Jeff Bezos Case Study

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with roles that require the leader to be hands on with the followers. The coaching style helps those who are in need of both direction and motivation. The leader helps by being directive but also offers the support needed by the employees. This role works well in internships where the follower is both a student and a worker. The third style is supportive. The supportive leadership style involves helping the follower on a more personal level. This includes helping them keep their morale high, making sure that they are okay and know that the leader cares for them. The last main leadership style is delegating. The delegating style allows a follower that is well seasoned to take the spotlight by leaving the forum open. In this event, the follower does not need very much direction or motivation because they are already self-starters/ motivators and experienced.

Leadership Style of the Leader

While the leadership style of Jeff Bezos does encompass a few of the main leadership styles, the one that most describes his style is Transformational. Amazon is a company that is tremendous in size and Bezos wants everything to run exactly to his liking. However, Bezos still finds a way to be innovative with old practices. For example, Bezos has what he refers to as the two-pizza rule. He feels as though two pizzas should be able to feed any given team. This means that he likes his teams to be small. The reason given for this is that too many people with ideas can create chaos, which is true in many cases. Instead, Bezos’ recipe for success in teamwork is delegating people that he feels are key players to act as leaders in the small groups so that they can be lead to success through innovation. Bezos, an avid micromanager, believes that these smaller groups can pump out better ideas because there are fewer conflicts in smaller groups. He has always been a leader filled with creativity and expects the same from the future leaders of his company. With this said, he implements his own spin on this leadership style as mentioned above, not only to yield great results, but to also put his employees in a position to think outside the box, which is exactly what makes Bezos a great innovator. He is always looking for ways to think out of the box and so far into the future that his company’s competitors are not able to keep up with his pace. Just last year Amazon bypassed Wal-Mart as the world’s largest retailer and this can more than likely be attributed to his leadership style and the fact that he is always thinking and working towards his long term goals for his company. According to MarketWatch.com, Amazon.com is currently worth $559.43 a share and last year the company made 107.01B in sales and revenue, bringing Amazon to the forefront of its competitors like Walmart. With that said Jeff Bezos certainly sets the pace and ensures that Amazon is always winning the race.

Leadership Style and Organizational Goals

Jeff Bezos is very goal oriented when it comes to his company, Amazon and getting the results that he desires at any cost. Jeff Bezos’ goals and the goals of Amazon.com are both compatible. This is because he is the person setting all of the organizational goals. Amazon’s goal is to be “committed to sell more items at a lower cost, rather than fewer items at a higher cost, while at the same time trying to cut operating costs” (James, 2009). While this is exactly what Bezos wants, he also wants to spend the least amount of funds as possible on employees. Therefore, workers at Amazon.com will find that they do not have free drinks and food, they have minimalist desks and office supplies, and the employees receive rewards in the form of stock options and not with cash. There are no incompatibilities with the alignment of Bezos’ goals and the organizations’ goals; however, there are some weaknesses considered in Bezos’ leadership practices. In the past I have been interested in working for Amazon so having done some research myself, I quickly learned that Amazon.com was not the place for me. This is because of Bezos’ leadership style. Being extreme, Bezos only worries about the numbers and productivity. He is hardly concerned with the employees and the large workloads given on a day-to-day basis. While his practices and methods do work for the organization, it does not work very well for the workers, who often complain about this. Another one of his goals is to ensure that the customer is always happy and so the customer is the only population that takes precedence in his meetings. I believe that if you take care of your employees then they will take care of you. Bezos’ can attain even better results if he stopped and took some time to show his employees that he is there for them and that he doesn’t expect them to be robots. If Jeff Bezos’ could find the middle ground and maintain a balance then Amazon.com would be a remarkable organization to be associated with as a worker.

Recommendations

Piggybacking off the aforementioned, Jeff Bezos would do well if he could balance out his leadership style. Bezos’ leadership style plus strong determination for success, being innovative and taking risks coupled with servant leadership would be a recipe for success, not only for his company, but for his employees as well. The employees do not make very much working at Amazon because of Bezos trying to spend the least that he can on employees so it would help tremendously for them to have someone at the top, a boss who cares for them. While Bezos does display transformational leadership, he is also an elitist and antidemocratic, a couple of the main criticisms of transformational leadership (p. 179). Bezos’ main concern is having the largest e-commerce site in the world, which he does; however, there is a severe lack of democracy. This leads me back to servant leadership. By implementing servant leadership while keeping the bigger goal of productivity in mind, and encouraging his managers to do the same, Bezos’ followers or employees would be more encouraged to maintain longevity with the company and grow into Amazon’s future leaders.

Chapter 4

Necessary Conditions for Effective Delegation

The appropriate conditions necessary for effective delegation are dependent upon the development levels of the followers in relation to the task, goal, or job requirements. There are four levels; D1, D2, D3, and D4 respectively. D1 represents low competence and high commitment. At this level, the followers are not very competent, or very familiar with what the tasks are and how to handle them. However, they are very committed and motivated to learn so that they may achieve the goal. D2 is low to some competence and low commitment. The