SHR079-6 Leading People in Creative Teams Assignment Sample
Introduction
Analysing organisational culture and existing management approaches of a firm helps a firm to develop specific approaches that help in improving organisational growth and performance. Bringing changes in organisational culture assists in uplifting employee motivation, as based on a good organisational environment employees feel motivated to carry out their best performance. Leadership style also has a specific impact on organisational growth and development. Leader of a firm is responsible to bring sufficient changes within the business organisation. In this scenario, multinational company Amazon’s organisational culture and its management approaches has been discussed in this context. Amazon provides online services and products to consumers across this globe. Highlighting issues within Amazon’s culture has helped to bring necessary modifications within the business environment by proposing required methods.SHR079-6 Leading People in Creative Teams Assignment Sample
1) Discussion on existing culture of Amazon
Amazon’s culture is described as “break-neck paced” and its culture is notoriously cost conscious. Amazon has built up an organisational culture that has an immense performance pressure as this firm tends to set unrealistic goals and standards for its employees (Dudovskiy, 2022). Amazon’s organisational setup and work culture has been fiercely criticised in a New York Times article. Majority of the criticism is showered on Amazon because of its gigantic ideas and standards that are unachievable. Amazon has built up targets for its employees that are completely insane to attain. These insane and unrealistic ideas that are set up by Amazon breeds an unhealthy competition culture within an organisation. The New York Times Article has massively criticised the unrealistic performance standards that are set up for employees. It is witnessed that Amazon always puts immense pressure on employees and pushes them to attain those unrealistic goals.
Amazon has a bruising organisational culture as stated by various critics. This is an outdated organisational culture as currently most of the organisation’s culture is much more encouraging and nurturing. Amazon lacks a nurturing nature and it does not encourage any employees to provide their best performance. As stated by Alimahomed-Wilson and Reese (2021), providing a nurturing environment assists in better employee performance. A nurturing environment provides mental peace to employees. This mental peace allows employees of a firm to provide better work performance. Amazon lacks in having a nurturing environment thus this firm is unable to provide mental peace to employees. Amazon has a corporate culture that provides both emotional and sometimes physical pressure on employees. Only employees that have the capability to handle immense work pressure and fast paced environment can handle the organisational culture of Amazon.
Amazon has always tried to become customer centric, however becoming extreme customer centric have allowed Amazon to gain customer satisfaction but this creates issues for employees. It creates a bad work culture that disrupts the balance of work and life of employees. As stated by Weerts et al. (2018), extreme customer centric organisational culture pushes employees to become active for work late at night so that they can reply to customer issues. This creates disruption in working hours for employees. Thus, Amazon does not consist of an exact working hour due to its improper organisational culture. Amazon’s organisational set up is not advanced and it has an organisational culture that assists risks, other activities like start-up companies. Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos has still not brought any changes in organisational culture for handling risks and issues within the organisation accurately. Thus, necessary actions must be taken so that organisational culture can be modified for providing a better workplace environment.
2) Influence of leadership style on existing culture of Amazon
Leadership style of Amazon has an impact on the existing culture of Amazon, it is observed that Amazon has a harsh working culture. Amazon does not provide a nurturing working culture for employees that allows them to grow and develop. Amazon has followed a pragmatist leadership style within its organisation (AMAZON, 2022). Pragmatic leadership style pushes a leader to set unrealistic working standards and unapologetically expect those insane standards to be met by employees within a firm. Bezos, Amazon’s CEO has set up a servant leadership style that treats employees like servants and has placed unrealistic consumer service at the core of Amazon’s business. According to Helms et al. (2019), pragmatist leadership style in an organisation breeds an environment that does not help employees to grow and puts unrealistic pressure on employees to meet insane goals. Amazon’s organisational culture has always been criticised because of its immense pressure and unattainable standards. This pragmatic leadership style that is followed in this company has led to development of a toxic and unhealthy organisational culture.
Jeff Bezos’ incorrect leadership style has created an unhealthy work environment for employees. Pragmatist leadership style has pushed Jeff Bezos to create such inhuman pressure on employees as following this leadership style pushes a leader to keep the goals above everything. Similarly, in this scenario the leader of Amazon always puts his unrealistic goals and standards over everything and thus this justifies the problematic working culture of Amazon. In opinion of Lasted and Räisänen, (2018), pragmatist leaders treat employees like machines and servants. This justifies the scenario of Amazon, where this firm puts emotional and physical pressure on employees. Therefore, the leadership style of this firm had a huge impact on the organisational culture of Amazon.
