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Final Project

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Abstract

The paper focuses on analyzing a company; Southwest Airlines which is an American airline company. The paper focuses on evaluating the organization’s functionality based on Morgan’s eight metaphors, and the organization structures based Bolman and Deal’s frames. The two selected frames in this case include structural frame and human resource frame. The evaluation establishes the company efficiency based on the eight Morgan metaphors and great success based on Bolman and Deal’s frames. The organization has adopted servant leadership where even employees are required to make personal decisions. Thus, the paper recommend for management control in the decision-making processes to prevent expensive mistakes.

Final Project: Southwest Airlines Analysis

The paper focuses on analyzing a company, Southwest Airlines Inc, based on the eight Morgan metaphors and the four Bolman and Deal frames. Southwest Airline is selected because the company has a legacy of good services to the customers at a cheaper price. The company also has a record of a good financial performance and positive growth. This is a clear indication that the company has a unique form of management which would be interesting to analyze. The paper analyzes the company based on the eight Morgan metaphor making diagnosis of possible issues the organization’s operation may have caused or the success their form of operations may have brought. In this paper I also analysis the company situation based on two Bolman and Deals frames that include the structural and human resources frames. Before this, the paper provides background information for the Southwest Airline, and a rationale for the choice of the company. The paper also provides a recommendation at the end based on the analysis diagnosis and finally a conclusion. Southwest Airlines demonstrates a high level of efficiency, great leadership, effective human resource management, good culture and other aspects that have highly attributed to its success. Therefore, there are minimal issues to be addressed to enhance its efficiency based on this analysis.

Southwest Airlines Background Information

Southwest Airlines is known as the biggest low-cost carrier in the world (Southwest, 2016). Southwest Airlines was established in 1967 by Herb Kelleher and Rollin King and adopted its present name in 1971. Its headquarters are based in Dallas, Texas in the United States (Southwest, 2016). The company serves about 93 destinations located in 40 states that include Dominica Republic, Aruba, Mexico, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. It also offers international services to various countries. Southwest provides a total of 55 roundtrips and point-to-point service per week. “Southwest Airlines is dedicated to offering quality services to its customers, provided with a sense of company spirit, warmth, individual pride, and friendliness” (Southwest, 2016, p.1).

“By the end of December 2014, the company operated around 665 Boeing, 737 aircrafts and served 581 non-stop city pairs” (Swamedia, 2016, p.1). The company also contains a website which allows managing and purchasing online travel. It offers Spanish translation in its travel booking sites and mobile applications to allow booking via phones. It has a number of programs that promote services provision to its customers. They have Rapid Rewards programs that permit members to earn points based on how much they use the company services other than flying. This acts as a way of marketing other services that the airline offers to the customers. The company provides a number of extra products and services that aid in making its services to be more preferred and traveling through their airlines to be highly interesting and convenient. The company operates more than 3800 flights a day, which are managed by a total of 46000 workers. Its major competitors include United Airlines, Inc., Delta Air Lines, Inc., and American Airlines Group Inc. Southwest airline major competitive advantage is the low cost of carrier and high quality services and convenience (Swamedia, 2016).

Rationale for Selecting the Company

Southwest Airlines is selected for this analysis due to its popularity in the airline business. The company has been experiencing exponential growth since its establishment in 1967. It has experience expansion in terms of the network and traffic year after year. Its ability to generate good financial records and to employ various business strategies that have made it highly competitive has enabled the company to be analyzed by various researchers. In this regard, there is extensive information about the airline which is easily accessible online. In addition, the company has its own website where it gives more information on its operations, history, mission and other management and operation information. This makes it easy for the student to obtain extensive authentic material about the company making the analysis much easier (Tsha, 2010).

Diagnostic Reading of the Organization and a Storyline

Machine View

The company focuses on offering low cost carrier to all its customers and offering innovative quality services to all its customers. The organization is in a constant process of conducting research to identify what customers in the airline industry want and advance their services to meet the customers’ needs. It has also enhanced the goal of shared knowledge and shared goal to ensure that every employee can serve customer diligently at any position and that they can address customers concern instantly without having to inquire. This has provided the organization with a high chance of growing and being the most preferred airline in the US. It has therefore resulted to increase in the organization market share and competitive advantage (Southwest, 2016).

