British Airways Organizational Culture and Leadership - Case Study Example

and of the British Airways Introduction British Airways, an English airline company, was founded in 1972 through the Aviation Act in 1971. The company was formed through the merging of British European Airways and the British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) companies. Consequently, after forming this airline, the two companies, British European Airways and the British Overseas Airways Corporation, were dissolved in the year 1974. British Airways was formed with the expectations that it would manage the flights within Europe. Lord King, who was its Chairman by then, considered the company as the largest airline enterprise in Great Britain following its privatization in the year 1982. The company was able to achieve much success and enjoy its profits until in 1984 when the Virgin Atlantic entered the market. The British Airways faced stiff competition from this company as it also offered quality airline services within Europe. Unfortunately, the number of competitors increased greatly with time hence becoming a great challenge to this company. However, the company expanded all its routes internally to ensure that it outdid all its competitors in the market. British Airways achieved great success after it acquired Iberia since it was able to expand its routes to most parts of the world. Currently, they have employed an approximate of 57,000 employees to their company to ensure that all its activities are carried out effectively to increase the profits gained, offer quality services to its customers, and to increase the growth and development of the company. Culture British Airways motto, “Fly to serve” inspires it to serve their customers to its level best in ensuring that it satisfies all their needs. Consequently, the company has its set policies and strategies, in which all employees follow to the latter. Among its policies is to ensure that it provides the best service to its customers since they are the backbone to this organization. All employees in British Airways must comply with the set rules and regulations by the company and ensure that their behavior is presentable to improve its image. As Hofstede’s Theory Organizational Culture states, all employees in an organization must ensure that their behavior and actions are in line with the set rules of an organization to achieve its mission and vision. The company ensures that it supports the surrounding community for a better public relationship. Additionally, the company recruits most of the community members to work within the organization and employs the disables to hold important positions in the company as part of the community members. Through the system of divided bureaucracy, all employees are granted a specific duty and role to play to ensure that all activities in the company run smoothly. Discrimination is also eliminated in this company since it is a negative aspect that could lead to the organization’s failure. Racial discrimination, gender discrimination, cultural or religious discrimination and any other form of discrimination of either an employee or customer is an offence in this organization. British Airways has also adopted the SpeakUp survey program whereby it is able to maintain a high performance through encouraging most of the employees to ensure that they do their duties with much care, accuracy, and perfection. According to Shein (20), the British Airways launched a program named “complete 2012” to ensure that it leads to its desired objectives of increasing its profits. Fortunately, the company was able to achieve great success through this program since it realized a £875 million profit in the year 2008. Additionally, this program was also able to improve its operations and focus on the business goals and objectives. As the company strategized, it is its culture to ensure that it changes its air travels beyond recognition to attract and serve more customers to the company. The company has also ensured that it initiates development programs each year in order to change its path to achieve success in the future. It is the culture of British Airways staff members to be united and cooperate in all their activities in providing the best services to their customers. Additionally, it is its dream to ensure that the company is transformed into a customer centric organization in order to achieve much success in the future. Consequently, the company employs determined and highly qualified employees to work for it in order to make its dream come true. British Airways recently cut down all the redundant work and assigned it to the hardworking employees with the intention of cutting down the costs incurred in the company. According to Schabracq (9), British Airways senior management preferred to adapt to the enthusiastic approach in order to come up with the best cultural change that would lead to the success of the company. The company ensures that it establishes a very comfortable working condition for all its employees to ensure that they are comfortable and hosts many events to access their progress and successes. Conclusively, British Company ensures that it actively participates in communal activities such as conserving the environment, sponsoring education in the surrounding communities, calling for peace among the community members among other communal activities, which is very beneficial in the end. Learning and development Learning is an important aspect in British Airways Company since it ensures that all the staff members are educated. By this, the company is assured that the staff members are able to address the issues affecting it. Learning involves improving skills and gaining more knowledge on a certain field with the aim of achieving success in the end. British Airways ensures that it trains its employees to have