Pragmatist leader Jeff Bezos has always been known for its extreme competitive nature; Jeff Bezos has built Amazon as a competitive company. This competitive nature of Amazon has also constructed an unhealthy organisational competition between employees. This unhealthy competition has diminished the ethical culture of Amazon. Employees, because of this competition degrade each other and have a lack of cooperation between themselves. Thus, this scenario also justifies the negative impact of leadership style on the organisational culture of Amazon. Pragmatist leadership approach of Amazon has restricted this firm to set up a nurturing and healthy competitive environment within this firm (AMAZON, 2022). Leader of Amazon being unable to set up a healthy environment, which has degraded employee satisfaction. This has also increased chances of loss of employees within the organisation.
3) Problematic management approaches in Amazon
Amazon is currently facing task management issues and a result of such issues Amazon’s performance quality has been decreasing. It has been observed that the current rate of ecommerce growth has increased massively. Amazon has lost some of its steam of growth during this ecommerce growth phase. Amazon has acquired an overall growth of 10% however, it has lost its pace of development in some segments (Gaus, 2019). Amazon has not been able to keep up with pace of growth because of its improper management approaches. Amazon’s CEO does not bring any massive modifications in its management approaches despite being such a massive company. This lack of approaches has created issues within this firm and Amazon has faced challenges to keep up with the growing ecommerce platform’s needs and requirements.
Another major challenge that Amazon has been facing is keeping up with its international performance. It has been observed that Amazon has accounted for weak returns in its international segments. Amazon has expected a growth of 15% and it has not been able to meet that growth in its international segments because of some issues in its management approaches. In opinion of Elmouatamid et al. (2019), international performance can be maintained by a firm when it is able to impose required measures to handle the entire business productively. In Amazon, improper international management approaches to handle international customer orders and demands has caused a drip in international performance of Amazon.
Amazon has secured a productive position in the market, yet its rivals like Walmart is slowly becoming stronger in the market than Amazon. It is seen that; Amazon has pulled back its promotional techniques and as a result it is impacting the place that Amazon holds in its business environment. As stated by Rubinato et al. (2019), promotions play a key role in the business environment, lack of promotional approaches leads to disruption in business. In Amazon, holding promotional techniques is considered as an improper management approach. This improper management approach is causing issues within Amazon’s performance rate as lack of promotion decreases consumer awareness about a firm thus leading to decrease in performance rate. Walmart is taking advantage of Amazon’s less activeness and is slowly taking over Amazon’s place in this business market. Hence it is important to take up necessary measures to come up with better management approaches for betterment of business position.
Amazon has also been facing issues in balancing investment money and its profits together. Amazon has recently made investments and has introduced healthcare related payments and coordination. However, due to lack of task management, it is unable to conduct the business process successfully. Similarly, due to lack of proper financial management approaches in Amazon, it is unable to keep track of its profits and impose them in its business. Thus, Amazon is finding it hard to create a proper balance between its investments and profits. Government policies have its impact on a firm (Mokeski and Sokolova, 2018). Amazon is currently finding it difficult to handle all the new changes in taxation and regulations that have been incorporated by the EU and other countries. This difficulty has been faced by Amazon because of a lack of accurate management approaches to handle taxes. Hence, to avert such a situation, necessary actions must be taken to improve business conditions.
4) Human resource management practices that can be proposed for developing better employee engagement culture
Human resource management is an effective and vital perspective within organisations for gaining a high rate of employee motivation and employee engagement. In the opinion of Haneda and Ito (2018), human resource management practices often can improve the performances of organisations with the help of innovative strategies of employee motivation and engagements. Human resource management practice often can have a major role in developing better employee engagement culture. In the case of Amazon, this company has been facing some challenges which are E-commerce challenges, issues in international businesses, high rival aggressiveness, balancing between profits and investments and dealing with Government scrutiny (GAUS, 2019). From the discussions of challenges, it can be stated that this company needs to involve some recommended strategies in human resource management practices for developing better employee engagement and motivation.
Firstly, this company needs to develop the strategy of involving proper collaboration and communication within workplace, especially in collaborative and partnership work. This can help employees in developing a high rate of stable working by increasing efficiency and productivity. As per the views of Verčič (2021), companies can maintain a healthy organisational culture by developing proper internal communication and thereby employee engagement and motivation. As a result, Amazon can use this strategy for mitigating their E-commerce related revenue growth issues by increasing supply chain management and product quality enhancements for recovering the loss of some steams. It has been evident that this company has decreased its revenue growth by 3% by generating $116.4 billion (Iyengar, 2022). It further has been found that lack of proper communication within employees and with suppliers and customers are the main reasons for the slow revenue growth of Amazon in E-commerce. Due to these, product delivery by maintaining commitment of time has not been developed. Thus, this company has reduced the customer satisfaction rate. On the other hand, proper launching of products by determining the choices of customers also often are prohibited in this company due to the conflicts and confusion of employees for ineffective communication and interactions.
