Zappos is a company with the very unusual corporate culture and the business model that helps to attract a large number of customers and investors. Nevertheless, Zappos is occasionally criticized for failing to address some of the customers’ problems, inability to find the proper stakeholder balance and absence of a long-term vision.
The company has been trying to make its employees responsive to the customers. At the same time, Zappos failed to maintain the reliable relations with the main investor Sequoia Capital and eventually had to be sold to Amazon. Amazon does not control Zappos’s activity and such a partnership represents a risk for both companies. Nevertheless, the approach that has been taken by Zappos positively affects the ethical culture. Individualism, compassion and low uncertainty avoidance are some of the most crucial drivers of corporate behavior (______, year, p.155). These drivers are of the top priority for Zappos and the customer relations are also built on them. Moreover, employees are mission- and value driven at Zappos. They know what exactly is expected from them.
Zappos is very transparent in terms of the relations with the employees and the customers. There are numerous performance reviews, transparent decision-making practices and training programs that help to improve the integrity of the business activity. One of the main goals for Zappos is to increase the number of the loyal customers. Social media, tours to the company’s headquarters, reports, etc. help to achieve that. However, Zappos is sometimes inconsistent. For example, after being hacked in 2012 Zappos disconnected its call center and the customers were dissatisfied with such a decision. They received an email explaining what had happened, but such a measure was not enough to avoid the damage of the company’s credibility (Ferrel, Fraedrich, Ferrel, 2015, p.492).
Zappos manages the ethical risk by providing some excellent working conditions to the employees. The HR team usually hires the people that will be happy to work for Zappos in accordance with the Code of Business Conduct and Ethics. Keeping employees content and empowered at work also helps to reduce the ethical risks (______, year, p.168). The future ethical risks for Zappos include unclear relationships with the investors and the community, absence of the long-term vision, excessive reliance on the current CEO, environmental issues and use of the cheap labor force overseas by the vendors that sell merchandise via Zappos platform.
References
Organizational Culture. Location: Publisher. Print.
Ferrel, O., Fraedrich, J., Ferrel, L. (2015). Business Ethics: Ethical Decision Making and
Cases. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning. Print.
