Human Resource (Supporting Organizational Strategies) Assignment

Human Resource (Supporting Organizational Strategies) - Assignment Example American Airlines and Southwest Airlines have taken different approaches to the way each organization handled on-time flights. The culture he describes in American Airlines is one of fear, promoting blame amongst the employees. Leaders demand to know who is responsible for the problem, focusing on accountability instead of the true causes (Pfeffer, 2005). On the other hand, Southwest Airlines is described as breeding a culture of accountability, but from a different perspective than that of American Airlines. Rather than focusing on the individual or group of people who have caused the delay, they make it a point to promote the fact that delays are everyone’s responsible; supporting the mind-set that the organization is a team. Thus, Pfeffer (2005) describes Southwest Airlines as having greater success in its approach, working to find solutions rather than the person or department to blame the problem on. Managing a company’s culture has been proven to be at the root of its successes, and failures (Pfeffer, 2005). While accountability is extremely important in business, who is being held accountable is even more critical. As can be seen in the American Airlines example discussed, the blame-game can transform a well-meaning system into a useless chain of finger-pointing in a hurry. Then, the focus is on finding out who is responsible for the problem, rather than how it happened, to try and avoid it in the future; hence, Pfeffer’s emphasis on changing leader mind-sets to change the culture. key source of competitive advantage,† there is another responsibility, just as crucial to overall business success, that Human Resources (HR) must consider (Pfeffer, 2005, p. 127). Pfeffer (2005) suggests the diagnosis of changes to be made in regard to the mind-set of an organization is one of the most important, yet most underestimated tasks the HR team will