Introduction

            The organizational analysis helps in the determination of the organisation structure or the framework, and how the various factors and functionalities of the organisation affect the different internal and external factors of the organisation as well as the outputs of the organisation. The process helps the organizations to analyse and identify the problem areas that affect the performance of the organizations (Armstrong et al. 2015).Knowing about the performance of the business can help the managers identify the areas where improvement is required and where a simple small change can benefit to a large extent.

            The organisational structureis an integral part that determines the success of the organisation. It helps in providing the employees and the other members of the organisations by providing them with guidelines on how to proceed. It binds all the members together by providing them with distinct identities. Dealing with the organisational structure is very important for its development. Structure varies for different organisations. The governance, working style, number of employees, the hierarchy levels, distribution of works, culture and many such factors determine the structural composition of the organisation.

            Every organisation requires a proper management. Good management within the organization ensures that the work is going smoothly and increases the productivity of the organisation as well as the operational efficiency. A good organisational structure ensures that the works are coordinated. It reduces the conflicts among the members of the organisation, reduces the duplication of any kind of work and there remains proper unity of command and direction. A properly managed and structured organisation provides a solid base for effective planning.  This report deals with the assessment of the company Amazon. A critical analysis of the organisational structure of Amazon has been done and the necessary changes that can be made are discussed with their respective reasons.

Discussion

            Amazon is a multination company that specifically deals with technology. It is based at Seattle, Washington and provides services like e-commerce, artificial intelligence and cloud computing. The company was formed by Jeff Bezos in the year 1994. It is one of the largest e-commerce platform earning the highest revenue (Amazon 2019). The company started as an online bookseller, which was a unique concept when it started and later on, it diversified their products and made several changes in their company. The company competed against Walmart and even surpassed them. It employs most of the working class and is the second largest company in terms of employment. The company has its separate retail website that can be accessed worldwide. The company believes in the concept of sharing economy as well as commoditisation. The company has diversified its industry and entered into web services, consumer electronics, e-commerce and distribution of products digitally.

Organisational Structure of Amazon

            Organisational structures can be of several forms like matrix structure, horizontal or flat structure, divisional structure, line organisational structure, team based organisational structure, hierarchical structure and network structure. In case of Amazon, it can be said that they follow a hierarchical structure. In a hierarchical structure, the employees are grouped with other employees that have a clear supervisor. The employees are grouped according to the functions they perform, according to the geographical locations and as per the products being offered. CEO Jeff Bezos, three senior vice presidents and a worldwide controller represents the senior management of Amazon. The senior vice presidents and the worldwide controller reports directly to the CEO.The segments are also divided as per the function like information technology, legal operations, and human resources. The head of these segments report to the CEO.

            This structure of the organisation has developed because of the immense size of the business. The structure can be more specifically stated as a functional structure. The corporate structure of Amazon is segregated as groups based on global function, divisions in geography and a global hierarchy. There are several functions being performed by the organisation. Each of these major functions have their respective group or team with a senior being allocated to each of them. The functions of the organisation are as below:

1. CEO roles and responsibilities
2. Amazon web services
3. Finance
4. International consumer business
5. Consumer business
6. Business development
7. Accounting
8. Legal
9. Human resource

A vertical line of command and authority is followed in this organisation. The directives of the senior manager are followed by all individuals within the organisation. It facilitates the managerial control of the entire organisation. The company is however very much flexible and is adaptable to the frequent market place changes.The organisational culture of the company is based on cost consciousness, innovation and reinvention, and continuous improvement.

The marketing mix

            The marketing mix of the company helps in the assessment of the organisation in terms of price, product, place and promotion (Tapp and Spotswood 2013). Marketing mix is the different set of tools that help a company in understanding the right price and the promotion techniques of the product or the services being offered and the proper place and time for the same.

