SPIRIT AIRLINES

Spirit Airlines

SPIRIT AIRLINES

Introduction

Service workers are a key input for delivering service excellence and productivity, both of which can be important sources of comparable advantage. Yet, amidst the most requiring occupations in service organisations are these so-called front-line jobs where workers are anticipated to be fast and effective at executing operational jobs, as well as amicable and helpful in dealing with their customers. Therefore, it is a dispute for service companies to get their human asset (HR) administration right, and most successful service organisations have a firm firm pledge to productive HR management, including recruitment, selection, teaching, motivation and retention of employees. It is probably harder for competitors to replicate high-performance human assets than any other business resource.

SA's generic strategy and supporting capabilities

SA has achieved the holy grail of strategic success: sustainable competitive advantage. Even though the airline industry is extremely challenging, given its disastrous business cycle, overcapacity, difficulty of differentiation, high-risk profile and structural unattractiveness, SA has consistently outperformed its competitors throughout its three-and-a-half decade history. (World Airline Directory, 2000)

One key element of SA's competitive success is that it manages to navigate skilfully between poles that most companies think of as distinct: delivering service excellence in a cost-effective way, at cost levels so low that they are comparable to those of budget airlines. A key challenge of implementing business-level strategies, such as effective differentiation at SA (through service excellence and innovation) combined with superior levels of operational efficiency, is the effective alignment of functional strategies such as HR, marketing, or operations with the business level strategy, Our focus in this chapter is how human resource practices, a crucial aspect of any service business, contribute to SA's success through creating capabilities that support the company strategy. (Simons, 1993)

Method

Over the past seven years, through the in-depth case study method, this study examines SA's strategy and competitiveness in particular its organisational competencies that support the delivery of service excellence in a cost effective manner. It has assembled both prime and secondary data. In addition to researching library and database resources on SA and the airline industry. It has transcribed and analysed these interviews to identify practices and common themes related to the management of human resources at SA, that is outlined in this chapter.

As is inherent in service businesses, at SA, people and especially front-line staff, are a core part of the offering and the most visible element of the service from a customer experience point of view. Based on interviews with SA's senior management and experienced flight crew, It has distilled five elements that form the cornerstones of SA's human resource management and reinforce its service excellence strategy. Those five elements are:

stringent assortment and recruitment processes;

extensive teaching and reteaching of employees;

formation of successful service consignment teams;

empowerment of front-line employees; and

motivation of employees.

Even though these service elements are simple to state, few firms have been adept to implement systems that consign the yearned outcomes consistently and apparently effortlessly, and are hard to imitate at the identical grade of sophistication by ...