The Five Functions of Management in Amazon
Here is the scenario and situation:
Assume you are an employee working in the Amazon warehouse, and you pack orders and categorize them into small, medium, and large batches. You are considered a packer. You have experience packing all sizes and have been with the organization for two years. You are considered one of their best employees, you have a solid reputation for being a hard worker, and all of your orders are packed correctly. You have also been busy; you recently completed Amazon’s management training program, and you have completed your BABA degree at the Forbes School of Business and Technology at Ashford University.
Congratulations: You have just been promoted to manager. You will be relocated to a new plant that is two hours away that employs 100 employees. You will oversee a team of 10 supervisors and 90 packers and will now oversee the entire warehouse operation. How will you work to use and apply the five functions of management
Now let’s apply the five functions. In your paper, include the following sections:
Planning: Examine the specific areas you will choose to manage that fall under the planning function.
For example, what might be some of the things you will plan to do and implement to build an effective team and culture? People are the most important resource in any business, what do you plan to do to build a positive team culture? What processes and systems do you plan to use?
Organizing: Assess if the present structure that Amazon has set up is working.
Do you need to make or suggest any changes to make it more efficient and effective? What structure will you use and implement? Explain how you will use departmentalization in your organizational structure.
Staffing: Analyze your staffing needs.
How do you intend to staff your organization and replace members that leave or are promoted? How does the HR process apply? What things (if any) will you suggest?
Leading: Justify the leadership theory and style you will follow to ensure efficiency.
Will you use transformational or transactional leadership? Why or why not?
Controls: Identify what controls and measures you will implement.
How will you apply the four steps of control (these are in Chapter 7; i.e., establishing standards, measuring performance, comparing performance, and making decisions)?
Be sure to integrate vocabulary learned throughout this course and citations from the text to support your analysis. The paper should be five to six double-spaced pages in length, must include at least three scholarly sources, in addition to the textbook, and be formatted according to APA style
Amazon Team Management
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Amazon Team Management
A job promotion occurs when a worker is moved up an organizational hierarchy to a higher job position with more responsibilities by an employer. Being promoted in a big firm, such as Amazon.com, is a significant privilege since the company has a high level of internal competition among employees. Some of the primary things that can enable a person to be promoted at work include being a hard worker, obedient, transparent, and undertaking one’s responsibilities excellently. In the scenario at hand, a hardworking Amazon packer is promoted to a manager who will oversee 10 supervisors and 90 packers. The individual is promoted after completing a bachelor’s degree in business management at the Forbes School of Business and Technology, Ashford University, and a management training program offered by Amazon. The paper focuses on how the newly promoted Amazon manager will apply the five functions of management, namely planning, leading, controlling, staffing, and organizing.
Planning
Planning is a management function that entails coming up with objectives and determining the right course of action to fulfill set goals. As an Amazon’s manager overseeing 100 employees, the first and most significant thing to do would be to develop a proper relationship with supervisors and packers. Indeed, having served the company as a packer, it will be easy for the person to connect with packers since the individual understands the challenges these people encounter in their daily operations. For an individual to implement and build an effective team and culture, one should not be afraid to get hands dirty. As such, the best thing to do is to spend time with the packers and supervisors. The primary objective here is to make sure that the manager creates a trusting relationship with employees so that they can embrace the culture of transparency and openness (Kerzner, 2017). That way, these workers will report when an issue occurs, and they will not hesitate to own mistakes since they know it is an opportunity to learn. In particular, people are the most significant resources in business and when managed well can lead to the success of daily operations and increased productivity and profitability. The best processes and systems that can help the manager to build a positive team culture are rewarding employees who meet set objectives, encouraging interpersonal interactions, and uniting workers to achieve common objectives. Overall, supervisors and packers in the firm should know that the office door is always open, and they can come in anytime they want to discuss something with the manager since their ideas and opinions are highly valued.
Organizing
Organizing refers to creating an organizational structure without forgetting to allocate appropriate human resources so that the firm can accomplish the set objectives. Specifically, an organization chart is the graphical representation of a firm’s chain of command. Amazon uses a hierarchical organizational structure. For instance, senior management comprises three vice presidents and three chief executive officers (CEOs) who report to the senior CEO, Jeff Bezos (Dudovskiy, 2020). For many years, Amazon’s hierarchical organizational structure has been working well for the company by making it one of the largest online retailers in the world. In the new plant, the manager suggests using a hybrid structure where employees are allowed to share their managerial ideas to improve production effectiveness and efficiency. Despite hierarchical structure being the best for Amazon, it should not limit the firm’s productivity and decision-making processes. Additionally, a person will implement departmentalization to ensure that packaging is done appropriately. For instance, having ten supervisors in the new plant means that one can have eight departments and allocate eight supervisors to each one of them. In that light, new employees should be assigned the work of packaging small-sized items. The remaining two supervisors should gather information on how to improve work efficiency and effectiveness. Overall, all supervisors are expected to report directly to the manager.
Staffing
Staffing involves recruitment, training, compensation, selection, appraising, placement, and hiring employees. As a newly promoted manager at Amazon, one understands that good employees enable a company to have a competitive advantage. As noted earlier, workers are the most crucial resources of a firm, which is the reason why human resource managers should hire talented and highly qualified individuals (Wheelen, Hunger, Hoffman, & Bamford, 2015). First, as a manager, an individual will work with existing employees and show them the benefits of good performance to both themselves and the firm. Additionally, one understands the importance of motivating wor...