Southwest Airline

1. What might account for Southwest’s success?

A few things can be accounted for Southwest’s success. The most important attribute is its people. Southwest has always believed that an important part of its competitive advantage is its employees. Start from the beginning, Southwest has encouraged its employees to have fun and deliver great customer service. The great leader of Southwest, Kelleher, believes that fun is a stimulant to people, and will make them more productive. This philosophy leads to remarkable productivity by the employees and hence makes Southwest’s costs lower than many other airlines.

The second attribute would be Southwest’s unique culture. Since founded, Southwest has always maintained the same strategy and operating style. The unique culture of Southwest helps to differentiate it from other airlines and keep its employees delivering great customer services while having fun at their works.

Managing and maintaining its culture is one of the most important goals of the company. Continual efforts are put in to preserve the culture. These efforts included recruiting people with the right attitudes; training; feed-back to the employees and so on.

2. Why is it so difficult for other airlines to imitate Southwest’s success?

Just like Kelleher said, “Our essential difference is minds, hearts, spirits, and souls.” the most unique feature of Southwest is its culture. Culture of a company is created from the beginning and require lots of efforts to preserve, and this is why it is almost impossible for others to imitate. Southwest spent a lot of attention on managing and maintaining its own culture, and to make the whole company works like a family. Southwest’s culture cannot be imitated simply by copying its practices. This is especially true in the airline industry, which had been characterized by notoriously poor labor relations and authoritarian management. For example, even though Continental Lite imitated many of Southwest’ practices, it had the worst marks of any domestic airline in terms of customer complaints, on-time performance, and mishandles baggage. This is probably because its customers were so used to its old culture and could not accept the imitated one.

3. How does Southwest’s HR practices contribute its competitive advantage?

First, the human resources function