Southwest Airlines
Jeff Wirtz
COM/530
September 5, 2011
Charles Dudek
Abstract
Southwest Airlines
The Southwest Way
The mission of Southwest Airlines is dedication to the highest quality of Customer Service delivered with a sense of warmth, friendliness, individual pride, and Company Spirit (About Southwest, 2011). Southwest airlines culture is based on three qualities - Warrior Spirit, Servant’s Heart, and Luving attitude. Southwest believes so much in its values that they created a culture committee made up of representatives from all locations that meets quarterly in Dallas to give ideas on how to keep the culture strong (Kelly, 2011). Southwest’s employees’ first customer second principle states that “Employees could only serve their Customers with exemplary and memorable Customer service if Employees were confident they were supported in the same way” (Mcgee-Cooper, Trammel, & Cooper, 2008, 52). The employees’ personal well being is the most important matter for Southwest management – the entire company places significant importance on every job. For example SWA has the most supervisors per frontline employee than any other airline in the country. They have managerial authority but also perform the work of frontline workers. The supervisors spend more time than their counterparts engaged in coaching in the form of problem solving and advising the frontline employees (Gittell, 2005).
Communication in Organizations
Organizational communication can be determined by culture in several ways, one example is by management style. Is there an “open door” policy that allows all levels of employees to communicate freely with senior management or is it more of the “chain of command” type of communication, which employees must go through their immediate boss. These types of cultures can lead to the types of channels or direction used to communicate within the company, such as upward or downward communication channels. Upward communication...