Analyzing the Amazon Case

Amazon was incorporated in the year 1996 and has grown to become the most valuable retailer, surpassing, Walmart, in the United States with a $250 billion worth of market valuation. Amazon offers a wide range of products and services by means of its websites. In particular, Amazon offers its own products together with third-party products in different categories by means of mobile applications and websites as well as retail websites. Regardless of its incessant growth and advancement in the industry, in recent periods, the company has been faced with numerous complaints and negative perspectives, regarding the management practices being employed within the company. This paper will analyze some of the effective and ineffective management practices at Amazon and thereafter offer some recommendations to these practices.

Disdain for Employee Work-Life Balance

One of the ineffective management practices is the lack of a proper work-life balance for the employees at Amazon. As pointed out in the article by Kantor and Streitfeld (2015), a number of former Amazonians proclaimed that fostering managers or comparatively slow departments prevented them from unsurmountable stresses, but several others asserted that the corporate culture invigorated them to obliterate work-life confines. For example, employees time and again devote hours working from home at nights as well as during the weekend. At times, they could be obligated to be present at conference calls during holiday periods, such as Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving. Regardless of this, they would still be criticized by their managers with regard to having poor internet connection during their holidays (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015).

Ability and Ranking

One other poor element of management practice in Amazon is the system of ranking that is bigoted. The company undertakes organizational level reviews every year and in these assessments, managers talk over and ascertain the rankings of the subordinates. The appraisals start by deliberating on personnel in the lower levels in the company of managers who have higher rankings. As presented in the article, team leaders pronounced preparing for the appraisals as getting ready for a court case, far-reaching with paper trails to protect unjust allegations or implicate members of opposing groups, or detecting individuals to sacrifice in order to protect more treasured players (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015).

Use of Motivation as Organizational Behavior

Amazon utilizes motivation as an organizational behavior and as an incentive and inducement to enhance the performance levels of the personnel. The company makes use of an approach referred to as stack ranking in its management strategies. This technique is essentially utilized by Amazon to sort the poor and lazy workers from the effective and hardworking employees. The company employs this method in terms of grading its employees for the reason that the management of Amazon still requires to come up with ways to impartially and equitably assess its employees and have a foundation for compensating them. The downside to this management practice is that the company ends up getting rid of competent and proficient employees (Kantor and Streitfeld, 2015).

Organizational Commitment and Job Satisfaction

There are a number of effective practices undertaken by Amazon. The company boosts the motivation levels and increases job satisfaction of the employees by offering them the company's stock options. It is considered that Amazonians own about 10% of the company's shares. In doing so, the company enhances motivation, job satisfaction and also increases organizational commitment. This is owing to the fact that the employees gain a sense of ownership in the company, thereby giving them an incentive to dedicate themselves much more and improve their performance. This approach makes certain the employees distinguish exactly what and why they work hard for. It warrants that the employees recognize that the corporation they toil for is partially theirs (Jones and George, 2008).

Solutions and Recommendations