Amazon’s Organizational Structure

The Amazon is identified as the world’s largest online retailer and a conspicuous cloud service provider. Amazon strives to do big, innovative and ground-breaking things which are not easy. It offers the brand of an exciting company to work for but recently it is labeled as a ‘bruising workplace’.  The organizational practices are the practices and actions of the employees conducted within the culture of the organization. The organizational practices comprise the organizational structure and organizational culture (Strati, 2017). The organizational structure defines how definite activities can be directed in order to achieve the goals of an organization. Such activities comprise the rules, roles, and responsibilities. It also includes how information flows from level to level within the organization. Amazon follows hierarchical organizational structure. It incorporates many small teams which are specialized in dealing with various aspects of the business. The senior management of the company comprises two CEOs, three senior vice presidents, and a worldwide controller (Rizzolatti, Cattaneo, Fabbri-Destro and Rozzi, 2014).

The strategic responsibilities of the CEOs in the Amazon are to identify the right market for the business. Their responsibility is also to ensure effective utilization of the resources within the organization. it is also the responsibility of the CEOs to optimize various processes. They head the executive committee and arranges meeting at constant intervals to discuss and resolve various business issues. The CEOs take all the necessary actions in order to meet the requirements of the employees, shareholders, customers and the communities. They are liable to keep track of the financial market. They even develop and implement strategies based on the reports of the financial analysis. Whereas the directors manage the roles linked to the development of financial statements and government issues. The workers at Amazon are stimulated to represent ideas in the meetings and held to the standards which are swanked unreasonably high. The organizational structure at Amazon has limited flexibility and responsiveness. The dominance of the global functions reduces the capacity of the company to respond to issues and problems faced in the e-commerce business. There is a lack of flexibility in increasing empowerment.  The colleagues are guided by the internal phone directory and are taught to send secret feedback to another’s bosses. As per the employees, it is used to disrupt others.  It creates inflexibility and complaining about the minor tasks. The newcomers in the Amazon will not be there in a few years (Witt, et. al. 2017). The winners of company dream up innovation and roll out quarter-billion customers and ensue small fortunes in elevated stock.  As per the director of the human resources of the company, losers leave or fired in annual cullings of the staff. The workers who agonized from cancer, miscarriages, and other personal crises confronted that they had been assessed unethically rather than time to recover. The criticism is favored in the Amazon over harmony. A painful feedback is delivered to the colleagues before agreeing on a decision. The employees also suffer from poor working conditions. The unhappy employees are bad for the efficiency and this dispute has reached outside workplace (Nickson, Warhurst and Witz, 2017). The poor organizational structure creates problem to the company in being competitive at work place.

Amazon tests delivery by drone and methods to replenish toilet paper at the impulse of a bathroom switch. It is a little experiment to push white-collar works and redraw the boundaries which are acceptable. The company is run by many of the popular management bromides. It is really challenging for the company when it does something really big, innovative and the groundbreaking things. Amazon is stronger in extracting most from employees. Its swelling campus is capable of transforming ten thousand new workers to sell everything to everyone everywhere (Mishra, Boynton and Mishra, 2014).

There is also an unfair system of ranking in the Amazon. The managers are required to deliberate and determine the ranking of the subordinates.  The low-level employees are reviewed in the front of high-level managers. The company even adopted the practice of stack ranking. It causes managers to fire valuable talents to meet a quota. The company keeps offering a combination of incredible opportunities and compensation. This effort is like paining for gold to the employees (Zyskowski, Morris, Bigham, Gray and Kane, 2015).

The organizational cultures are the values and behaviors which contribute to the unique social and psychological environment. It influences the way people interact. The business culture at Amazon guides to the employees, work and the customer. The organization culture at Amazon enables business capacity to respond to the demand of the e-commerce market. The organizational culture is a critical factor in the success of the online retail business. The company is known for its corporate culture which pushes its employees to discover ideas and take risks. The culture is responsible for seeking opportunities to offer efficient online retail business. The company even highlights the centricity of customers. The company strengthens employees’ focus on the customer’s needs and demands. Amazon even strives to determine trends and changes in the preference of the consumers. The traditions and values set by the company influence the employee’s behavior (Maslach and Leiter, 2016).

The staff of the Amazon such as leadership members, human resources executives, marketers, engineers, retail specialists who work on the projects is under pressure and sometimes punished for the power to create. As some employees of the Amazon confronted that they were prospered specifically because it pushed them in the past what they thought were their limits. The employees were encouraged by thinking big and knowing that they have not spoiled the surface on what’s out there to invest. Some other employees also defied that they learned in brief and it helped in their careers later. Some other also realized later that they had become habituated to the company’s way of working (Burke, 2017).

