Amazon's Culture: A Case Study

Amazon’s culture is based on employees’ competiveness, hard work and innovation. This corporate culture however brings a really stressful environment among the organization. For the past years, the company lessened the impact of a negative culture whereas the financial reports as well as the innovation were reported as the most important things. Nevertheless, organizational culture is nowadays becoming really important. It was for example seen in the Harvard Business Review when the CEO of Amazon went from one of the top ranked CEO in 2014 to the 87th position in only twelve months. One of the main reason of that is that would be that (they? Who?) are not just looking at the financial success, but also at the social responsibility criteria.

For example, if all the employees of Amazon of always trying to find the mistakes that their peers are doing to report them to their superior and were working together instead, they could put all this unnecessary energy in a focus group to find innovative ideas and to help each others. This type of positive climate could help people staying in the company and not leaving after few months, because the stress encounter at work is too high. The article cited that Amazon had the second-highest turnover among the Fortune 500 companies, with a median tenure of one year, which is really low. [2] The espoused values of the Amazon’s culture are “work hard, have fun and create history”, but the enacted values just seemed to be hard work and success. The Amazon culture can be described as an outcome orientation organization with managers asking for results without excuses. The company also promote aggressiveness among employees and because of that, the employees consider each other as competition and not as a team. Since the social context is becoming really important, Amazon is forced to change their corporate culture. Their culture had brought a lot of success to the company, but it is now however time to change towards a positive environment and a positive culture that

It would be a great challenge for the company because the culture represents the established mind-set of all the employees and managers of the organization, it would require a lengthy process that would take years of reorganization. [1] Amazon is a gigantic organization with a strong culture, so the only way to change their corporate culture would be to require a dramatic crisis or a huge turnover in leadership. We do not wish a dramatic crisis to Amazon, so the turnover would be a better option. For this to work, all top management of the organization would have to be replace by a new team of leader who would promote a positive organization culture based on the employee’s strength, growth and individuality. They should also reward more often their employees instead of punishing them. Moreover, the managers should not reprimand the creativity of their employees by imposing them tremendous amount of paper work every time they want to present a new idea. In order, to help your employees to bring new ideas, you have to instore a creative environment where the employees will not be discouraged by the work they have to do just to present a new algorithm for example. The employees should also see the action of the top management as an example of good behaviour. [1] The only way that this change would