Other than this, this organisation further has faced the issues regarding the maintaining balance between the profits and investments. As included by Ekster and Kolm (2021), proper investment management often is an effective factor within companies for gaining a high rate of profitability and stable cash flow within organisations. In accordance with this, this organisation can develop proper HR management practice for supervising the activities of employees for gaining a high rate of resource handling and appropriate utilisation of it. In compliance with this, it can help in increasing the budget management in a strategic way for increasing profitability with the basis of high investments. Regarding this, HR management of Amazon can use the strategy of including the advanced employee engagement tools like ProofHub and Trello for supervising the work of employees even if they are working from different working environments.
Other than this, developing proper employee engagement culture by including a learning and training environment along with offering independence to employees for working with their innovative approaches for working in an effective way. As stated by Vasanthi and Basariya (2019), learning and training environment within workplace can help employees in accelerating their ability and skills as well as innovative decision making skills, problem solving skills and technological skills. In relation to this, Amazon can be benefited by using this human resource practice in reducing aggressiveness of rival companies in the same business environment by using competitive advantages with the innovative working of employees.
Furthermore, independent working of employees can help companies in gaining a high rate of employee satisfaction which leads to the high rate of product quality and commitment meeting of employees. This can be a major competitive advantage of Amazon by involving proper implementation of employee resources.
Other than this, as this company has faced a major challenge in international business henceforth this company can include the strategy of effective interactions with customers and proper marketing developments. Firstly interaction with customers can be developed in an adequate way by engaging interactions of employees of the marketing department and customer relationship department. For developing this, this organisation can use the approach of using proper employee communication tools and standardising the strict code of conducts. Communication tools like task management, GoToMeeting and One Call Now can be used in this company. Apart from that, this company also implements new policies as well as terms and conditions for increasing the communication of these two departments’ employees. Furthermore, improvements of marketing department also can modify the purchasing rates of customers towards this organisation. As regards by Lee and Yoo (2019), effective and innovative marketing decisions can include a high rate of consumer values and their engagements. In case of this, proper supervision of marketing people and offering them in using their creativity can assist in increasing the revenue growth of Amazon which has faced a slow bit as per the context of international performances. Taking these into account, issues regarding handling the Governments’ scrutiny such as high tax values can be handled by this company by reducing employee turnovers.
5) Methods that can be used by Amazon to motivate employees for developing emotional intelligence and psychological contract
Amazon can use different employee motivation strategies which can help this company in developing stable and healthy workplace culture.
Firstly, as this company has the issue regarding provision of high working loads to employees, thus this company needs to take the strategy of provision of working loads according to their capabilities. Thus, employee retention growth can be increased in this company. Furthermore, as the majority of employees within this company have been suffering from major mental problems, this strategy can help them in leading a healthy life with a high rate of job satisfaction.
Other than this, rapid increments in salaries further can increase their psychological values and major emotional intelligence by avoiding the major working trauma and stress. It can help in reducing employee turnover by developing proper employee efficiencies and loyalty.
Apart from that, as Amazon is a multinational company thus this company can adopt the approach of developing proper code of conducts and code of ethics standard along with policies and procedures. This company has been facing the issues of cultural discrimination in a severe way (Wasserman, 2021). Therefore, this organisation can gain advantages by code of conduct and code of ethics by maintaining proper communication within employees who belong to different cultural beliefs by mitigating their discriminations. In this account, this company can gain a high rate of employee satisfaction and employee retention within the global perspectives which can reduce the internal costs by decreasing employee turnover in an effective way. In accordance with this, this company can include a high rate of effectiveness by including psychological contracts and emotional intelligence in the working environment.
From the other side, this company can include a high rate of effective performance of employees by increasing their motivation by providing a paid leave within a month and giving appraisal letters every six months. It can ensure employee retention and engagement in an effective way within the workplaces even if they are working from home and they are using a hybrid working model. Therefore, this company can gain a stable cash and workflow in the working environments within global markets. Thus this company can gain a high acceleration in profitability over the investments and developments of high revenue growth and competitive advantages.
Finally, this company can use the strategy of providing proper training and learning environment for employees so that they can face negative emotions like panic, stress and trauma in case of inability within work. From these discussions, it has been discovered that this company can arrange training on different aspects which can be needed in work on a rapid basis for ensuring their ability. On the basis of this, this company can use these employee engagement and motivation strategies for handling their psychological contracts and emotional intelligence.
Conclusion
From these discussions, “break-neck paced” and notoriously cost conscious organisational culture of Amazon has been creating barriers in meeting the business goals in an effective way. Other than this, approach of this company related to employee centric actions has a severe contribution in developing extra working loads among employees. Furthermore, working hour instability also has been observed in this company due to this. Other than this, from the discussions of employee engagement strategies, this company can use the strategy of developing proper communication within employees, rapid increments in salaries, proper training and learning environment for employees can develop stable organisational culture. Finally, provision of working loads according to their abilities and prevention of cultural discriminations can improve employee motivation.
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