Leadership vs. Management: Analyzing Jeff Bezos' Style at Amazon

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of Jeff Bezos' leadership style at Amazon, examining the differences between his leadership and management approaches. It explores Bezos' unique methods, including the "empty chair" tradition and a focus on customer obsession, while also discussing the positive and negative characteristics of his leadership. The report delves into the impact of his management style on Amazon's work culture, employee performance, and the company's future, including the implications of a demanding work environment and the company's response to criticisms regarding employee treatment. The analysis highlights the consequences of Bezos' leadership, both in terms of Amazon's success and the challenges it faces in maintaining a positive and sustainable work environment.

Running head: AMAZON, LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
AMAZON, LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
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Executive summary
The report analyses the leadership style of Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of the world’s
largest online retailer Amazon. The analysis aims to discuss the unique style of Bezos in building
the Amazon Empire. Some issues come up with the idea that the company does not take proper
care of its employees therefore leading them quitting the job. This issue has raised questions
about Bezos’ management style and the future of the company. The report discusses these issues
extensively.

2AMAZON, LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
Table of Contents
Introduction:....................................................................................................................................3
Leadership traits of Jeff Bezos........................................................................................................3
Bezos leader or manager:.............................................................................................................3
Positive and negative characteristics of Bezos:...........................................................................4
Future consequences of Bezos’ style:..........................................................................................6
Bezos right person for Amazon:..................................................................................................8
Conclusion:......................................................................................................................................8
References:....................................................................................................................................10

3AMAZON, LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
Introduction:
The report aims to analyze the difference between the management skills and the
leadership methods of global leading company Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos, the management
strategies of its employees and their performance as well as the challenges that the company
faces in competitive world.
As the founder chairperson of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos has been its chief executive
officer. With his dynamic vision and passion for reputation, he has built Amazon the world’s
largest Internet Sales Company. Beginning as a merchant of books on internet, has expanded to a
large variety of products as well as services like audio and video streaming. Amazon is currently
the largest provider of cloud infrastructure services (Mattone and Vaidya 2016).
The report discusses the impact of leadership and management skill of Bezos, his
characteristics effecting current position of Amazon. This report also discusses the impact of
Bezos on Amazon’s future and his success as a boss of Amazon employees.
Leadership traits of Jeff Bezos
Bezos leader or manager:
The people working in any organization may possess leadership skills and encourage
others to complete assigned task. Management is something different form leadership but a
manger must be a good leader to manipulate the employees for the sake of an organizational up
gradation (Bolman and Deal 2017). It is a vague assumption that most of the people believe that
managers are different from leaders. Therefore, the managers cannot lead his coworkers and
leaders unable to manage. The leader posses the vision of his goal but has no knowledge the

4AMAZON, LEADERSHIP VS. MANAGEMENT
possible way to reach the desired destination (Dinh 2014). Similarly, a manager without
leadership skills is unable to win trust and engagement with others therefore cannot lead the
organization to the target. Above all his actions must include innovation, manipulation and
creativity on the one hand and engagement, management on the other (Higgs and Dulewicz
2016).
Methods of Bezos:
As a leader of the company, Bezos follows some of the unique methods, which has
helped the company to reach its current position. Amazon has empty chair tradition, which
continuously reminded of the customers’ existence in the policy making of the company. The
leadership trait of Bezos includes component of emotional quotient for all sectors. To the critics
this can be proved the company’s weakness but having freedom to disagree and state opinion are
part of the company’s principles. Unlike the other successful leaders, Bezos’ active imagination
and experiment has transformed Amazon to be the world’s largest retail company. He innovates,
renovates and sometimes eliminates the whole thing to shape up any policy according to the
time’s needs.
Under the management of Jeff Bezos, the company has maintained a strict work culture
where the employees’ performances are assessed constantly. The worker must comment on one
another’s performance. The company deploys the method of ‘purposeful Darwinism’ that is to
create struggle among the staffs to uplift performance. The company’s foundation and growth
has proved that he is a leader more than a manager is.

