Integrating Culture and Diversity in Decision Making Essay

1. Provide a brief (1 paragraph) description of the brass you chose to research. Zappos was founded in 1999 during the dotcom boom by Nick Swinmurn (Twitchell, 2009) on a quest to demoralize a pair of sneakers at a local m alone. It has gr hold in to a 1.2 atomic number 53 thousand thousand dollar subsidiary of Amazon.com and a leading on-line provider of everything from shoes to couture handbags. They have d i this with a simple truism Powered by Service. Providing all of their customers with free ( whatsoevertimes next day) merchant vessels and returns, Zappos has invested in the power of word of mouth to fuel their business. 2. Examine the refinement of the selected organization.Retail doesnt seem to be the only thing that Zappos has gotten right, however. beyond growing from a small, upstart corporation to a 1 billion dollar behemoth, Zappos prides itself on the culture it has created and invests in for its employees. Unlike some companies that guard their employee cred os and inherent culture (Apple comes to mind), Zappos promotes theirs for any would-be customer to see. duplex links on their website lead to testimonials, blogs and YouTube flicks providing a behind the scenes look at exactly what its like to exert for this Once Upon a sequence shoe gild. Current chief operating officer Tony Hsieh said in 2009 while celebrating the play alongs 10th anniversary that Our No. 1 priority is the company culture. Our whole belief is that if we get the culture right, then everything else, including the customer service, provide fall into place, (Twitchell, 2009) and indeed that thought processes seems embedded in the companys Core set which are posted on its website under a link labeled Our Unique Culture. 3. Explain how you determined that the selected organization showed the signs of the culture that you have identified. Zappos company culture seems to pride itself on creating a world-class experience not reasonable for its customers, but fo r its employees as well. two the external adaptation (day to day tasks) and internal integration (employees ability to spanking and ferment together) have been addressed in exactly the same route. Zappos seems to apprize that the way they treat their external customers as a company and the way their internal customers treat each other are not varied. In each of the videos posted on their company blog, employees regard their Core Values as both the way they guide their interactions with customers and with each other. Though subcultures do seem to exist (based simply on the variety of employee groups with blogs on their website), Zappos has interpreted great strides through rituals like their Wishez program to keep those unique subcultures from nice countercultures that work against the common goals of the company. Indeed, relationships within these subcultures seem accompanimently strong. In one video describing the Wishez program and the way it bonds other departments together , employees seem to indicate that without it they efficiency have never interacted in the first place.This seems to lend itself to Barker and Tompkins hypothesis that employees maintain a tendency to identify more strongly with their individual work teams than with the company as a whole. (Schrodt, 2002) In one video, an employee identifies that she has leased a marching band to come and play Happy natal day for another employees 40th birthday because he had teased when she turned 40. They work in the same department. By forging such strong relationships betwixt employees, members of Zappos are encouraged to pursue similar relationships with their customers. One web knave boasts that the longest recorded customer service call to Zappos (lines which are bold 24/7) was eight hours long. Additionally, during Holiday months, customers might even encounter CEO Tony Hsieh on the customer service lines. 4. forge the factors that caused the organization to embody this particular cu lture.This dedication towards customer service that the Zappos culture seems to be based somewhat is what has allowed Zappos to survive where other dotcoms had failed. In his book The Greatest course Decisions of All Time, Verne Harnish lists Zappos decisions to offer free shipping and returns as in particular profound. He says (among the other decisions that he lists) that they stood out from others because they were counterintuitive they went against the grain of customary practice. (Gringarten, 2012) Without this richly customer focused culture, Zappos as a marque might never have existed. Indeed, it continues to promote its customer focus and nix else. While we might bet of Zappos as a shoe company, Zappos seems to think of Zappos as a customer service company that happens to sell shoes. 5. Determine what type of leader would be best suited for this organization. Support your position.This winsome of energy takes a particular type of leader to induce. Each video on th eir company website that mentions CEO Tony Hsieh mentions his name with some sort of idolize suggesting that this type of culture is best suited for a charismatic leader. accord to Schermerhorn, charismatic leaders by force of their personal abilities, are loose of having a profound and extraordinary effect on followers. (Schermerhorn, 2000) Hsieh gives seminars in which he instructs other companies on how they can adopt the Zappos culture to their own businesses.He believes very strongly in the culture that Zappos has created. 6. Imagine that in that respect is a decline in the demand of product(s) or services supplied by the selected organization. Determine what the change in culture would need to be in response to this situation. The intense success that Zappos has enjoyed in such a concise amount of time and the growth of their business from simply shoes to just about anything else seems to suggest that even if tomorrow people needed one less pair of shoes, the corporate culture of Zappos as a company would not need to be adjusted. By focusing on internal culture (employees) and external culture (customer) first, Zappos has answered the question of how to sell rather than what to sell. Their intention implies that people dont just need shoes what they take is a different way to buy them.BibliographyGringarten, H. (2012). The Greatest Business Decisions of all Time. Journal of Multidisciplinary Research , 95.Schermerhorn, J. R. (2000). Organizational Behavior . New York Wiley.Schrodt, P. (2002). The relationship mingled with organizational identification and organizational culture employee perceptions of culture and identification in a retail sales organization. Communication Studies , 189.Twitchell, J. (2009, June 16). From Upstart To $1 million Behemoth, Zappos Marks 10 Years. Retrieved from LasVegas Sun