Identifying, Analyzing, and Assessing Amazon's Success

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Amazon's human relations, examining various aspects of the company's business practices. It explores Amazon's approach to workplace cultural diversity, team development, and decision-making processes. The report delves into Amazon's communication strategies, target customer segments, and team selection methods, including the "Two-Pizza Teams" concept. It also investigates the methodology behind managerial decisions and assesses Amazon's market reputation. Furthermore, the report identifies areas needing improvement, such as tax payments, warehouse wages, and the treatment of temporary workers, and offers recommendations for enhancing the organization's ethical practices. The analysis covers a brief history of Amazon, its human relationship structure, and its organizational performance, providing valuable insights into the company's operations and strategies.

Running head: HUMAN RELATIONS
Human Relations
[Identifying, Analyzing, and Assessing the Success of Amazon]
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Executive summary
The main purpose of this study was to discuss Amazon from different business. The study could
find a few important things about Amazon. Amazon uses distinct styles to manage workplace
cultural diversity, team development and decision-making. However, there are few areas as
found in this study that needs to be looked upon. These are tax payment, low warehouse wages
and exploitation of temporary workers. The paper recommends a few points of suggestions to
Amazon to improve in these identified areas.

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Table of Contents
1. A brief history of Amazon...........................................................................................................3
2. The type of human relationship structure that Amazon promotes...............................................3
3. The target customer of Amazon..................................................................................................5
4. Communication strategies of Amazon.........................................................................................6
5. Suggesting ways to improve its communication strategies.........................................................7
6. Team selection method at Amazon..............................................................................................8
7. The methodology followed to develop managerial decisions.....................................................9
8. The market reputation of Amazon.............................................................................................10
9. Summarizing the organizational performance of Amazon........................................................10
10. Recommendations to improve the organization’s practices at Amazon and showing how it
could become more ethical............................................................................................................11
References......................................................................................................................................12

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1. A brief history of Amazon
Amazon.com can be given numerous names for its excellence in a variety of forms the
world has witnessed so far. It has already set an example of an E-commerce Company that never
satisfies with the current; rather constantly seeks to enrich its users' experience by using a
relevant piece of innovation. Amazon.com is the name of a Company that manufactures eBooks.
It provides webs services to its clients. The Company has its headquarter in Seattle, Washington.
Jeff Bezos laid the foundation for the Company in 1994 (Amazon.com, 2019). Jeff Bezos
decided to sell eBooks primarily following the information he could derive from his research
work on the target market. When it started selling eBooks, Amazon was not the first Company to
do so. A Silicon Valley-based Computer Literacy was the first to sell eBooks under the format as
adopted later on by Amazon (Amazon.com, 2019). However, Amazon was distinctively different
from Computer Literacy as it committed to deliver any book to its customers living anywhere in
this world. From its very early days, Amazon was largely a Bookseller. It contended that
Amazon is not just a seller of consumer goods; rather a Company that uses emerging and
relevant technologies to enrich the consumers’ experience of online transactions. Today,
Amazon is famously known as the leading E-commerce Company in the world. According to a
study shared by Bloomberg BusinessWeek in 2018, Amazon has a 5% share of the entire US
retail spending and 43.5% share of the entire online spending (Amazon.com, 2019).
2. The type of human relationship structure that Amazon promotes
Studies suggest that human relations are the relationship between the members of an
organization. Workplace relations have a direct or indirect impact on the work performance of

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employees. Positive relations between employees will positively shape their attitude to work.
Positive workplace culture is an utter need of the operations for being able to pursue the change
process whenever required (Kurnia et al., 2015). Amazon unlike many major brands in the world
has a different approach towards cultural management. Amazon presents a perfect example of a
brand-culture fusion. Amazon effectively maintains a good integration and alignment between its
internal organizational culture and the external brand identity. Amazon fosters a performance-
driven environment where it fires up employees for not being able to contribute to its innovation
process in pursuit of continuously-improving customer experience. Amazon is purely dedicated
to enriching the experience for its customers with its disruptively innovative strategies (Holm et
al., 2017). On a broader aspect, the structure of human relationship at Amazon can be
categorized into three distinct categories. These are (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015):
 Boldness
Amazon promotes boldness at the organization-wide level. There is an encouragement for
employees to take risks like using new ideas to an extent it is related to improving its customers'
experience. Considerably, it facilitates openness towards new ideas. By promoting boldness and
driving employees to respond to it Amazon manages to identify innovative ideas and solve
problems.
 Customer-Centricity
Amazon has its vision aligned to customer-centricity. Customer-centricity is also observable in
the organizational culture of Amazon. For instance, Amazon fires its employees for being less
competent with creativity. Amazon constantly applies innovative ideas to offer enhanced service
experience to its customers. It is due to this characteristic of the organizational culture at

