There are special methods to Bezos’ leadership of the organization. According to a 2012 Forbes article, Benzos is known for his empty chair tradition where he pulls an extra chair into the conferences to remind the staff of the importance of customer experience. It has proved that his customer obsession have served the company well in the market competition with 310 million active customers attracted (NCHANNEL, 2018). Despite the bad press on the working conditions of warehouse workers, Bezos has shown a successful leadership and gained recognition for some of his theories. Data shows that Amazon ranks one of the world’s top by market value (Investopia, 2019). There has been a consistent growth in the company’s revenue with a 21.11% increase year-over-year for the twelve months ending June 30, 2019 (Microtrends, 2019).
Bezos is a visionary leader in the way that he encourages consistent innovations and is not afraid to take risks. Visionary leaders often have an idea of the future so that they understand the importance of change and its close association with risks. Bezos wrote in his annual letter in 1997 that “failure and invention are inseparable twins” and mentioned that even though the result of one experiment is not predictable, it is a necessary procedure contributing to successful innovations.
Another element that makes Bezos’ leadership successful is the ability to lead others in decisions making towards future innovations. As mentioned above, efficiency has always been emphasized in the management of the organization with the expectation of high performance from the team. In order to minimize the exhaustion caused by resolving disputes between people with fundamentally different views, Bezos believes that leaders are responsible for making the decision for their teams in a situation of conflicts. therefore, Bezos created a strong team by having intelligent and decisive managers to keep the development on track. Additionally the instinct to recognise and adopt external trends is necessary for the managers. They are required to take quick actions in recognising the biggest trend and making decisions to carry out inventions. The process has already eliminated time waste that other organizations would have spent on debuting about the proper trend to follow. and it proofs that these strategies have made it easier for him to decide the directions of future developments when he says “We’re in the middle of an obvious one right now: machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
It is clear to see that Bezos trains his employees into an intellectual team with believes. “thinking outside of the box” is another idea he has been using to stimulate motivation. This behaviour of inspiring employees is commonly found in intellectual stimulation which (Breaux, 2010) is defined as “having a leader who encourages innovation and creativity”. these components are essential to developing a successful organization because it people often find themselves motivated under leaders who “awaken their curiosity, challenge them to think and learn, and encourage openness to new” (Daft, 2005).
However the question arose is that are the employees motivated as it was expected? It is debatable that the influence of the intellectual stimulation reaches every level of the company. ABC news Australia reported in 2019 about the working conditions at the Amazon warehouse located in rural Melbourne, workers are employed as casual employees without contracts and people constantly worry about whether their can get their next shift ( Burin, 2019). Assurance is not granted to the workers even when they are given heavy workloads. This can result in an uncertainty of the employees’ commitment as their contributions seem to be devalued. And in fact, one of the workers said in the interview that he feels “dehumanized” by the fast “Amazon” working speed. Workers seem to work for fear of losing their jobs instead of working with positive motivations to change for a better future as Bezos’ expected from his employees. Positive reinforcers are necessary in this case to ensure a level of motivation is maintained among the workers. Studies shows that the reward in the positive reinforcement process is a reinforcing stimulus that encourage the subject to perform the desired action more often (YourDictionary,” 2018) as explained in further depth in the next section.