Southwest_Airlines__Organizational_Behavior_and_Communication_Paper

Southwest Airlines: Organizational Behavior and Communication Paper Communications for Accountants COM/530 Southwest Airlines: Organizational Behavior and Communication Paper Southwest Airlines is a successful company that welcomes a fun culture combined with dedication and effort. The company’s culture is very simple, but it is taken very seriously by both the management and the employees. The company emphasizes in valuing people, and trying to keep its employees happy, so they can have happy customers. They believe that a happy employee will create a happy customer, and a happy customer will bring business back to them. It is a cycle they pay attention very carefully. The members of southwest airlines consider themselves more than just a business, their secret ingredient -they say- is the ability to build and sustained high performance relationships between managers, employees, unions, and suppliers. Relationships that share not only goals, but also knowledge, and mutual respect. Southwest airlines’ mission has been state as “dedication to the highest quality of customer service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit.” To accomplish this, the company is committed to their employees to offer them a stable work environment with equal opportunities for learning and personal growth. Southwest core values are love and fun, and the company encourages creativity and innovation in their employees, and provides them respect, caring attitude and show concern about them just as they expect the employees to care about their customers. Herbert D. Kelleher, Co-founder of Southwest Airlines said “Culture is the glue that holds our organization together. It encompasses beliefs, expectations, norms, rituals, communication patterns, symbols, heroes, and reward structures. Culture is not about magic formulas and secret plans; it is a combination of a thousand things." After getting familiar with Southwest’s organizational values, we can say that the company espoused values align with its enacted values. The culture established by the founders did not only stay in paper and got filed in the management area; it is and it has been applied by its managers and employees in their every day experience at work. This has been accomplished with the amazing one of a kind culture that Southwest holds. They treat their employees the way they wanted them to their customers. So they do it every day, and the results have been successful. In Southwest’s case, communication has played and still plays a very important role in the process to line up the enacted values and the espoused values. If it wasn’t for the fact that management was open to communicate with its employees, Southwest culture might not have had the same successful result as it currently does. Communication was definitively a key for its success. Let’s try to picture, for a moment, what if southwest airlines had the idea of this great amazing culture just in paper, but it never got applied to reality. I am sure the company would not have had the same results. Like Colleen Barrett (President Emeritus of Southwest Airlines) stated in 2008, “The Southwest Airlines culture... is our essence, our DNA, our past, our present and our future...If another company somehow managed to hire all of our fantastic employees, that company might see its best performance but still would not match up to Southwest.” (Credit Union Journal July 7, 2008: p. 8)  Conflict can take place in a group when people disagree over two or more options, in the process of making decisions, resolving a problem, or achieving a goal. The causes of the conflict might be the differences in personality, perception, information, culture, and other reasons. Southwest seems to be -if it is not- the perfect company. The culture they have grown over the years is amazingly great, according to what I have read about them, in case of conflicts they are opened to talk and try to make stuff work in a way that both sides will be benefited, management and employees. Southwest value their employees so much that they would do the best they can to have a happy peaceful environmental culture. CONCLUSION As a conclusion, we can say that the founder of Southwest, Herb Kelleher, has done an extraordinary job of creating a unique culture that combines not only humor, and love but also concern for other people, and good, old-fashioned straight talk. The quality of the Southwest Airlines culture, combined with its innovative niche strategy, is the key factors that allow Southwest to achieve the national recognition they have year after year.  References Credit Union Journal 12.27 (July 7, 2008): p. 8 (340 words)  Gittell, Jody Hoffer. "The Southwest Airlines Way: Using the Power of Relationships to Achieve High Performance.” Paperback. Publised by McGraw Hill, 2005-ISBN 0-07-145827-1 Quick, James Campbell. Crafting an Organizational Culture: Herb's Hand at Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines, www.southwest.com