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Amazon that it is able to meet its customers’ needs and expectation. In spite of moving to new
marketplaces, Amazon is able to manage its effectiveness in offering excellent customer service.
 Peculiarity
Amazon prefers going against the conventions. It motivates employees for going beyond the
conventional modes of doing business. Indeed, it succeeds in encouraging employees for more
innovative and less conventional modes of doing business. Amazon believes that conventions
restrict the growing capacity of employees and so of the employer. Amazon is able to drive
employees to think out of their daily job routines.
3. The target customer of Amazon
The target customer for Amazon comprises of various groups as evidenced from its
segmentation strategy for the target market. Hence, the geographic segmentation suggests
Amazon has its customers in more than 98 countries. It has its customers both in the rural and
urban areas. The customers of Amazon range from 18 years in age to even older than that. The
demographic segmentation informs that Amazon has both males and females as its customers.
The list also includes bachelor stage young, newly married couples, single not living at home,
youngest children under six years of age, older married couples dependent on their children, the
older married couple no children living with them and so forth. The behavioral segmentation
suggests that hardcore loyals, softcore loyals, switchers, non-users, potential users, regular users,
first-time users, ex-users of a product and so forth. Amazon uses psychographic segmentation to
target all social classes, struggler, resigned, mainstreamer, aspirer, explorer and reformer (Khan
& Uwemi, 2018).

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4. Communication strategies of Amazon
Amazon, as it admits, has been a Company that regularly develops and enhances its
capability to communicate its mission and vision of doing business using emerging and relevant
technologies. The essence of communication at Amazon is, therefore, has been an exceeding
utilization of the latest technologies. Amazon uses Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence
to ensure a smooth flow of communication within and outside the Company (Hanna, 2016).
Amazon uses high-performance transaction systems. It uses object catching and complex
rendering. The list of technology does not end here but expands to the likes of workflow and
queuing systems, data analytics, business intelligence, pattern recognition, probabilistic decision
making, neural networks and various other techniques (Čiarnienė & Stankevičiūtė, 2015). To
stay close to their customers, and communicating new launches and more others Amazon uses
various conventional modes of marketing communication. Amazon does an extensive utilization
of Print and Media Advertising to communicate its message to its target customers. Amazon
does TV advertisement and spends so much on this to interact with its target customer. In print
advertising, Amazon uses magazines, newspapers, journals, billboards, print messages, cartoon
and picture characters from “Minions” movie to be used on its shopping boxes (Moon et al.,
2017). Amazon also uses Viral Marketing to make things viral such as it did for advertising its
“Prime Air” service by using a flying robot (Garner, 2018).

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5. Suggesting ways to improve their communication strategies
Amazon is the name of a brand that commits very few mistakes in regards to
communication within and outside the company. However, scopes of improvement will always
be there or else the business will be considered to have reached its maturity level. Studies
suggest that communication plays a vital role in ensuring sustained growth. If there is no
effective conversation between the employer and its target customer, there may be more
confusion than informed decision-making from customers. Hence, an effective conversation can
be established by following a few basics. These are (Starostin & CHERNOVA, 2016):
 Product Descriptions
Product’ description is a very impactful way to converse with the target market. By effectively
customizing the product descriptions an e-commerce service provider can influence the buying
behavior of the customers. For Amazon, these things are not new and it is already into it.
However, they should keep working on the product description to make it even engaging than it
currently does. It can be done with effective utilization of data analytics to customize the
description as per the individual need and demand.
 Fast Email Response
E-mails are good ways to allow customers to ask questions if they have any. By replying to the
questions and clearing their doubts on anything related to the business an e-commerce company
can effectively manage its relationship with customers. At times there may be emails reaching in
bulk and due to shortage of people taking care of such emails, there may be a delay in the
response. Therefore, it is recommended to Amazon to improve its efficiency in an email
response. If they are managing it appropriately they should make it even productive.