            The company deals with a wide variety of products and services. The product ranges from the e-commerce products and applications to the web services, cloud computing, electronic devices and content services. The products and the services offered are Amazon kindle, books, mobile phones, tablets, television, DVDs, jewelleries, gaming consoles, cloths, footwear, videogames and several other equipment. The company has innovated its own smart phone and own set top box television system. The television system that the company has innovated also supports speech recognition system.

            The company uses several pricing strategies for different products; the market oriented pricing strategy remaining the primary one. The company determines and analyses the prices of the competitors prior to setting up the prices of its own products. This makes the prices of the company very much competitive in nature. It follows a price discrimination strategy as well. The concept of the price discrimination strategy is that it charges different prices for the same services or the product from different customers (Mikianset al. 2013). Amazon has several websites as per the countries and the price difference can be seen in these websites. The premium pricing strategy is also followed by the company for the products that are unique and enjoys a competitive advantage. Skimming pricing, value based pricing, penetration pricing and geographical pricing are also some of the additional strategies used by the company.

            The company persuades the consumers to visit its website in a numerous ways and it uses loads of tactics and strategies to interact with the target market. It persuades its customers to pay for the online services. All these are done by the company through ways of advertising, direct marketing, sales promotion and public relations. The company also uses the social media portals to some extent and uses the concept of the search engine optimisation and web analytics that helps them in tracking the wants and the needs of the customers in an efficient manner. The company uses advanced algorithms in case of search engine optimisation that helps the company name to appear at the top of the search list. The firm also increases its value by contributing into many CSR and sustainability issues that creates customer loyalty. It has also launched the Amazon Smile that donates a certain proportion of the amount in the charitable organisation. This method influences the perception of the individuals towards the company in a positive manner.

            Amazon is an online shop. The company initially did not have any offline stores and performed online totally. It has concentrated on the physical stores since the year 2015. The company opened a large number of bookstores during that time. These were the campus bookstores that were only made for reading purpose and not for selling purpose. The concept of the convenience stores that is stores without cashiers have been also implemented by the company. A separate pick up store has been prepared in many places where the students place their online orders and then the delivery is done to the pickup stores from where the students take the orders at their convenient time (Angeleanu 2015).

The leadership strategy

            The company follows a unique leadership strategy. The internal standards are set high and the employees are taken into these higher standards. The employees adapt accordingly. The opposite is however also true and therefore the organisation wants to maintain a proper standard within its framework. The expectations and the objectives follow the SMART concept, which means the organisational objectives are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and timely achievable. The company follows a long-term strategy and has a customer centric approach. The company in general follows a democratic leadership strategy. It also follows an authoritative leadership style. This means that the current leader overrides most of the important data based on their gut feeling. The company also has a paternalistic leadership approach as the CEO Jeff Bezos has inspired many employees by his technical assistance, roles, and responsibilities (Stone 2013). He is also not interested in the opinion of the other people and sets several benchmarks. In this strategy, the leader makes the subordinates do things exactly the way the leader wants but through proper cooperation and coordination. Apart from transactional leadership, Jeff Bezos also follows the transformational leadership strategy. He is a visionary and believes in innovation. He links the company’s long-term goal with the people’s value. These leadership styles have led to the huge success of the company.

The organisational culture

The organisational culture influences the attitudes and the behavioural patterns of the individuals within the organisation in numerous ways.  The corporate culture of Amazon motivates the employees to go above the traditional limits thereafter creating new and great ideas and solutions. The organisational culture of amazon is bold, customer centric and peculiar in nature. The employees are motivated and encouraged to take more risks and follow creative and innovative idea to manage any kind of risks. It helps the employees to identify the best possible solution of a particular business problem. The company also guides the employees to keep their focus on the needs and the wants of the customers. The company allows its employees to think differently and beyond the normal ways to take the online business to the next level.  Jeff Bezos has recently introduced the ‘Two Pizza Rule’, which states that the teams are required to be small enough so that two pizzas are enough for the members. Amazon is the perfect fusion of the brand and culture. It has a full integration of the identity of the brand and the organisational culture.

