Managing Culture at British Airways

Managing Culture at British Airways: Hype, Hope and Reality

Managing culture is very important in gaining competitive advantage towards the organization by enhancing the employee satisfaction. Some managers are seeking to promote positive attitudes by increasing the employee responsibility through empowerment. These cultural changes may directly affect to the employee attitudes, where this will enhancing the mutual commitment of employees. Moreover, this will help to share a common vision within the work force and that will fulfil the organizational objectives while gaining good will of the organization. Managing culture involves lot of management concerns; where there are managerial tasks need to be fulfilled. Managerial tasks become one that involves establishing control over the meaning of work, where they need to provide prescriptions, exemplars and celebrations. Therefore   it will help to fulfil the functions necessarily, productive interventions within the organization.

British Airways is one of the most widely used inspirational accounts of changing culture. In the 80s and 90s these cultural changes took place, where the transformation occurred during that period. BA s transformation was impressive. In the late 70s and early 80s BA was performed inadequately. Which they had a problem of airlines unpunctuality. Because of this their productivity dropped dramatically compared to the other airline services and gaining large amount of losses during that time period (pounds 140 billion or some pounds 200 million minute in 1981). The major reason behind this problem was the employee dissatisfaction towards organizational. Because of that, the customer dissatisfaction rates were increased.  This is the turning point of BA, where they have focused on to do radical cultural changes within organization to overcome the above mentioned problems.

The main process was focused on creating a vision that would inspire the BA staff and gain the eager of commitment. They have put a great effort on changing the culture of BAs. The first step was ‘Putting People First’ training programme, where the main aim was intended to revolutionise the attitudes of all the 40000 employees. The major challenge that they have came a cross was the hierarchical and militaristic culture of BA at that time. Throughout this training programme they have changed the attitudes of employees and encouraged them by modifying behaviour, to set personal goals, to take positive attitudes, etc. Managing people first targeted on managers and employees aimed to bring their behaviour into a line. The four factor menu of practises used in BA was,

• Clarity and Helpfulness

• Promoting Achievements

• Influencing through personal excellence and team working

• Care and trust

Throughout that BA was able to transform their culture into a larger extent. BA has gained lot of competitive advantage by implementing new cultural changes within the organization itself. This will pave the way to increase the commitment of both the managers and employees, where employees may find themselves required to change their practices and beliefs to order while senior management observe and monitor. BA has succeeded well. It is well proven by BA become the world’s largest and most profitable international airline. 

In some cases organizations need to concentrate and need to take necessary actions regarding cultural changes to overcome existing and potential conflicts, which will lead the organization to gain a higher position in the long term.

List of References

Gruglis, I., Wilkinson, A, 2002. Managing Culture at British Airways: Hype, Hope and Reality, Vol 35, pp.179-194