Assessing the risk that Zappos will suffer from cultural narcissism and cultural decline depends on the top management team, social media, employee hiring and mirroring of cultural heritage/image. Referring to the top management team, if the previous CEO Nick Swinmurn continued to focus solely on customer service and profitability (neglecting company culture and identity), the risk of cultural narcissism would have been increased. Although, once Tony Hsieh joined the top management team, deciding to transform the company’s identity through a new culture, employee satisfaction and customer service plan, the risk was substantially reduced. Cultural narcissism can be illustrated in the top management teams if the organizational culture revolves …show more content…
One risk that could potential surface from this open concept, referring to the Organizational Identity Dynamics Model , is “organizational member infer their identity on the basis of how they express themselves to others and reflects on who they are in the shadow of their own self-expressions”. One flaw in an open culture is that the employees can become “too” involved and become only participants inside the organization, “ignor(ing) the mirroring process by not listening to external stakeholders and this leads to internally focused and self-constrained identity dynamics”. Which is heightened through the push of employed socialization, family events and constant enlargement of social …show more content…
This risk increases through hyper-responsiveness, which is constant catering to the customer’s needs and wants, while abandoning the organizational culture. Put another way, “loss of organizational culture is when processes of mirroring and impressing become all-consuming that they disassociated from the processes of reflecting”. Seen in Zappos’ CEO, “If I’m living my life through these 10 core values, it all goes towards building the Zappos brand while shaping me personally as well”.
In conclusion, Zappos has some potential to suffer from cultural narcissism and decline, although because of their constant innovation, open communication, self-reflection, core values and top management team the current risk is not