Work Culture and Competition at Amazon
Regardless of Amazon
becoming one of the world’s largest, most innovative companies, their reputation
for employee satisfaction is extremely tainted, and their turnover rate is especially
high. In this New York Times article, the work culture at Amazon is discussed in
reference to past employee’s and their experiences working for the commerce giant.
As quoted in the article by a former employee, this turnover rate is made possible
through “purposeful Darwinism” (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). The incredibly high
expectations and exhausting demands drive away those who can’t handle the pressure,
leaving behind “an empire of elite workers” (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). As
the article also addresses, Amazon’s work culture significantly differs from that
of Google and Facebook’s, as one of their 14 guiding leadership principles (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles)
is “Frugality” (# 9), meaning the benefits that we often see offered by other
tech companies are not assumed, but instead, sought after through competition. Another
principle guiding the work culture at Amazon is to “Have Backbone; Disagree and
Commit” (#13). Social cohesion is not encouraged since it leads to compromising
of ideas, rather than challenging them.
Those who are
lucky enough to make it through to their next contract are driven by the competition
that surrounds them. With the understanding that the elitist network they have
become a part of is, in fact, a binary one, you are either included or excluded
(Castells 1996, p. 20). Actors have no choice but to commit to these guiding principles
or forego their membership.
As the article summarizes, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s
founder, works extremely hard to continue fostering the competitive tension in
which the company’s culture is established. However, as highlighted within
Castell’s “Power in the Network Society” (1996), he makes the claim that:
“competition depends on the ability to outperform
other networks by superior efficiency in performance or in cooperation capacity.
Competition may also take a destructive form by disrupting the switchers of
competing networks and/or interfering with their communication protocols. (p. 20)”
My question is, by looking at the
experiences of these Amazon employees, do you think that the companies guiding
principles (and the practices that nurture these principles) are “destructive”
of their own internal communication protocols? Is there something they should
change in order to improve their employee satisfaction, or is the “purposeful Darwinism”
approach effective?
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