BRITISH AIRWAYS

British Airways

British Airways

Introduction

British Airways plc (BA) is the world's biggest international airline, carrying more passengers from one country to another than any of its competitors. British Airways is a scheduled international passenger airline. The Company's main activity is the operation of international and domestic scheduled passenger airline services. The Company's principal place of business is London Heathrow, which handles more international passengers than any other airport in the world. Because its US competitors carry so many passengers on domestic flights, it is the fifth biggest in terms of overall passengers (in terms of revenue passenger kilometres).

British Airways worldwide route network covers some 233 destinations in 96 countries. Its two main operating bases are London's two main airports, Heathrow (the world's biggest international airport) and Gatwick. BA also operates a worldwide air cargo business in conjunction with its scheduled passenger services. The cargo operation, which carries both freight and mail, is run independently of the passenger business, although cargo generally is carried in the holds of aircraft flying scheduled passenger services. The Company also provides other services to outside parties, such as aircraft maintenance. In addition, the Company's operations include certain ancillary airline activities.

Task I:

British Airways has a formalised structure with precise rules and procedures, due to its size and the global scope of its activity. A major change in the last years has been the reduction of its management layers, between the chief executive and the front line who interface with customers. It now has small ad hoc groups working in parallel with the formal structure, with responsibilities that cut across different functions, or in some case duplicated these functions.

British Airways have a board and a leadership team. Whilst the structure would lend itself to a hierarchical one, British Airways encourage employee participation, suggesting a top down and bottom up approach. British Airways are set up as a traditional hierarchical structure, however management is moving into collective decision making, involving all employees. BA operates from many airports, but its main base is at London Heathrow.

British Airways is defined as a role culture reflecting functional differentiation in its structure. There are two cultures in British Airways, one high in the sky at 30,000 feet which is highly co-operative, service oriented focused on passengers and the other one on the ground highly competitive, politicised head-to-head with the external world, where it seems that fiercely adversarial values reigned. Middle management, which is key to the implementation of any strategy and the outcome of cultural change, is still ruled by separate functions and at the top all the weight still goes on the individualist functions of high finance and take-over.

The reason for BA's success lies in the radical change of its culture prompted by a marketing orientation. Customers have been posed at the centre of the attention and individuals have been empowered to take initiative. It learned to respond to customers' requirements and co-act on individuals' initiatives.

The traditional style at BA had been bureaucratic, distancing, highly segmented between functions and characterised by low ...