Leadership Styles in Business: Amazon Case Study Analysis

This report delves into the leadership styles employed by Amazon, examining the autocratic, transformational, and bureaucratic approaches. The analysis highlights how Amazon utilizes these styles, with specific examples of their application within the organization. The report identifies that Amazon has utilized autocratic leadership, especially in situations requiring tight control, while also incorporating elements of transformational leadership to inspire employees. Additionally, the report acknowledges the presence of bureaucratic elements, focusing on the importance of rules and procedures. The report also discusses the impact of leadership styles on organizational success, emphasizing the dynamic nature of the business environment and the need for leaders to adapt their styles to different situations. The influence of Jeff Bezos' leadership is also discussed, especially in the context of the transformational approach. The report concludes by providing references to support the analysis.

RUNNING HEAD: Leadership in business 0
Amazon
Leadership in business

Leadership in business 1
Leadership style depending on history, culture, geographic life and conditions
Autocratic Leadership style
The autocratic leadership style is used by Amazon. It is a classical approach. This leadership
style has to do with control and how much control a leader should give to others. In this
leadership style the authority have control over decision making (Anderson & Sun, 2017). It
is used by Amazon in the situations when the control is necessary or where is little margin.
Autocratic leadership is best suitable for the manufacturing organisations like Amazon. The
group members are hardly trusted with decisions and important tasks.
Transformational leadership
The transformational leaders inspires it’s followers by using beliefs and moral of colleagues
for the motivation to accomplish tasks. In this style of leadership the leader and followers
raise each other to motivate and accomplish tasks. It helps in achieving higher level of
achievement and morale. Such leadership creates sense of purpose and meaning in the
projects of Amazon. The transformational model is a model of integrity and fairness. He sets
clear goals and higher expectations. The leader provides support and recognition and
encourages others. It creates positive and valuable change in the followers aiming to develop
followers into leaders (Yıldız, Baştürk & Boz, 2014).
Bureaucratic style
The bureaucratic leader sets the rules and makes it compulsory to follow by followers.
Amazon has an independent concept where followers keep distance from employees. The
leaders tend to foster employees and accept mistakes. The bureaucratic leader maintains
professional relationships. It is focused on rules and procedures to manage team and
procedures at company (Yahaya & Ebrahim, 2016). The bureaucratic leader is much
organised and ensures that all steps have been followed prior sending to it. This kind of
leadership has no space to explore new ideas for solving problems. It tries to bring control
and clarity to the situations.
Types of leadership/management styles determine who will ‘follow and how’
Leadership is an instrumental approach which plays vital role in organizational success as
well as in failure. According to certain philosophers and business experts, it has been

Leadership in business 2
evaluated that leadership and management, both are two crucial factors for an organizational
success. These two approaches acts as the two sides of a coin and both have a significant role
in managing human resources and directing them towards one direction through which
organizational performance could be enhanced. While determining the impact of leadership
impact over teams and over whole organization, it has been evaluated that leadership needs
are situational. This determines that both leadership as well as management styles cannot be
the same for all situations (Arnold, Connelly, Walsh & Martin Ginis, 2015). Business
environment is considered as dynamic in nature, thus, same type of situation never occurs and
in order to face unique and different types of situations, it is necessary for the leaders as well
as for managers to adopt effective style so that situations could be faced as well as challenged
with the motive of originating positive outcomes. In relation with Amazon, leadership styles
practiced at workplace by one of the great leader of this era is transformational leadership
style (Chang, Chen & Chiou, 2015). Initially, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon Inc. was not
bothered about its employees and this resulted in certain losses through which organization
was not able to perform as per expectations.
Leadership styles mainly are of three types i.e. autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire.
Autocratic leadership styled leaders are known as single decision makers and in the initial
period, Jeff Bezos was also following autocratic type of leadership style. In this leadership
style, employees’ consent is not bothered and they are not involved by the management in
relation with the decision making and other processes. In traditional times, this approach was
meant to be more successful than approaches of contemporary business environment
(Swanson & Frederick, 2016).

Leadership in business 3
References
Anderson, M.H. and Sun, P.Y., 2017. Reviewing leadership styles: Overlaps and the need for
a new ‘full‐range’theory. International Journal of Management Reviews, 19(1), pp.76-96.
Arnold, K.A., Connelly, C.E., Walsh, M.M. and Martin Ginis, K.A., 2015. Leadership styles,
emotion regulation, and burnout. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 20(4), p.481.
Chang, T.Z., Chen, S.J. and Chiou, J.S., 2015. Management leadership behavior and market
orientation: The relationship and their effects on organization effectiveness and business
performance. In Marketing, Technology and Customer Commitment in the New Economy (pp.
276-281). Springer, Cham.
Swanson, D.L. and Frederick, W.C., 2016. Denial and leadership in business ethics
education. Business ethics: New challenges for business schools and corporate leaders,
pp.222-240.
Yahaya, R. and Ebrahim, F., 2016. Leadership styles and organizational commitment:
literature review. Journal of Management Development, 35(2), pp.190-216.
Yıldız, S., Baştürk, F. and Boz, İ.T., 2014. The effect of leadership and innovativeness on
business performance. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 150, pp.785-793.