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Positive and negative characteristics of Bezos:
According to the theory of innovative entrepreneurship, it is the high impact of the
research skill of the employees that helps the company discover new ideas and products that the
market never imagined. Manifold experiences allow people for thinking diversely and learn new
flair (Kantor and Streitfeld 2015). New skills lead to improvement of innovative capacity.
Working with diverse people and process of solving complex issues can bring a boom in
creativity as well as knowledge.
Positive characteristics:
To Jeff Bezos, experiments lead to innovation, which is the most essential part of the
company policy. Experiments continue to surprise and teach more. The more the company
experiments with its products, the more it innovates. Amazon always try to find the solutions of
the ‘what if’ questions and therefore casts a clear difference between the inventors and non-
inventors (Bao and Chang 2014).
Bezos always tried to deconstruct the conventional process of business and find the new
perspective to introduce in his business. He found the new and emerging business opportunity
provided by the internet and incorporated in his policy thus ‘the biggest bookstore of Earth’ was
founded. It is the process of triggering innovative ideas extracted from enquiry and self-
questioning. Jeff Bezos encourages his employees with the motto of focusing on process and not
on failure. Experiment with the existing products and the ideas, is the optimum way of
implementation of a scheme into reality (Cronin 2014). After Amazon stated to make profits
from bookselling, the founder took a risky decision to construct large warehouses throughout the
USA. This bet sank the stock prices initially but lifted the company to become the largest

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discount store online (Nichols and Cottrell 2014). According to Bezos, the failure can teach the
right method of experiment and show the needed modification.
Bezos points out that most of the tech companies wait for their competitors to introduce
new ideas and then try to match up with them. The policy of the owner is to listen to the
customers and solve the problems. Therefore, Amazon Web Services has been designed. The
main idea working behind it is to follow the customer’s needs in order to lead the market. It is
not about setting targets but selecting the most important things and repeats them so that people
purchase.
It the business strategy of Amazon that it uses stock options on recruitment. In order to
engage and retain the skilled and versatile workers, the company gives them stakes in the
company’s success (Miniotaitė and Bučiūnienė 2015). The CEO claims that the company has
built a right culture for the employees. The employees feel attracted and like the approaches, as
they are meaningful as well as energizing. Jeff Bezos believes that when the organization gets
larger, there is a tendency of involvement of top executives in decision-making procedures.
Amazon follows the idea of making quick decisions by high judgment groups or individuals.
Thus, these characteristics have proved to have positive effects o the company’s growth and
adverse stagnation as well as risks.
Negative characteristics:
To the critics, the CEO of Amazon does no pay heed to what others think about him.
Bezos firmly believes that if the company gives priority to the customers the stock will rise to
desired position. Amazon maniacally focuses on the customers that no other company does
(Burke 2017 ). However, this approach of Bezos has its ill effects also. In 2011, a popular

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newspaper Morning Call published a series documenting the process of treatment of the
employees by the company. This reveals that the company pushes the worker to work harder and
faster until they quit or were terminated. The documentary also describes how the workers are
bound to work in the worst possible conditions. Some of the warehouses lack proper air-
conditioning that resulted the workers fall sick. The employees are enraged with the issue of
exploitation within the largest online retail company. The New York Times investigated and
found though the white-collar employees are happy with the condition of the warehouses and
wages with stock options but somewhere feel a tremendous work pressure (Ritala, Golnam and
Wegmann 2014).
It is the Darwinian work tradition created by the founder, where no sympathy is shown to
the employees facing difficult time or serious illness. The company pays no time off in such
cases but punishes for losing focus from the work. This cutthroat work culture was built by Jeff
Bezos to prevent the company from being a sluggish bureaucracy. He wants Amazon to have the
feelings of start-up therefore has a frantic work pace and pressure intense.
Future consequences of Bezos’ style:
Positive effects: Amazon has been reveling its toughness. The founder and CEO of the
company assumes the work culture of Amazon intense and friendly but The company’s motto
reveals ‘work hard’ and Jeff Bezos often repeats these two words to keep his employees
motivated. This uncompromising attitude has played a great role in keeping a retail company
with a market capitalization of $250 billion.
The most relevant criticism for the company’s performance management is on its
structure. The system followed by Bezos is based on meritocracy. It is the ideas, which are put

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into competition and to domination of the best. This competition makes the ground for this
unhealthy workplace ambience where each has to outperform the other. Amazon’s feedback
system is created to push the limits of the employees (Holten and Brenner 2015). It is as if a
machine to propel to achieve the founder’s amplifying ambitions. To evaluate the employees’
performance, the company holds reviews on monthly or weekly basis. Each employee is
accountable for his knowledge. It is a lengthy process and exhaustive with discussion which
consumes a substantial volume of work hours (Nor house 2015). Therefore, the employees must
initiate their own feedbacks and discuss with his team for betterment of his performance without
worrying about the negative feedbacks. This will maintain the company’s transparency.
Negative effects: Now the company has been taking issues depicting that the prevailing
work culture needs to tamp down all-toughness-all-the-time attitude because it has left many
bruised workers. In a response to an article published in The New York Times, which revealed
Bezos’ hard hitting style of management, the CEO says that in present competitive tech hiring
market no company can survive in a soulless workplace where the employees work without
passion or love. He also says it is not a culture of Amazon and it is not the reality.
The article that describes the condition of the workers in the warehouses says that the
company evaluates the personal crises of the employees unfairly. The workers suffering from
cancer or miscarriage or even psychological trauma and other personal problems are severely
penanced and given lesser time to recover from the crises. To the company, the best persons are
chosen for work and such unprofessionalism should not be tolerated. However, Bezos has
disagreed with this argument completely and guarantees that the company does not tolerate this
kind of callous management styles (Johnston and Marshall 2016). ). The company maintains