a collective behavior that would steer the company to achieve success in each of its activities. Training is the only perfect tool that ensures that all employees are able to gain the required skills in the learning process. According to Daft (2012), a program is very essential since it incorporates training, development, and education systems, which would be of great benefit to the company. Henceforth, it would be important for British Airways to induce a program in its schedule that would ensure that all the staff members in the organization are educated and trained. Consequently, development is a long process, which incorporates both learning and training in an organization. Additionally, the development of any company is a long process, which includes the application of skills learnt in the learning process. Development in an organization is a continuous process that is more effective since there is always room for growth and is a long-term process, which even allows room for reflecting the performance of the company. Consequently, the company ensures that it is very careful while choosing its employees because they must choose among the best. Due to this, the company uses questionnaires, surveys, and interviews to come up with the best employees. Additionally, the existing employees are examined and monitored to ensure that all their activities are done in line with the requirements of the organization. British Airways ensures that it comes up with programs that educate the staff members to keep in line with the goals and mission of the company. This training is beneficial to the company as it gives employees the knowledge and skills that are very important in order for the company to succeed in the end. British Airways always aim to be the best company offering airline services all over the globe. According to Imeche (13), British Airways employs highly qualified staff members in the organization to achieve the desired results and reach all targets in its activities. To achieve this, the company trains its staff members according to its specifications. The staff members of this company include the cabin crew, pilots, engineers, and other off board and on board members. British Airways always train its crew and engineers to ensure that they have the knowledge and required skills in order to provide the best services to the company. Additionally, all the staff members must be tested to prove that they understood what they were being taught so that the company comes up with the best employees. Additionally, all the employees must be of sound mind to ensure that they perform all the duties assigned to them without failure. British Airways is very careful while choosing its employees since it targets at maintain a good customer and public relationship through offering the best services in the market. It is also able to overcome and defeat its competitors since most of the passengers will be attracted to its high quality services provided by the employees. Through these achievements, British Airways will be able to achieve success leading to increased development in the end. The company has collaborated with other institutions such as The Institution of Mechanical Engineers in ensuring that its engineers are well trained and educated for the company to achieve success in the end since these employees are able to improve their skills, to provide quality services and come up with new technologies for the company. Through this, British Airways is able to increase the quality of its services hence achieving much success and improving its development projects. Performance marketing British Airways Company does its best to ensure that they observe their employees in order to succeed in the end. Through this, the company is able to achieve its set goals and objectives as the employees are motivated to work hard in ensuring that the company is very successful. Additionally, the company spends a lot of money every year in educating the staff member to ensure that they provide the best services to the customers. To ensure that the company is able to achieve much, it sets goals and targets for every employee whereby they are supposed to achieve them. It also motivate the employees by giving them rewards and ensuring that they are able to access all the required material for them to provide the best and quality services that lead to increased performance of the company. According to Satherley (11), British Airways ensures that it uses SMART in achieving its objectives and improving their performance. Their goals in all cases are Specific in that the company knows what it wants in all cases. Consequently, the employees are trained and requested to comply with specific goals and objectives, which in the end would lead to increased company’s performance. Their goals are also measurable in that the company can estimate the amount and duration in which they target to achieve a specific goal. All the staff members try their best to ensure that they achieve this target before the targeted time in order to achieve success. The goals are also accurate. Through this, British Airways ensures that it is sets accurate goals that need to be achieved. This goals call for hard work among the staff members for them to achieve these goals. The goals must also be realistic in the sense that they can be achieved after the strategized period. These goals must not be overestimated or under estimated to be accurate and achievable. Finally, the goals and objectives must also be time based in the sense that they are supposed to be achieved after a specific time. It is the duty of British Airways management to ensure that they encourage and motivate their staff members to keep in line with the goals and objectives of the organization in order to achieve success and improve the performance of the company. Additionally, the company