Leadership Analysis: Jeff Bezos

Leadership Analysis: Jeff Bezos By (Name) Institution Course Instructor Date Leadership Analysis: Jeff Bezos This essay analyzes the leadership style of Jeff Bezos. It demonstrates how Bezos uses a combination of transformational and transactional leadership. Bezos has been chosen for this analysis because of his success as the leader of an e-commerce platform. The biggest challenge Bezos faces is his transactional traits that make the working environment unfavorable for some workers. Suggestions are given on how Bezos can become a better leader. According to Britannica.com (2019), Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the U.S. He is the founder and CEO of Amazon.com Inc. Amazon is an e-commerce platform for books and a variety of products. Under his leadership, has grown to become one of the largest online retailers on the web. Amazon is considered a customer-centric company and Bezos is credited for setting standards on customer service. Bezos combines the aspects of both transformational and transactional leadership style. Transformational leadership entails empowering followers to develop their skills and improve their performance (Shah and Nisar, 2011; Cavazotte, Moreno and Bernardo, 2013). Transformational leaders raise followers to higher levels of morality and expectations. It is about elevating others to higher levels of greatness and that what Bezos exhibits in Amazon. According to Coleman (2018), transformational leaders do not emphasize position, title or the salary they earn. Instead, humility, vision, and passion guide their daily activities. Transactional leadership entails the use of disciplinary power of rewards and punishments to influence the performance of the staff members (Rodrigues and Ferreira, 2015). Elshout, Scherp and van der Feltz-Cornelis (2013) further indicate that transactional leaders micromanage their employees and expect them to meet the strict standards set up in the organization. Bezos exhibits transactional leadership by using authoritarian compliance to force the employees to work towards the established goals. Bezos is task-oriented and ensures that his employees work towards meeting the expectations of the clients. A transactional leader sets the criteria for the functioning of the staff members according to their previously determined requirements (Moynihan, Pandey and Wright, 2011). This can be demonstrated with the performance reviews that are common in Amazon as Bezos evaluates the performance of the workers. One of the challenges Bezos has faced as a result of using the transactional leadership approach is criticism from the media and the public. According to Sainato (2018), Amazon has come under criticism for mistreating employees in the warehouses by having difficult working conditions for them. All employees wish to work for a company that values them. Poor working conditions reduce the morale of workers (Dobre, 2013). Some of the employees at the corporate levels have expressed the lack of flexibility in the workplace. They are expected to work for long hours and over the weekends and holidays. It happens that employees are required to abandon a working project to start working on a new one. Due to the transactional approach, workers do not have...