Southwest Airlines

Essay by crabbxx1College, UndergraduateA, July 2009

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Southwest Airlines like many other companies over the years has looked to find the way to keep their companies competitive. Many of the ways they have found to do this is through organizational behavior concepts. These concepts give companies many different approaches to try. Southwest Airlines has found many of these concepts to be very important in the way they run their business. Many companies may not find these concepts successful, but Southwest Airlines has been about to take these concepts and advance its company so as to stay on top in the industry. Which of the organizational behavior (OB) concepts has helped Southwest Airlines the most?Southwest Airlines, like many other companies, has looked to motivation as one of the key OB concepts to use. So what is Motivation? Motivation according to Robbins is, "the processes that account for an individual's intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward attaining a goal (2005)."

This means to motivate an individual you would need to find a goal that they will want to work toward. But the problem with this is that everyone is different. So how can Southwest Airlines motivate their workers? With Southwest Airline they found the easy way is not always the best. Most of us would think that money would be the way to motivate employees. But once they have it there is no goal to work for. So, money wouldn't be the best track would it? Southwest Airlines found that by focusing on a mission, values, and pride it will bring teams together (1999). To strengthen collective pride Southwest Airlines posted hundreds of documents and photos that focused on the company's accomplishments (1999). Southwest Airlines also looked at self-discipline and group-discipline in order to build pride. The results worked better than they ever could have...