PESTEL analysis

            PESTEL analysis is an external analysis of the market that states how the company is being affected by the political, economic, social, technological, environmental and legal factors. This analysis helps in the understanding of the strengths and weaknesses and the probable opportunities of an organisation.

Political factors

            This particular aspect of the analysis focuses on the government policies and the other political decisions that have a direct impact on the business. The political considerations that are taken by this company are the political stability or the instability of the countries, the support of the government in the business, the efforts of the government for cyber security. Amazon is involved into the commoditisation of the products and they operate overseas with a wide variety of products. The company therefore must abide by the laws and regulations of the respective countries.

            Amazon is already a retail giant and it has been trying to expand in most of the sectors. It is also trying to expand its business in the logistic segments. It also wants to provide the best possible services at the lowest cost. The company therefore takes a lot of support from the government in order to become a powerful delivery house. Amazon is also involved in political contributions. The blue coloured signature staff badges that the employees wear are not just a badge but it reflects a political identity. Almost 90 percent of the employees of Amazon contributed to democratic aligned committees. In between the year 2004 and 2018, Hillary Clinton received an amount of $610,805 from the employees of Amazon.

Economic factors

            The performance of the company depends on the economic condition of the places where it operates. The changes in the economic conditions affect the business. The changes in the price level of the products, the change in the rate of inflation, the change in the foreign exchange rate and several other micro and macro-economic factors affects the business decisions. Amazon is set up at places where the economy is either developed or developing and therefore the company is getting a huge success. The developed countries do not have much economic issues and hence the company can perform without much obstacles. The developing economies have a growing trend of the disposable income and hence the firm enjoys financial growth in these developing segments. Amazon is also concentrating on the grocery segments in order to compete with the offline store giant Walmart.It is helping in the strong growth in the GDP. The cost of labour and the cost of other resources are reduced. The changes in the foreign exchange rates had a negative impact on the sales of Amazon.

Social factors

            The social factors involve the thoughts, understandings, attitude and beliefs of the individuals (He 2015). All these have an effect on the fact how the marketers interpret the customers. There is a shift in the retail landscape of Amazon.There has been a boost in the online shopping trend. There has been an increase in the number of the smart phones and the number of computers and laptops being used by the customers. This has resulted in the increasing use of the online portals and the online shops, which has increased the demand for the e commerce applications. Amazon has a specific feature of commoditisation and therefore a similar product is available at different prices form different dealers. The individuals want to acquire the quality product at the cheapest price. It can be therefore said that Amazon is providing the customers a base to choose form number of list at which price they want to get the same product. This is the reason people are inclining more towards Amazon. The people now days also want to save their time and does not want to waste time travelling while shopping. The online stores are therefore a very convenient market for them.

Technological factor

            The technological factors refer to the innovation level, research, development, and automation of the processes. It also refers to the changes in the technology that is the new ways of production, new ways of communication and new ways of distribution of the goods and the services. The concept of big data analytics has transformed how Amazon has been working (Fan, Lau and Zhao 2015). The use of web analytics is very common for Amazon. The introduction of the Prime Air is one of the unique innovation done by Amazon. It is a delivery system provided by the company with the help of a drone. Dash button is another concept that has been introduced. It helps in quick reordering of any of the past orders by just a click. Apart from this,the company has also launched Alexa, cloud computing and one click purchases (Amazon 2015).

Environmental factor

            The environmental factors are getting important in the recent context because of the scarcity of the resources and exploitation of the resources. There are several impacts on the environment on how a company performs within the environment by taking the resources form the environment. Sustainability is one of the important term in this aspect. It is the concern of all the business sectors. Amazon also has to focus more on how they are treating the wastes, packing and packaging the goods and how the consumption of the energy is done (Akins et al. 2013). This will help them increasing their sustainability. Amazon has invested a lot in CSR activities and sustainability. One of the key focus of the company is the renewable energy.