Organismic View

Southwest Airline organization structure contains five levels of management which start by the company’s president and the CEO. This is followed by four executive vice presidents, responsible for major department in the organizations. This is followed by six senior vice presidents that are provided various responsibilities in the major departments. They are followed by 19 vice presidents and advisors in sub departments and finally, they are followed by 15 coordinators in various departments. This implies that the company adopts hierarchical form of governance though servant leadership is highly enhanced to integrate workers views in decision making and organizations transformation. This focuses on ensuring that the company objectives of quality services are enhanced. It reduces delays and inconveniences while offering services to the customer by eliminating the need to consult when a customer is waiting for a particular service (Dearinger, 2010).

Information Processors

Southwest airlines employ low emphasis on formal organizational structure. Normally, leadership meetings are recorded and shared with workers. In this regard, decisions in the organization are made by the management or workers committee, and workers are encouraged to act responsibly. They are also provided the power to make decisions, based on the organization procedures and policies. Information in the company is shared instantly to the relevant individuals to enhance to enhance effective decision making. Although this demonstrates servant leadership, it may bring unnecessary strain to the employees and sometimes they may make inappropriate decisions that would impact the organization well-being, particularly with relation to its customers. Employees may fail to control their emotions in decisions making and thus, they should not be offered with too much power to make decisions.

Cultures

Southwest Airlines has embraced innovative culture where new technologies are always integrated into the organization’s operation system to enhance customer services even further. The company researches on customers preferences and aspects enjoyed by customers which are not provided in the southwest airline and they are integrated with more advanced manner. This has enabled the company to acquire a high competitive advantage due to high efficiency in their services and their ability to provide the customers with what they want in a more sophisticated manner. The company has also adopted southwest Spirit culture which is used to influence the employees’ spirit to ensure that they serve customers in high spirit, friendliness, and warmth. This culture has increased the level of customers’ satisfaction in the company services (Gittell, 2003).

Psychological Prison

Southwest Airlines is committed to offering a stable work environment to its workers with equal chances for personal growth and training. Workers are also provided with same caring attitude, respect, and concern by the organization, as they are anticipated to share with organization’s customers. This has highly made employees to be highly attached to the organization and to be highly dedicated into offering quality services to the customers. This has greatly improved the organization retention rate and also increased its ability to attract more qualified and talented workers.

Instrument of Domination

The organization highly understands the importance of high job satisfaction in the provision of quality services to the customers. In this regard, it has provided its employees with a good working environment where personal growth and training are highly regarded. This assists in nurturing creativity and innovation enhancing the services offering process to the customers. As a result the organization has highly managed to enhance good financial performance and its reputation across the globe (Dearinger, 2010).

Flux and Transformation

Southwest Airlines have embraced innovative culture which makes it to keep on changing its strategies and methods of offering services to enhance efficiency. They have also embraced training and personal growth which gives the employees a chance to grow and to be more creative. The organization has also experienced a number of changes which are based on change of leadership, expansion of its network and the services provided. This transformation has created more employment position and enhanced the growth of the organization in all ways.

Political Organization

The organization practice mutual respect among employees of all level and leaders. There is acknowledgement of varying roles each employee plays in enhancing overall outcome of the organization’s operation. The organization respect and acknowledge the contribution made by every person and thus, employees are inclined to act productively to attain the main organizational objectives. The act of blaming each other and using juniors to dodge blames is eliminated in the organization by turning any problem or conflict to a chance of strengthening the organizational cohesion and training more tips to eliminate future problems. This assists in enhancing work harmony and in encouraging juniors to report problems on time before they can cause severe damages. It also increases individual courage of employing their skills and abilities to address problems at young stage (Southwest, 2016).

