Leadership Approaches to Change in Amazon: Overcoming Barriers

This essay examines the leadership approaches necessary to manage change within Amazon, focusing on overcoming barriers to change and resistance from employees. It identifies issues such as poor communication, inappropriate management behavior, and lack of employee motivation as key challenges. The essay explores various leadership styles, including authoritative, situational, transformational, and transactional leadership, and suggests that a transformational approach would be most suitable for Amazon's turbulent environment. It emphasizes the importance of creating a shared vision, fostering strong relationships, and providing adequate training and motivation to employees to facilitate successful change implementation. The analysis draws upon leadership frameworks by Goleman, Hershey and Blanchard, and Fullan to provide a comprehensive strategy for improving Amazon's corporate culture and enhancing its change management capabilities. Desklib provides access to this and other solved assignments for students.

Running head: UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
Understanding and Leading Change in Amazon
Name of the University:
Name of the Student:
Authors Note:

1UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
Task 3: Leadership Approaches to Deal with Change in a Range
of Organisational Contexts Including the Change Required for Amazon
Introduction
Amazon is facing different change barriers that are resulting in decreased profits of the
company. The objective of the essay is to analyse the suitable leadership approaches those can be
implemented in Amazon in dealing with change taking place in the organisation focussed on
barriers to change faced by the company.
Discussion
Understanding the Required Change
It has been identified that Amazon is one of the leading global online retailers. However,
it has been confronted with different issues in relation to its supply chain management. Firstly,
the organisation does not ensure smooth flow of communication from the higher levels to the
lower levels (Al-Haddad and Kotnour 2015). Hence, the concern is directly associated with the
work culture of the organisation. Another issue confronting the organisation is the inappropriate
management behaviour that caused resentment among the staffs. More precisely, the
management has set unrealistic goals, which are almost impossible to be accomplished by the
staffs. Along with this, the staffs are facing unhealthy competition among them and this issue
needs to be addressed with effective care.
Finally, the managers lack the desired skills in Amazon in motivating their subordinates.
This has minimised the motivational level of the employees working in different departments in

2UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
Amazon (Alvesson and Sveningsson 2015). There has been absence of adequate training and
development schemes that have hindered the progress of staff growth within the organisation. As
a result, the employees of Amazon have become resistant to change and the organisation would
find it difficult to implement effective change management strategies in its supply chain
management process for enhancing its business operations (Amazon.com 2019).
Analysing Barriers and Resistance to Change
It is vital to recognise the barriers faced by Amazon long with its current culture in order
to develop a leadership approach that is not contradicting the organisational culture which can
cause increased resistance from employees (Antonakis and Day 2017). The identified barriers
faced by Amazon that needs to be addressed through suitable leadership approaches
implementation are explained below:
 Amazon has the organisational culture of ruthless working environment which is
observed to affect the communication flow among the employees regarding change. This
acts as a great barrier in successful change implementation and the lack of employee
engagement within the company’s decision making process can lead to increasing change
barrier in attaining global profit growth (Khan et al. 2018).
 Another change barrier that is observed in Amazon is inefficient management behaviour
that is not supporting change that it is planning to implement in its supply chain
management. The company has implemented unreasonably high standards and
expectation along with causing unhealthy competition among the co-workers
(Kollenscher, Popper and Ronen 2018). The company also has the culture of maintaining

3UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
overly forthright leadership that is causing in increased employee criticism to make them
formed in working for extra hours without proper compensation structure.
 Another barrier that is faced by Amazon is that the leadership followed within the
organisation is focussed in imposing change on staff without offering them right training
or motivating factors to deal with or contribute towards the change taking place in the
company (Kontoghiorghes 2016). The workplace within Amazon is dealing with
increasing workplace disputes for not considering the basic safety and skills needs of the
workers. The strict targets are forcibly imposed on the employees within any change
process and because of which the staff feel that the disciplinary points are unfair.
 There is the barrier of presence of suitable skills and knowledge those are necessary for
the employees to attain in supporting in the change process which can improve its
profitability position (Peterlin, Pearse and Dimovski 2015). It is also observed that
Amazon is dealing with challenge associated with lack of offering effective training and
the support skills that can affect the morale and confidence of employees because of
which they resist change.
Change Leadership Approaches
Leadership that gets results (Daniel Goleman’s Golf Clubs):
According to Daniel Goleman, there are six leadership styles and they include coercive,
authoritative, affiliative, democratic, pacesetting and coaching. In the case of Amazon,
authoritative leadership styles needs to be applied for dealing with the aforementioned barriers
and issues. This is because Amazon does not have sound corporate culture and clear
communication and thus, proper leadership style needs to be adopted immediately. Authoritative

4UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
leadership style would mobilise the staffs working in Amazon towards a common vision (Al-
Haddad and Kotnour 2015). The change in Amazon needs a new vision, in which the employees
have to be guided clearly. This leadership style is classified as the most strongly positive style in
minimising the resistance to change of the staffs.
Situational leadership (Hershey and Blanchard):
In this leadership style, the leader tells the employees about their roles and the ways of
performing such roles. The managers of Amazon could sell their ideas and they have to message
the staffs working in their departments to enter into the process. However, the managers have to
go back and forth with their subordinates (Al-Haddad and Kotnour 2015). Moreover, the
managers rather than providing direction have to allow their subordinates to play a crucial role in
generating ideas and undertaking decisions. Therefore, the group members have to undertake
majority of the decisions along with undertaking maximum responsibilities for the expected
outcomes. Finally, with the help of this leadership style, there would be improvement in the
corporate culture of Amazon.
Framework for leadership (Fullan):
According to this leadership style, there are five themes, which constitute of moral
purpose, understanding change, developing relationship, knowledge sharing and creation and
coherence making. It is necessary for the managers of Amazon to show determination so that the
staffs receive proper guidance and motivation to achieve a particular goal. Thus, resistance has to
be reframed in the form of potential favourable force (Al-Haddad and Kotnour 2015). Moreover,
the managers of the organisation have to maintain strong relationships with the employees, since
such relationship assists in balancing social competence and personal competence. Furthermore,

5UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
the managers are needed to share their experience that would add to the knowledge base of the
staffs working in Amazon. Finally, all the staffs working in Amazon have to accept complexities
and uncertainties while implementing the change management process.
Transformational leadership and transactional leadership:
Transformational leadership is a leadership style, which employs punishments and
rewards for motivating the staffs. On the other hand, transactional leadership is the leadership
style where the managers show charisma as well as enthusiasm for motivating staffs. In case of
Amazon, transformational leadership would be more suitable, since the corporate environment is
observed to be turbulent (Smollan 2015). This leadership style would assist in changing the
existing organisational culture and there would be more than one leader in a single department.
As a result, the staffs working in different departments are stimulated by their managers by
setting group interest as a priority.
Conclusion
It was gathered from the essay that the concern in Amazon is directly associated with the
work culture of the organisation. Another issue confronting the organisation is the inappropriate
management behaviour that caused resentment among the staffs. The managers of Amazon could
sell their ideas and they have to message the staffs working in their departments to enter into the
process. However, the managers have to go back and forth with their subordinates. In case of
Amazon, transformational leadership would be more suitable, since the corporate environment is
observed to be turbulent.

6UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
References
Al-Haddad, S. and Kotnour, T., 2015. Integrating the organizational change literature: a model
for successful change. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), pp.234-262.
Alvesson, M. and Sveningsson, S., 2015. Changing organizational culture: Cultural change
work in progress. Routledge.
Amazon.com, Inc. - IR., 2019. Annual reports, proxies and shareholder letters | Amazon.com,
Inc. - IR. [online] Available at: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/annual-reports [Accessed 21 Mar.
2019].
Antonakis, J. and Day, D.V. eds., 2017. The nature of leadership. Sage publications.
Khan, H.U.R., Ali, M., Olya, H.G., Zulqarnain, M. and Khan, Z.R., 2018. Transformational
leadership, corporate social responsibility, organizational innovation, and organizational
performance: Symmetrical and asymmetrical analytical approaches. Corporate Social
Responsibility and Environmental Management, 25(6), pp.1270-1283.
Kollenscher, E., Popper, M. and Ronen, B., 2018. Value-creating organizational
leadership. Journal of Management & Organization, 24(1), pp.19-39.
Kontoghiorghes, C., 2016. Linking high performance organizational culture and talent
management: satisfaction/motivation and organizational commitment as mediators. The
International Journal of Human Resource Management, 27(16), pp.1833-1853.

7UNDERSTANDING AND LEADING CHANGE IN AMAZON
Peterlin, J., Pearse, N.J. and Dimovski, V., 2015. Strategic Decision Making For Organizational
Sustainability: The Implications Of Servant Leadership And Sustainable Leadership
Approaches. Economic & Business Review, 17(3).
Smollan, R.K., 2015. Causes of stress before, during and after organizational change: a
qualitative study. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 28(2), pp.301-314.