People Express Case Analysis - Essay Example

& development (T&D) of skills, employee relations, retention and motivation strategies, workplace culture and delegation of power, authority and responsibility. People Express indeed adopted some far reaching HRM practices to achieve organizational goals. The most powerful motivator of the workforce was the requirement to become shareholder of the company in addition to being an employee. Next the company encouraged team work in which 3 to 4 employees were teamed together so that time waste in coordinating work effort could be reduced and employees would be motivated by team spirit.

In addition to these employee friendly work practices and motivators a number of others were also adopted. However the organizational outcomes were poor and questionable. In the first place People Express’s HRM practices were purely based on the textbook theory. Secondly motivation related HRM practices ignored productivity. In other words these HRM practices at people Express were poor growth drivers. For instance work teams don’t on their own produce efficiently simply because they are allowed to be self-reliant.

In fact at People Express, work teams tended to be smugly satisfied with their own performance in the absence of standards of reference. Performance of work teams has to be measured against relative performances of others and this requires common standards to be set up on a priority basis. Broader level of employee participation, minimal hierarchy, in-house expertise and problem solving and job rotation practices were good measures but they were not backed by a system of performance-based metrics.

The airline was operating in a relatively competition-free and regulation-free domestic market then. However, with the ever increasing threat of competition the airline HRM practices at People Express were oriented towards creating a pleasant work environment without a set of well defined corporate goals. Effective HRM practices must be aligned with organizational outcomes