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complete secrecy about the issues regarding the workplace culture they retain. It signs agreement
for not speaking to the press about the ambience of the warehouses within.
Nick Ciubotariu, an Amazon engineer in his book Linked In, has described that the
company always focuses on innovation and customers and no one is compelled to work long and
late. The company also does not cull its employees on annual basis. These points contradict
completely with many of his colleagues who confirm that the company manages out to reduce a
percentage of its workforce annually. The management practices of Amazon have created a haul
when the former and current employees have given statements on social media, various websites
to compare the strength and weaknesses of the work culture celebrated by Amazon.
Some of them the culture is highly demanding but compassionate while others have
described feeling hammered by uncompromising demands, ceaseless competition and the
company’s unreasonably high standards (Van Wart 2014). The ex-employee of Amazon working
currently working with Hewlett-Packard Software Americas has termed the company the most
toxic place to work at. It is impossible to speak about the intolerable problems to the manager as
Bezos urges in his letters to the employees because the executives are themselves facing the
same problems. The company’s principles of leadership, behavioral guidelines and most
importantly the CEO’s style has proved to be harmful for the employees (Rivet 2017).
The company’s has a feedback culture where the employee is encouraged to criticize
colleagues’ ideas and instructed to send secret feedback to their managers (Rossman 2016). This
feedback culture is claimed to be too open to abuse the coworkers and it is also used foe
weakening the work of others. The nature of the feedback culture prevailed at Amazon is harsher
than the cultures adopted at Facebook, Adobe, Google and other innovative companies.

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Discussing the issues that pose as harm in the reputation of Amazon in the market it is
clear that the main problems are centered round the management and employee satisfaction
section. The company holds the customers to be the most important but the employees of a
company are the driving force (Tourism 2014). Amazon believes in the idea of recruiting people
and makes them workaholic and finally cast them aside after they outlive their utility. The future
of the company lies on the principles that the company is following at present. It needs to take
care more of its employees and empathies with them so that no negative issue can spoil the
reputation of Amazon.
Bezos right person for Amazon:
As previously discussed various personal and characteristic traits of Jeff Bezos has built
the empire of Amazon. His ability of decision-making and vision helped the company to be the
world’s largest online retail. Over the 20 years, the company has spread throughout the world
and has transformed the concepts of retail (Renz 2016). From a balding bookseller to become
one of the richest men in the world was not easy. It is his vision to expand into various retail
categories, like food, clothes and electrical (Kantor and Streitfeld 2015). It has recently
developed a cloud computing service, own TV shows and an electronic personal assistant for
domestic use. Bezos has accepted various challenges chiefly concerning its workforce.
In 2014, Jeff Bezos has named as the worst boss in the world congress of the
International Trade Union Confederation. It proves that Bezos represents the inhuman treatment
face by the employers working in the North American corporate offices. The New York Times
has revealed the employees’ experiences for Bezos and the condition of the warehouses of
Amazon. The company regularly terminates the employees or they themselves quit the job,
which they found very much compelling and intolerable. Amazon’s corporate practices under

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Bezos’ dictatorship are termed as stingy. However, this is true that Bezos’ vision and passion has
raised the company at the top and it could not reach the place without the assistance of its
employees. It is therefore clear that the CEO must take care of his workers so that it built a
healthy relationship as well as atmosphere in the workplace.
Conclusion:
From the above discussion, it may be deducted that Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief
executive officer of Amazon stands solely responsible for the company’s growth. His vision and
hard work have helped Amazon to be recognized all over the globe. It is his strategies that
manipulate the employees to work hard keep on innovating. The leadership skills of Bezos have
led the company for 20 years. From selling only books over internet, the company now has verity
of offerings for its customers. His management style has paved the way for others. His company
enjoys the top position globally. To run the company Bezos has faced various problems among
which the employee dissatisfaction is the most severe. The philosophy of performance
management is reported to be pressurizing the link between the individual performance and the
overall success of the company. Many have misinterpreted the ownership culture and therefore
overwhelmed with the responsibilities associated with it. These have proved to be harmful for
the company’s reputation and employee morale is not doing well in Amazon.