How Target's CEO Inspires Teamwork At A Massive Scale

In modern day Corporate America, there are revolutionary events occurring seemingly every day. Often times businesses become too focused on earning a profit and fail to worry about ethical dilemmas that they may face in the long run. In the majority of circumstances, the main focus of corporations is customer satisfaction. One of the most important concerns an employer should have are the attitudes and behaviors of employees in the workplace. Although employee satisfaction may seem trivial in the short run, there have been several studies that conclude that perceived fairness in the workplace is an issue that needs to be addressed in order to enhance productivity and utility. Corporations have the ability to promote more ethical behavior by

Fast Company released a story in October of 2012 titled How Target’s CEO Inspires Teamwork at a Massive Scale. In the article, CEO Gregg Steinhafel frequently makes reference to collaboration and how it is key to their performance and everything Target does as a company. He makes references often about asking for opinions from everyone, and never implements anything he thinks to be unnecessary. Steinhafel preaches fairness and collaboration in every aspect of the company, and never refers to himself or the company as “I”, because he wants everyone to understand that running a large corporation is a team effort (Dishman). Although the article does not interview any employees, it can be reasonably inferred that there is a high level of perceived fairness amongst employees because of the trust senior managers have in every employee. Unfortunately, not every CEO is as ethically and morally sound as Gregg

Employees frequently let parasitism happen intentionally so they can take credit for doing work that their colleague was responsible for. An employee would do this so that he could take credit for doing the work and then he could report his colleague for not carrying his own weight. Many people are interpersonally aggressive toward one another as one of the key concepts Amazon believes in is to “disagree and commit”. Bezos preaches that employees should openly disagree with others to the point of painfulness, which drives down collaboration and makes people less comfortable contributing. Boastful behaviors happen every day, whenever someone does something they are likely to let everyone know about it and take all the credit for their team. Amazon, referring to itself as a company, brags about its standards being “unreasonably high”. Resources, in the form of young workers, are often hoarded so that some teams dramatically outperform others and can receive the new candidates they want (Kantor and Streitfeld). Amazon has a much more unethical process than Target when performing day to day