Organizational Culture at Amazon

The company is even keeping up with the competition and helps old-line business in order to become responsive to change. Amazon believes in infusing with transparency and precision about the employees who are really achieving and who are not. The employees of the company are often designated as athletes for the endurance, performance, and speed which can be measured. The employees can work hard, long or smart. But they cannot choose two out of three at Amazon.com. It is not the priority of the company to offer any pretense which caters to employees. It is just compensation which is considered competitive as the successful managers can collect an extra salary (Dwivedi, et. al. 2015). But the employees are anticipated to hold prudence and cell phones and travel expenses are often not paid by the company. The focus is being made persistently to please customers. Along with this, the members at Amazon are educated to ‘disagree and commit’ to split into the colleague ideas with feedback. The staff is also discouraged due to lack of praise. The company have never done good enough. The employees cannot even tolerate the hostile language used in the meetings.

The system at company strengthens others to motivate and discipline the marketers, engineers and finance specialists. The constant feedback on the performance and the competition among staff misses a potential problem and race to answer an email before anyone else. Some employees even opposed that they were protected from the pressure caused by the bosses and worked in the relatively slow divisions. However some other said that the culture encouraged their willingness to corrode work-life boundaries and criticize themselves for the shortcomings. The people became practically combust (Anderson, 2016). The organizational culture even imposes a strain on the human resources in pushing employees to take a bold and non-conventional approach in doing their jobs. Amazon has a culture of working incredibly hard. It is used to describe the standards and expectations of the company. The junior employees have a lot of responsibility which even reveals the punishing culture. The employees are even often found upset as they have to compete with each other. The team members are ranked each other and it leads to the competitive atmosphere. It creates an uncomfortable working environment as the negative feedbacks can be send to the peer’s bosses. The company do not give time employees to recover who are suffering from cancer or like major disease and the miss happenings (Hatch, 2018). They found a company so persistent that they could not pause. The intense work environment creates concern for the place to work. The employees have to give up feel-good aspects in order to be innovative, competitive and winning. The corporate culture here is enduring, stable and hard to change. Pushing employees with the impossible standards may seem easy but replacing people is not easy at all. It is also observed that most employees cannot handle negative and suspicious culture (Grof and Grof, 2017).

Amazon can establish higher flexibility and responsiveness in increasing empowerment. The company is even moving through a lot of people to identify and retain talent. Amazon can enhance its organizational culture and structure by offering a combination of incredible opportunities and compensation.

References

Anderson, D.L., 2016. Organization development: The process of leading organizational change. Sage Publications.

Burke, W.W., 2017. Organization change: Theory and practice. Sage Publications.

Dwivedi, Y.K., Wastell, D., Laumer, S., Henriksen, H.Z., Myers, M.D., Bunker, D., Elbanna, A., Ravishankar, M.N. and Srivastava, S.C., 2015. Research on information systems failures and successes: Status update and future directions. Information Systems Frontiers, 17(1), pp.143-157.

Grof, C. and Grof, S., 2017. Spiritual emergency: The understanding and treatment of transpersonal crises. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 36(2), p.5.

Hatch, M. J. (2018). Organization theory: Modern, symbolic, and postmodern perspectives. Oxford university press.

Maslach, C. and Leiter, M.P., 2016. Understanding the burnout experience: recent research and its implications for psychiatry. World Psychiatry, 15(2), pp.103-111.

Mishra, K., Boynton, L. and Mishra, A., 2014. Driving employee engagement: The expanded role of internal communications. International Journal of Business Communication, 51(2), pp.183-202.

Nickson, D., Warhurst, C. and Witz, A., 2017. The labour of aesthetics and the aesthetics of organization. In The Aesthetic Turn in Management (pp. 89-110). Routledge.

Rizzolatti, G., Cattaneo, L., Fabbri-Destro, M. and Rozzi, S., 2014. Cortical mechanisms underlying the organization of goal-directed actions and mirror neuron-based action understanding. Physiological reviews, 94(2), pp.655-706.

Strati, A., 2017. Aesthetic understanding of organizational life. In The Aesthetic Turn in Management (pp. 3-16). Routledge.

Witt, S., Rohenkohl, A., Bullinger, M., Sommer, R., Kahrs, S., Klingebiel, K.H., Klingebiel, R. and Quitmann, J., 2017. Understanding, Assessing and Improving Health-Related Quality of Life of Young People with Achondroplasia-A Collaboration between a Patient Organization and Academic Medicine. Pediatric endocrinology reviews: PER, 15(Suppl 1), pp.109-118.

Zyskowski, K., Morris, M.R., Bigham, J.P., Gray, M.L. and Kane, S.K., 2015, February. Accessible crowdwork?: Understanding the value in and challenge of microtask employment for people with disabilities. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (pp. 1682-1693). ACM.