Skills and Competence Vital for Employees of Aviation Organizations - Essay Example

Work in a commercial aviation maintenance firm usually involves a distributed system, where different people with different skills, knowledge, and capabilities may need to work together as a team. Employees in aviation maintenance organizations perform specific duties that require intensive training. While employees’ skills and competence are vital for these organizations, improving quality and accomplishing safety depends on employees’ development of effective, cooperative working relationships and interpersonal skills with the other employees’ in the working teams.

This requires dynamic interactions and team coordination during work, so as to improve the effectiveness of timing and process of interdependent actions. Aviation maintenance managers perform management duties that focus on quality improvement, increasing sales, cutting costs, improving efficiency, safety, and complying with regulations. Other duties include hiring new employees and meeting security regulations that ensure that employees work in a safe environment. Effective team coordination is a necessity for job satisfaction, safety, and efficiency.

This is primarily significant in safety-critical organizations such as aviation maintenance firms (Salas et al. 2001). Teamwork enhances both efficiency and safety by identifying and managing individual errors by using the organization’s available resources. Gittell, Civil Aviation Authority, argued that sharing goals and knowledge, showing respect among the employees, and frequent and timely problem solving improves the efficiency and quality of work (Salas et al. 2001). Coordination in teamwork is also improved by effective communication amongst the employees.

Other studies have established that communication is a parallel process for teams, however, in aviation maintenance firms, communication is considered as a critical medium of coordination. This is because communication is an interactive process of generating and interpreting information (Salas et al. 2001).