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6. Team selection method at Amazon
Amazon, unlike other major retailers, has a very distinct approach to team selection.
Amazon is famous for Two-Pizza Teams (Akter & Wamba, 2016). This means they can run
teams just by feeding them with a pizza for each team. Narrowly, it means that Amazon has
semi-independent teams. They behave like entrepreneurs and carry obsession for customers.
Each of the team members carries a sense of ownership. This is how Amazon drives its people to
work as per customer-centricity. The team selection method as followed at Amazon follows a
few notable techniques. One of the techniques is “Occupational Personality Questionnaire”
(Sobihah et al., 2015). Amazon does an extensive filtration of candidates at the time of an
interview. When they select people they also have their data. Amazon does closely observes
these data and utilizes their study in developing teams for services. The capabilities of
individuals are taken care of while developing the teams. Once, the selection for teams is over it
goes the same at least for two years. Since they have done a lot of filtration work in selecting
teams there are fewer chances of any performance-related challenge for two years at least. In the
case of an unexpected challenge, Amazon takes care of it through iteration (Laudon & Traver,
2016).
The teams working at Amazon are made to look different from those in other major
global companies. Amazon reduces the communications overhead as part of their team selection
and development method (Althafairi et al., 2019). Amazon does not believe in frequent meetings,
planning, testing, and launching new releases. Amazon believes that rigorous communication in
all these ways affects the independency of people. The Company believes that teams having
independent members move faster than those lacking it.
7. The methodology followed to develop managerial decisions

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Like in terms of workplace culture and team development methods Amazon is unique
again in crafting managerial decisions. The process followed to make decisions at Amazon is
very rare in existence. Unlike major companies, Amazon adopts a slow approach to make
decisions. It follows a one-size-fits-all approach to decision-making. This means they follow the
opinions common among the majority of executives in a meeting. It gives importance to its
stakeholders in giving input to decision-making. A culture of consensus-driven decision-making
is into practice at Amazon. This means all stakeholders will need to give input to decision-
making. Amazon uses the phrase "disagree and commit” to acknowledge any disagreement to a
decision in case if there is any (Farooq et al., 2019). Amazon believes that “high-velocity
decision-making” makes major companies act like smaller ones. Amazon instead of promoting
PowerPoint Presentations to start and conduct an executive meeting prefers 6 pager explanatory
narrative pitch. The meeting starts with executives reading the narratives in full silence. The
reason behind such an approach is a fact that it encourages better thought process and
understanding of what should be given importance instead of finding the interrelation between
things (Montague et al., 2016). The session becomes normal once the executives have completed
reading the narratives. They ask questions and share their opinions on the matter of discussion.
In terms of product development, the decision-making approach is also very different from many
major companies. Amazon uses “working backward” approach before launching a product. What
it does it circulates a press release indicating a finished product, and mentioning the problems the
new product addresses. If the product manager is not satisfied with the customer feedback on the
press release it does not move further with the new product (Montague et al., 2016).
8. The market reputation of Amazon

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Amazon has constantly been able to manage an excellent market reputation over the
years. It affected the business for many physical retail brands. Amazon with a whopping market
cap that is more than $867 billion competes against some of the world’s biggest companies
(Usatoday.com, 2019). It competes against media companies such as Netflix, internet search
engines like Google and on-demand transportation in the form of Uber (Usatoday.com, 2019).
One of the greatest assets for the Company has been its employees. However, it received
criticism for many wrongdoings. These are (Taylor, 2017):
 Tax Avoidance: Amazon maximizes its profitability by avoiding taxes at various levels.
Taxes are important as this help to redistribute money to some important sectors such as
education and healthcare. Low Warehouse Wages: The wages at Amazon's warehouses are very lower as compared
to other major companies like Walmart. The exploitation of Temporary Workers: Temporary workers are asked to graduate to
become a proper employee of the Company once they have been through the peak
season. However, there is no proper protocol in the company that supports the same.
9. Summarizing the organizational performance of Amazon
To summarise, it can be said that Amazon has reached massive popularity in a very short
period. The dominance of the Company is not only limited to the e-commerce sector but the
brick-and-mortar industry as well. Amazon is unique with its set of strategies for managing
workplace culture, developing teams, identifying and developing innovative ideas and making

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great decisions. It is more famously known as a Company that dares to go beyond conventional
forms of doing business.
10. Recommendations to improve the organization’s practices at Amazon and showing how
it could become more ethical
1. Better Public Policy: Better working conditions can be provided to temporary workers by
being ethically true in implementing policies about minimum wage, labor standards and
temporary workers.
2. Be a Good Tax Payer: Some customers do not blindly shop from any brand. Rather, they
give importance to those that are socially and ethically responsible organizations. Taxes
are redirected to be used in education and healthcare sectors. Hence, by being ethical in
tax payment Amazon can improve its ethical status.

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