The Organization System - Culture and HR Policies and Practices - Term Paper Example

Hence resource-based view of the firm suggests that if an organization has any resource which is valuable, immobile and inimitable it can be used as its sustained competitive advantage which will work as a weapon against its competitors. Wright and McMahan (1992) identified four criteria for a firm’s resource to provide as a source for sustained competitive advantage as: 1) Contribute positive value to the firm 2) Unique among competitors (both current and potential) 3) Must be imperfectly imitable 4) Must not have any alternative resource to get replaced This means that for a resource to provide competitive advantage to a firm it must be unique, rare, difficult to copy and without alternatives; above all it must add positive value to the firm.

Applying this concept to Southwest Airlines it can be seen that Southwest Airlines has utilized its human resources and nourished the relationship among various levels of staff to offer quality services to its client. Competitive advantage of Southwest Airlines as identified by many authors and researchers is the relationship between its employees which ensures the firm, overall, has a shared knowledge and goal base to proceed on. Gittell (2005, p. xii) explained it beautifully “Southwest's most powerful organizational competency--the "secret ingredient" that makes it so distinctive--is its ability to build and sustained high performance relationships among managers, employees, unions, and suppliers.

  These relationships are characterized by shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect”. Hence this characteristic of shared knowledge and shared goals arrived at by mutual relationship among employees is what makes it distinctive among its competitors. Applying the four criteria identified by Wright and McMahan (1992) on the above discussed competency of Southwest Airlines, we can say that being a part of an industry where customer’s experience matters a lot this is a competency which absolutely adds real value to the company.

Only when employees work according to a shared goal will their actions work in the same direction, which is, of course, utmost important in achieving customer satisfaction. As far as being unique is concerned, in an industry where there’s cut throat competition and every airline is striving hard to improve its services, achieving a level where the resource become an irreplaceable competency is certainly considered as unique. Though the resource is not completely inimitable however it is difficult to imitate.

This is because though every airline works to improve its customer relationships via embedding a sense of shared goals among its employees however doing is perfectly is what only Southwest Airlines is doing. There exists evidence in literature that Southwest Airlines is unleashing its employees’ relationship in such a manner that it promises the firm a valuable and inimitable resource. Hence the resource can be considered as imperfectly imitable. Lastly, since human resources, specifically human intellect, as suggested by Zairi, Jarar & Aspinwall (2010) “is fast becoming the executive skill of the age” it is difficult to find an equally worthy alternative.

They added that there is no doubt many facets in an organization like IT, new processes, new products and services etc however they are well replaceable, whereas the only irreplaceable resource is workforce in