Southwest Airlines' Culture Continues to Case Study

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There are many examples of this throughout the company's history, all pointing to the fact that employees who have a strong sense of ownership and wiliness to sacrifice for the greater good. Southwest's ability to translate cultural values into financial performance while embracing, even attacking change, in their industry is what fuels their profitability. Through the worst recession in 40 years, Southwest has been able to generate positive Return on Investment (ROI), Return on Assets (ROA), and Return on Equity (ROE).

Sustaining and Strengthening the Culture Given Strategic Decisions Made

The case study shows that while Southwest excels with their culture from a purely customer service standpoint, their leadership and management of maintenance, repair, overhaul and support has been a weakness that in 2007 became a liability. Southwest had failed to create a culture of transparency and accountability to the point of whistle-blowing in its maintenance organizations. As a result Southwest was forced to cancel 4% of its flights in the 2008 timeframe when media issues surfaced.

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No doubt Southwest mechanics and maintenance crews were aware of the cracks appearing in their jets and of the violations, some 30 months old. Due to the cozy relationship between Southwest's maintenance and repair organization on the one hand and the FAA on the other, lapses began to happen in reporting. Southwest needed to define more accountability and ownership for maintenance services as well, and had to change their culture in this area quickly. Making this cultural change required more ownership of the maintenance process, not just the customer experience, which had been the case in the company to this point. Auditing maintenance procedures for accuracy, providing expanded training and more effective escalation of faults with planes to the FAA senior management teams, and creating more transparency of communication between the FAA and Southwest were all needed. Southwest excels at owning the customer; it needed to change its culture to own the Maintenance process as well.

Appendix a:

Table 1: Southwest Airlines Financial Ratio.....

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