Legal factor

            The legal compliance is one of the important factor that affects the companies in many ways. The goodwill of the company is dependent on the fact that how much the company is following all the rules and the regulations. Amazon has been very much compliant with all the laws and it works aligning itself with the Government. It has a separate team for all the legal issues. Recently the changes in the legal system are raising few questions. Questions are being asked in relation to the data storage, data privacy and antitrust issues. The cloud services given by Amazon will have to undergo a change because of the rules and regulations laid down by the General Data Protection Regulation Standards (Irani 2015). The deployment of additional data protection security system, compliance experts and other securities expert is necessary.

SWOT Analysis

            SWOT Analysis helps in the assessment of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the company. It helps the managers to take prompt decision on the threats and helps them in choosing the opportunities that will yield the best result. It helps the firm in understanding its competitive advantage.

Strength

            Amazon is the largest online retail industry in the world. It earns the highest revenue through online sales. The growth of the Amazon market is much higher than the overall growth in the e-commerce sectors. This means that the company has grabbed the market share of its competitors also. The success of the company lies in the fact of the low cost of resources and the low cost of the production along with a wide variety of products and services.             The business model of the company allows the third party sellers to showcase their products on the portal of the company(D’Agostino 2018). This enables a greater choice to the customers and hence Amazon is always ahead of the others. There is a synergy between the market place, the web services and the prime services. The Amazon Web Services has increased efficiency. The page load speed of the portal helps the company in preventing unnecessary losses.

Weakness

            The business model that the company follows can be easily copied by the competitors. The company usually tries to penetrate in the developed countries. The countries where the other firms are established fully, it becomes difficult for the company to penetrate. The customer attracting ability of the company get limited because of the limited brick and mortar presence of certain products. Those products are more sellable in offline shops than in the retail shop. One of the biggest weakness of the company is that the company is totally customer centric and wants to provide the customers with the best services at the least cost. It follows a business model of zero margin, which has affected its profitability in spite of having high revenues and high sales volume(Kantor and Streitfeld 2015).

Opportunities

            The company has immense opportunities to growand expand and to continue with its leading position. It has the opportunity to enter into the developing countries. The company can also build more physical structures,apart from its online stores. This would enable them to capture the retail market as a whole. The application of its own payment gateway can have loads of advantages. It can also provide more of its own products rather than listing and selling the third party products.

Threats

            There is an increasing concern over the online hacking system and the identity theft as the customer data is exposed because of this process. The customer concern related to this affect the business. The cybercrime has also increased recently. Amazon has to keep a strict vigilance on the online operations in order to protect itself from such crimes. The recent moves taken by Amazon, in terms of diversification have shown that the company is moving away from its core competency. It is losing its focus on its core business and spreading its wind on the other business strategies that can prove to be harmful for the company in the end. It offers free shipping facilities, which can increase its burden on cost, as there is a loss of margin because of this reason. Amazon faces most of the threats form the local retail markets who have a great presence in offline retail sales.

The organisational problems

            The e-commerce giant has faced a lot of success but there are certain severe problems that need correction. The problems can be stated as follows:

1. The company has a wide variety of products. There are certain items in those product lines that are unnecessary. The improper product lines are letting Amazon lose profitability for no reason. The few valueless and the useless products listed by the company affects the goodwill of the company.
2. The cost of delivery is one of the biggest problem. The delivery of a very small quantity of the product is very expensive. Amazon in most of the cases provides free delivery, which means the profitability is largely affected.
3. There are increasing issues of cybercrime and hacking of the system, which has raised awareness among the customers and these issues are to be answered in a proper manner. People are getting more aware of data privacy and they are trying to avoid the online applications in order to protect themselves from online frauds and threats (Hua and Bapna 2013).
4. The consumers want to feel the product before making a purchase decision. Most of the people would like to understand the product before moving ahead. The quality shown on the online portal and the quality provided might also mismatch because of which the customers get dissatisfied.
5. In the recent year, there has been a significant reduction in the growth level of the first party e-commerce segment of the company.
6. The offers provided by Amazon like clearance sale or the festive offers have not shown better result in the current year. There have been weak returns in the international segments of the company (Rossman 2016).
7. Amazon has reduced its promotional activities and its price matching with the rivals. The brick and mortar competition has taken advantage over the aggressive attitude of Amazon.
8. The company is very reliable on the vision of the founder. It lacks a proper top management team. There will be a severe problem when Jeff Bezos will not be present in the company.
9. The standards set are unreasonably high. If there are so high standards set for all the workers, then the workers will get distressed unnecessarily if they are unable to meet their targets.
10. The current leadership imposes sudden changes and it guides the others on how to behave and react. There is an attitude of overconfidence within the system at times.
11. The workers need to work for long hours at times because Jeff Bezos did not provide the opportunity of choosing among working long, hard or smart. All the three must be followed by all the employees.
12. It follows a transparent work culture where theemployees are allowed to discuss any issues openly and are allowed to talk about the other employees in front of everyone. The team members are ranked, the highest rank holders are provided better opportunities and the lowest rank holders are fired from the organisation.
13. The employee appraisals are not properly structured. There have been concerns in relation to the poor human resource management. Employees who underwent hardships and severe health problems performed poor for a certain time. Those people were judged on that basis and were fired from their jobs (Castelliet al. 2017). This has resulted in employee dissatisfaction in most of the cases.
14. The benefits offered by Google and Facebook are something that drives their employees the most (Dolata 2017). Amazon does not provide any kind of employee benefits. The employees have to cover their travel expenses and the travelling expenses by themselves. The company also has the policy to deduct a portion of the bonus if the employee leaves the company within a year.

Proposed change

            The above problems can be addressed properly by making certain changes within the organisational framework. The changes can be noted as below:

1. The company must focus on the core competency that is the e-book and must focus on producing its own items rather than showcasing the third party items on their portal.
2. The company is customer centric but it must also focus on preventing the loss of the unnecessary costs and must remove those products and services that are having no value additions.
3. The company must not be totally inclined towards the founder but it must be inclined more towards the organisational goal and must have a proper top management team where the decisions are required to be takenby the management and the employees together.
4. The overconfidence nature of the company must be reduced and the employees must be provided with a charismatic leader who will not only tell what is to be done but also involve himself along with all the workersand perform the tasks himself to set an example within the organisation.
5. Several incentive schemes are to be provided to the employees in order to retain the best talents within the organisation. 
6. The online transactions should be assisted with some secured payment systems and data privacy system so as to acquire the loyalty and the trust of the customers.
7. The employee appraisal system should be done properly and the emergency issues are to be addressed in a matured way. The employees who undergo a lot of pressure and emergencies are to be given a fair chance to perform and must not be judged on the basis of a short-term performance.
8. The company must indulge into the promotional activities and must be socially more active. This would help the company be more interactive with the customers, as there are no other ways, by which, the company can interact with the customers. This will also help the customers be aware of the products and services available on their portal.
9. A separate chat bot by the company can be launched that will provide instant replies about the products or the service queries. This will help in the reduction of the doubts in the minds of the customers.
10. The management structure is needed to be changed a bit. The top management of the company must comprise of talented and confident individuals that will not simply listen to the boss but will have their own views and must convey their views and plans to the boss.

Conclusion

            It can be concluded from the above discussion that the Amazon is a giant that earns the highest revenue. The companyhas a diversified range of products and it has kept on increasing the revenue. It enjoys a competitive advantage over all its competitors. The company is highly influenced by the visions of Jeff Bezos and the top management works on the commands given by the founder only. The company therefore has faced some issues in the recent years. There are several changes that are therefore required for the company. The company needs to focus on its top management, product lines, security, incentive schemes, employee appraisal, the employee attitudes and thoughts and promotional activities.

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