers. Innovation has also allowed the company to establish strategic alliances with various providers of digital and electronic products to help it access various markets. Besides, Amazon is based on innovation as the premier global e-retailer. Impacts of Amazon’s organizational practices on the company’s performance. One of the most noticeable practices of Amazon is teamwork. The workforce is divided into small teams for specific tasks. Teamwork allows the company to accomplish its objectives in developing innovative products and services (Stone, 2013). Besides, the diversified nature of a team makes it possible for Amazon to have access to a variety of ideas from internal sources. Another aspect of organizational practices that influence the performance of Amazon is customer service. Amazon’s level of customer service is a uniquely excellent case. Great customer service practices at Amazon has been one of the driving factors of customer retention. On the other hand, innovative practices have led to the development of unique services, like Amazon Kindle, which ten to conquer the market upon their launch. Impacts of place, people, and narrative on Amazon’s performance. Amazon leads the retail business online. Its regional websites are tailored to provide the surrounding population with specific products. The largest Amazon’s web platform is based in the US (Amazon.com). This website provides the access to the largest of Amazon’s customer segments. The UK website makes the second leading website for Amazon in terms of customer base. The websites serve as the interaction points for that company and the customers. Amazon also has physical offices where goods are stored, and their delivery planned. Warehouses provide the storage facilities of the stock for prompt delivery after the customer requests. On the other hand, people are the Amazon’s cultural aspect that provides the cornerstone of its success. Jeff Bezos has continuously provided organizational leadership from its inception. Within the company’s organizational structure are important nodes that provide expertise in planning and execution of goals for the company (Stone, 2013). The important sections of Amazon’s organizational structure include finance, customer service and technology, each of which is led by experienced experts to support the company’s endeavours. Moreover, the narrative primarily affect the morale of the workforce by motivating them. The aspect of the company’s premiership, as well as its leadership in e-retail, contributes to the staff motivation leading to better performance. Amazon’s is a rich culture of professional business that is highly customer-centred. References. Aspray, W., & Ceruzzi, P. E. (2008). The Internet and American business. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Pres Alvesson, M. (2002). Understanding organizational culture. London: SAGE. Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2008). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. New York: Routledge. Driskill, G. W., & Brenton, A. L. (2005). Organizational culture in action: A cultural analysis workbook. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage Publications. Everson, C., Pardey, D., & Institute of Leadership & Management (Great Britain). (2003). Organizational culture and context. Oxford: Pergamon Flexible Learning. Fisk, P. (2010). People, planet, profit: How to embrace sustainability for innovation and business growth. London: Kogan Page. 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