ensures that it target for a higher goal every time to increase the chances for growth and development of the company. Consequently, it is the duty of the management to evaluate if the company achieved any improvement in its performance and issue a constructive feedback of the results. According to the case study,” British Airways” (14), British Airways was a not profitable airline in the year 1980s to 1990s. However, after sometimes, the company’s system changed since it was privatized in order to be modified and become a very admirable company. Eventually, this was successful since it was able to perform much better after its privatization. It also had an aim of ensuring that they served their customers to their level best and ensure that all their needs are satisfied to achieve success. Additionally, its performance was steered by the fact that the company promised individual rewards in case any employee achieved great performance in his or her duties. The company also offered to educate the employees to gain more knowledge and skills in handling the customers and steering the company to success. British Airline also had its set objectives, which assured them of success in the end. One objective was that the company would become the leading airline in London. Secondly, it aimed at improving their airline services, especially on long distance air travels so that customers would gain trust in them. To achieve this, British Airlines had to be loyal to its customers and ensure that they practiced this loyalty through various heartfelt services that it offered to these customers. The company also had the objective of ensuring that it had good leaders that would steer the company to achieving success through increased development strategies. The company also aimed at ensuring that they would be very competitive and successful in the future and its name would gain much competitive advantage. Lastly, this company valued the interests of all customers hence aimed at being flexible to accommodate all the customer’s specifications, needs, and wants for them to feel satisfied with the company’s services. Additionally, it aimed at improving all its customer’s services and educating all the staff members to achieve greater success in the future. The employees and other staff members are encouraged to be hard working to improve the condition of the company and assist in achieving success in the future. Teamwork Teamwork involves cooperation and working together of individuals in order to achieve a certain objective or goal. British Airways human resource managers encouraged all the employees and staff members to cooperate in ensuring that the dream of the company was achieved. All members of the company must be determined to achieve success through hard work and cooperation. However, for this to be successful, all the members must bond cohesion between them and ensure that they are loyal and trustworthy to each other. Additionally, all the employees must also be focused to achieve success in the end. British Airways ensure that it educates its staff members on the importance of cooperation in every organization to ensure that they work effortlessly leading to the desired results of the organization. Witte and Jaap (20), outlines the various stages of team development, which includes forming, storming, norming, performing, and adjourning. Forming involves assigning a specific group of people with a task that they are supposed to fulfill and achieve whereas storming involves providing or coming up with new ideas which assist the team in fulfilling the task assigned. Norming involves setting up rules, which must be followed during the teamwork to ensure that their activities run smoothly. Additionally, performing is also very essential since it ensures that the employees are able to overcome all their challenges and ensure that they have the spirit of teamwork that would lead to achieving the set goals. Finally, adjourning refers to presenting the teamwork’s results and ensuring that all the necessary amendments are done in order to come up with the best and desired results. Many problems result from teamwork since most of the members have conflicting opinions. However, the problems have to be solved in order to enhance cooperation and teamwork in the place of work. British Airways encourages teamwork since it encourages sharing of ideas and better decision-making, leading to the success of the company. Consequently, the British Airways have team building programs that ensure that employees are able to work together peacefully hence leading to the success of the organization. According to Satherley (73), the British Airways introduced a 90 minutes program whose main aim was training employees on how to work as teams to reach certain targets and achieve success in the end. Consequently, a ‘Hug a Pilot’ program was introduced to increase interaction between the staff members to encourage cooperation within their activities. Through research, it has been identified that British Airways has been very successful since all the staff are united in serving the company and consequently ensuring that all customers are pleased with their services. Through this cooperation, the company has been able to reach greater heights hence achieving great success. Works cited Daft Ree. (2012) New Era of Management, 10th edn, China: China Translation & Printing Service Limited. Print. Schein Edr. Organizational Culture and Leadership. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons (2010). Print. Hall, D., Jones, R., Raffo, C., Anderton, A. (2008) Business Studies, 4th edn, Essex: Pearson Education. Witte Kart and William Jaap, M. Organizational Culture. Essex: Psychology Press, 2000. Print. Schabracq Meter. Changing Organizational Culture: The Change Agents Guidebook. New Jersey: John Wiley and Sons, 2009. Print. Read More