A Comparative Study of Amazon and Google - How Management, Salary and Culture Influence Job Satisfaction in the High-Tech Sector?

How Management, Salary and Culture Influence Job Satisfaction in the High-Tech Sector?  

– A Comparative Study of Amazon and Google

Yimin Gu

University of Southern California

How Management, Salary and Culture Influence Job Satisfaction in the High-Tech Sector?

– A Comparative Study of Amazon and Google

Last month, Jay Carney, senior vice president of Amazon Corporate Affairs posted an article online in an attempt to refute a widely read and shared New York Times article that appeared two months earlier and detailed the bruising workplace culture faced by Amazon’s white collars (Kantor & Streitfeld, 2015). Carney took this action right before Amazon announced its holiday recruitment of 100,000 seasonal workers, trying to dispel the doubts in potential employees’ mind (Kurtz,2015). In the meantime, it could also be seen as a more inward-facing strategy – to sustain the confidence of the current employees and keep them from being lured away (Kurtz,2015).

While many industries tripped and waned in this century, high-tech, as the undeniable leader of the employment landscape, has stayed strong and kept on flourishing (Lautenschläge, 2015). Meanwhile, the fight among companies for top tech talent is intensifying; employers are using aggressive strategies to steal tech talents from competitors (Coelho, 2014).  In addition to that, retaining current employees is another way to secure the talents for high-tech companies (Mendoza, 2013). Even industry leaders such as Google and Facebook are dealing with the problem of employee turnover: in 2010, Google gave all its employees a 10% raise and a $1,000 bonus to compete with the temptation from other companies (Blodget, 2010).

It is no exaggeration to say that the success of prosperous business organizations has been dictated by contributions of engaged employees (Hoogervorst, van der Flier, & Koopman, 2004); therefore, retaining employees is becoming ever more important for high-tech companies (Sarangi & Srivastava, 2012). To keep employees engaged in their current services, it is important to assure that employees achieve certain degrees of job satisfaction (Yuan, 2015). To guarantee this, high-tech companies have started a race of employee benefits: from free meals to Comic-con tickets, and to extended parental leaves (Huang, Li, Meschke, & Guthrie, 2015).

High-tech employers have already realized the tech people needed more than high salaries, and that employee satisfaction could be influenced by organizational culture and management (Huang et al., 2015). But how much influence do these factors have on employee satisfaction in high-tech sector? There have been studies on job satisfaction factors in various sectors, including education (Tahir & Sajid, 2014), science (Sone, Mizunuma, Yasunaga, & Ohtomo, 2013), medicine (Wallin, Jakobsson, & Edberg, 2012). Little research, however, has been done to analyze the job satisfaction factors in the high-tech companies. To address this gap, this research adopts content analysis to evaluate Amazon and Google employee reviews on Glassdoor (a website where employees post anonymous reviews on their employers), to identify how job satisfaction is swayed by the company management, salary and culture in the high-tech sector.