Two Most Relevant Frames and Issues and Possible Options

Structural Frame, Metaphors and Options

The organization has adopted a hierarchical organization structure with the CEO as the head of the organization. The power flows downwards to department coordinators who coordinate operations in the organization. However, despite of the hierarchical structure, the organization highly embraces servant leadership where workers are involved in the organization decision making. The organization leaders are involved in setting meetings and discussion different organization issues. The meeting proceedings are then shared with employees via tape recording. Thus the organization employees are full aware of the management plans toward the organization development. Beside this, the organization does not embrace formalities too much. Leaders create an environment which integrates responsibility with humor. The organization’s most distinctive competency is its aptitude to sustain and build relationships typified by mutual respect, shared knowledge, and shared goals. It centers more on relationships which the organization considers as the fundamental driver of coordination, leadership, strategy, and culture. Workers in the organization embrace their links with each other, which permits them to more effectively coordinate across all functions. The organization also embraces and fosters empowerment, fun, individuality, and creativity. Shared knowledge in the organization regards how the tasks of a group or individual are associated to all other tasks. This permits the workforce to act based on the total process. This allows the workforce to be extra coordinated, efficient, and competent as compared to Southwest competitors. Through this structural frame, the organization has managed to nature its culture, to define politics, instruments of dominance, and to influence the psychology of workers. The organization trusts that front line leadership can play a crucial role in the success of the organization. Thus the company contains more supervisors in each frontline worker compared to any other airline in the market (Gittell, 2003).

Interrelationships of Frames, Metaphors, and Options

The organization has established a mutual relation among the employees and also between the employees and the management. This has highly enhanced relations in the organization which are regarded as the main drive to the organization success. The respect also encourages all workers to value their colleagues’ contributions and encourages all workers to cogitate the effect of their actions on others. It strengthens the propensity to act in the best interest of the general work process. Organization anticipates their employees to offer quality services to the organization’s customers in a similar manner like they are treated by the organization. The organization has been employing various practices to enhance high performance relationships. These practices include leading the organization with caring attitude and credibility. Caring and credibility are employed as the aptitude to instigate trust and the aptitude to instigate the belief that the organization’s leaders deeply care about their wellbeing. The organization’s team of top management has obtained the complete trust of managers operating in the field, and that of the workers working in the frontline by being consistent and forthright in their messages to workers. The organization focuses more on employees’ retention and thus, the organization hires talented individuals and keeps on offering them more training. Personal growth is highly encouraged in the organization where employees’ effort is encouraged via promotions (Messina, 2008).

Recommendation

The organization seems to have a great organization structure with a highly computed form of leadership that enhances the organization’s success. The organization has established a leadership system where open communication is highly embraced and thus, problems are highly identifies before they turn to be harmful. However, this form of leadership gives employees so much power than their capability. Although it is essential for employees to make minor decisions to enhance efficiency, the organization need to set limit on the issues employees should decide on and the issues they should consult on. This will prevent organization from experiencing great losses as a result of poor decisions made without management awareness or even their authority. Thus, the process of decision making needs to be controlled by the management.

Conclusion

Southwest airlines Inc. is marked as one of the best airlines in the US. Its success can highly be attributed to its servant leadership and mutual respect in the organization. It can also be attributed to the organization’s culture, mission, and goals which have played a great part in shaping the organization. The general situation of the company can be termed to be excellent and thus, the company does not have various issues to address to enhance efficiency, it only needs to be more careful on the decision making control to prevent future calamities.

References

Dearinger, R. L. (2010). Organizational behavior evaluation of Southwest Airlines. University of Florida Levin College of Law, 1-15.

Gittell, J. (2003). The Southwest Airlines way using the power of relationships to achieve high performance. Internet Delivered Business Book Summaries. Retrieved from < http://www.theclci.com/resources/thesouthwestairlinesway.pdf>

Messina, J. (2008). Southwest Airlines: A culture worth understanding. Retrieved from < www.jamesjmessina.com >

Southwest. (2016). About Southwest. Retrieved from < https://www.southwest.com/html/about-southwest/ >

Swamedia. (2016). Southwest corporate fact sheet. Retrieved from < http://www.swamedia.com/channels/Corporate-Fact-Sheet/pages/corporate-fact-sheet>

Tsha. (2010). Southwest Airlines. Retrieved from < https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/eps01>