Content area
Full Text
Ulla K. Bunz: University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL, USA
Jeanne D. Maes: University of South Alabama, Mobile, AL, USA
Introduction
With the airline industry in the USA hardly making financial records, how has it been possible for a small company such as Southwest Airlines to completely satisfy their customers since 1971? (Bovier, 1993). What lessons has the management of Southwest Airlines learned in such a relatively short time period? How have these lessons enabled the company to capture such a portion of the market? (Bovier, 1993; George and Jones, 1996)
Southwest Airlines began its service in 1971. Since then the killer-whale painted planes have become familiar to their customers and to corporate America. Besides being profitable, expanding constantly and defending its high place on the Fortune 500 list, Southwest has a very special trait: attitude (Bovier, 1993). The Southwest perspective stems from CEO Herb Kelleher and Southwest's employee motivation.
The purpose of this article is to discover the sources of success of Southwest Airlines as a company with high employee motivation. Three factors will be addressed:
(1) Southwest as an "excellent" company;
(2) the source of employee motivation in this "excellent" company; and
(3) whether lessons learned can adequately address potential future problems for Southwest.
Southwest - the "excellent" company
In Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence (1982), the authors summarize the results of their study of "excellent" companies. Forty-three US companies, taken from the Fortune 500 list "had to be of above-average growth and financial return over a 20-year period, plus have a reputation in their business sector for continuous innovation in response to changing markets" (Pugh and Hickson, 1997, p. 99). The authors then applied the McKinsey 7-s framework to the selected companies. The 7-s framework describes the seven variables "that any intelligent approach to organizing had to encompass" (Peters and Waterman, 1982, pp. 9-10): structure, strategy, systems, style skills, shared values, and staff. Peters and Waterman expanded this list of excellence to include eight attributes:
(1) a bias for action;
(2) close to the customer;
(3) autonomy and entrepreneurship;
(4) productivity through people;
(5) hands-on, value-driven;
(6) stick to the knitting;
(7) simple form, lean staff; and
(8) simultaneous loose-tight properties.
Since in 1982 Southwest Airlines had only been operating...