Leading Changes Sample Assignment (GC01741)

Executive Summary

The finding of this paper shows that Bezos is a mix of leader and manager, but on the scale of leadership and management, his characteristics show more leadership qualities than management qualities. Bezos are he is driven by a grand idea, has incredibly high expectations, and persevered through lots of adversity. Bezos is big thinker, maintains high standards, amazing learner, and is tactically impatient but strategically patient. Bezos focuses on long-term thinking, strong returns on capital, grow to a large size, and customer expectation Bezos never misses an opportunity to self-promoter always stays on commitment and knows this market. Bezos applies to combines trait theories and contingency theories of leadership that have made him a visionary leader and helped him to bring major changes in the success of Amazon.

Bezos’s practices combine democratic leadership styles, authoritative leadership styles, transactional leadership styles, and mainly transformational leadership styles has helped him bring huge success to Amazon with sustainable competitive advantages in the market. However, his leadership is not perfect enough to gain high employee satisfaction and motivation, retention and loyalty. He is also a risk-taking leader that many of his followers do not like. Therefore, other leaders can follow his good leadership practices and characteristics but should avoid the bad ones. Overall, Bezos’s leadership can be suited for the current and future business of Amazon but now should focus on more management practices, rather than leadership practices.

Table of Contents

Executive Summary.

1.0      Introduction.

2.0 Is Bezos a manager r a leader or both?. 4

Concept of Leader vs. manager

Is Bezos a manager or a leader or both?.

3.0 Bezos’s characteristics helped him drive the company forward.

Key characteristics of a good leader

The good characteristics of Bezos have helped him drive Amazon forward.

Some bad characteristics of Bezos’s.

4.0 What could be the consequences of taking Bezos’s style too far?.

Leadership theories.

Leadership styles.

Leadership styles of Bezos.

What could be the consequences of taking Bezos’s style too far?.

5.0 Is Bezos the right person for Amazon during the times ahead, or does the company now require more of a ‘manager’ than a ‘leader’?.

6.0 Conclusion.

7.0 References.

1.0 Introduction

Amazon is the leading online retailing e-commerce site in the current business world. The successful leadership of Jeff Bezos has brought huge success for Amazon (Anders, 2012). This paper conducts a study and makes a report on the leadership practices by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. The first part of this paper defines leadership in comparison to management and evaluates whether Bezos is a leader or manager. Then, this paper defines the key characteristics of a good leader and evaluates the good and bad characteristics of Bezos. Next, this paper defines the leadership theories and styles, and discusses the leadership practices by Bezos and justifies what will happen if other leaders practice the leaderships of Bezos. Finally, this paper evaluates how effective the leadership of Bezos in the current business of Amazon.

2.0 Is Bezos a manager or a leader or both?

Concept of Leader vs. manager

Leadership in a business refers to the ability of a person to enable, motivate as well as influence people in the workplace toward the success and effectiveness of businesses (Torrington et al., 2015). Leadership styles are mainly classified as democratic, autocratic, liaises-faire, consultative, participative, and transformational (Mullins, 2014).  Leaders are brilliant as well as mercurial with charisma. Leaders are always people-oriented and focus on leading people and achievements. Leaders are risk-taking and facilitative and have followers. They show power through their influence and charisma (Wiseman, 2010).

On the other hand, management refers to controlling and directing the people in the workplace for harmonizing and coordinating them towards organizational goals (Torrington et al., 2015). Management styles are classified as consultative, democratic, authoritative, dictatorial, and transactional (Mullins, 2014). Managers tend to be rational and solve problems under control. They are always task-oriented and manage work to gain expected outcomes. Managers develop strategies, policies and methods to reduce business risk and gain success (Buckingham and Coffman, 2015). Managers show their power through formal authority and position. They have subordinates, rather than followers (Block, 2014).

Is Bezos a manager or a leader or both?

Lashinsky (2017) said several leadership qualities have made Bezos a famous visionary leader in the current business world. Bezos’ pearls of wisdom are repetitive that bring new realities for Amazon by the discussion in less obvious but visible ways. The other hearty Bezos perennial is satisfying customers and being willing to reverse direction. Bezos also shares his knowledge and experiences on building high-performance teams with his followers (Lashinsky, 2017). The visionary leadership and the greatest accomplishment of Jeff Bezos have turned Amazon into the retailing giant. Amazon was a retailer of books, music and video in its starting time. Now it has over 10 million products in stock, where most of them are non-media goods such as dresses, shoes, drills, tennis rackets, as well as everything else that people need (Hartung, 2013). Amazon has now been synonymous with store due to the strong transformation leadership of Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos could successfully transform Amazon from an online bookstore to now a store of millions of products (Dughi, 2013).

The successful transformation of leadership has increased its stock by 397% in the last five years. In leadership practices, the passing of Steve Jobs has left Bozos as the number one CEO in the USA. Bezos has succeeded as CEO using a bang-for-the-buck methodology and gaining sustained performance. As a high-flying tech company, Bezos always put higher attention to his 164 million customers than his 56000 employees (Blazek, 2016). The formidable leadership practice by Bezos has developed a ‘culture of metrics’ that promoted Amazon to track its performance against nearly 500 measurable goals and objectives, where about 80% of goals and objectives are related to customers ((Lashinsky, 2017). As a leader, Bezos is so confident that he has been able to personalize the Amazon website for every single customer. Amazon has now been able to create classic customer-segment persons like gearhead and soccer moms (Hartung, 2013)………………………..

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