British Airways Case Study

Question 1.

Authors and scholars have different meaning and definitions of organization culture but the popular way of defining organization culture and structure is by analyzing as to how things are done and in what manner. Organization culture refers to the “the collection of traditions, values, policies, belief, and attitudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we do and think in an organization” (Mullins, 1999). Organization culture plays an important role in driving organization in the right direction and in meeting organization objectives and mission by developing and incorporating the supportive and required system of tradition, values and beliefs. Organization culture is of utmost important and tops the list when any organization is about to make changes or revitalize its current culture. It must changes its current culture to adapt to the new change in order to survive and make its business sustainable and successful (Salama, A. & Easterby-Smith, M., 1994). British Airways is one such example that faced lot of troubles and issues in the form of losses and failures and as a resulted decided to merge its business with other airlines and planned for making the required changes in it organization culture. Some of the major issue that BA faced involved improving the image and perception of BA in the industry and recapturing the focus and momentum of external challenges and changes in the environment. It has been suggested that strengthening of the corporate culture resulted in improved employee performance and commitment which has a direct impact on organization performance (Willmot, 1993, pp. 1).

British Airways incurred great losses in the year 1980 due to tough competition among the airline companies and increased fuel cost that was touching the sky. Their pretax loss amounted to more than 240 million UK between the year 1981 and 1982. In the words of BA's CEO the company was losing money at the rate of almost 200UKP per minute which was a great deal. According to research and analysis the main reason behind the continuous financial losses and inefficient operations in the year 1980 was its historical background of inefficient operations and organization culture that was ineffective and outdated. It was actually BA's decision of privatization and merger of two companies namely British European Airways (BEA) and British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) that proved to be a failure and reason of losses for BA. The two companies were different in terms of culture, background and values and due to which it became impossible to implement proper integration of functions and departments which was one of the major reason behind the failure. The organization structure after merger of the companies was based upon departmental or functional division but they were highly disintegrated and lack of common focus, mission and unifying corporate governance and culture resulted in prevention of achievement of organization objective and successful performance. It has been mentioned that majority of the employees working in BEA and BOAC belonged to army and were war veterans. It was due to this reason ...