Homework answers / question archive / Class: High Involvement Human Resource Management   Book Info:    Textbook Organizational Behavior (4th edition) – with “Connect” Jason Colquitt, Jeffery LePine, & Michael Wesson McGraw Hill Education, 2015 ISBN 10: 0077862562 ISBN 13: 978?1308513447   Instructions:   Case Assignment #2 MAN 6327 Airline CHRO Virgin America and Alaska Airlines have recently merged, and because of your reputation for being savvy and strategic, you find yourself in the enviable position as CHRO at the newly merged airline

Class: High Involvement Human Resource Management   Book Info:    Textbook Organizational Behavior (4th edition) – with “Connect” Jason Colquitt, Jeffery LePine, & Michael Wesson McGraw Hill Education, 2015 ISBN 10: 0077862562 ISBN 13: 978?1308513447   Instructions:   Case Assignment #2 MAN 6327 Airline CHRO Virgin America and Alaska Airlines have recently merged, and because of your reputation for being savvy and strategic, you find yourself in the enviable position as CHRO at the newly merged airline

Management

Share With

---

Class: High Involvement Human Resource Management

 

Book Info: 

 

Textbook

Organizational Behavior (4th edition) – with “Connect”

Jason Colquitt, Jeffery LePine, & Michael Wesson

McGraw Hill Education, 2015

ISBN 10: 0077862562

ISBN 13: 978?1308513447

 

Instructions:

 

Case Assignment #2

MAN 6327

Airline CHRO

Virgin America and Alaska Airlines have recently merged, and because of your reputation for being savvy and strategic, you find yourself in the enviable position as CHRO at the newly merged airline.  

It’s been a tough number of weeks for the airline industry, with several airlines coming under fire from passenger rights groups, lawmakers, employee unions, and the general public – all as a result of multiple stories breaking on social media about passengers having altercations with airline staff and crew. Most notable among these incidents was the now infamous forcible removal of Dr. David Dao, a passenger aboard United Express Flight 3411, who was removed against his will because United wanted his seat to give to a United Airlines employee. The incident, as well as the initial handling of the incident by United’s CEO, ended up costing the airline a lot of goodwill with the general public, created all kinds of finger pointing by and toward different stakeholders, and may even result in congressional action on the matter. And of course, this incident and the response may result in loss of business by travelers who choose to take their business elsewhere – the jury is still out on how much lost revenue it will cost the airline. 

During a meeting with your boss (the CEO) earlier today, he tasked you with performing an analysis to assess the HR factors (and by HR factors, I mean a whole host of potential factors related to people such as principles of organizational behavior, practices, people policies, norms and culture, attitudes, etc.) that could lead to a similar customer service disaster at Alaska/Virgin. In other words, your briefing should examine the contributing factors that are likely to lead to situations where there is a customer service failure/incident. Your briefing should NOT focus on whether these factors/principles specifically exist at Alaska/Virgin (in other words, I’m not asking you to dig for information about the airline’s specific practices, culture, etc.) – but rather you should focus on the HR-related principles/ideas/things that could contribute to major customer service failures/incidents either on the ground or in the air. I don’t want you to focus solely or primarily just on the David Dao incident, but rather a host of customer interactions/situations that might ‘look really bad’ if a video of the situation were to get out. 

Remember, you are addressing the CEO of the firm and as such, think about the (in)appropriate use of jargon for the intended audience. 

The first part of your briefing should present the possible/likely contributing factors (I would aim for about five or six), and for the second part (“Key Action Steps”) I would like you to list and briefly describe (in a few sentences) the two actions that you (as CHRO) will be taking in the coming days to minimize the chances of a “David Dao” type incident from occurring at your newly merged and highly awarded airline.   

You may want to read up a bit on the David Dao incident, the aftermath, some of the analyses, etc., to get you started…but this will only help you a bit.

Your executive briefing will be graded on the following:

Total: 30 points

• Style and Clarity: 10 points 
  • Criteria: Information is laid out clearly and is professionally presented. Briefing is free from grammatical and spelling errors and is stylistically professional. Briefing minimizes “extra” unnecessary information and ideas that might act as distractions. Briefing balances the need for brevity with need for adequate coverage of components. Different components of the report are clearly identified.
• Appropriate Incorporation of Course Topics: 8 points 
  • Criteria: For this assignment, you should bring in a least three ideas/principles from this course into your executive briefing. You may bring in more, but I also don’t want you to limit yourself to only things covered in this course – I want this to be just like a real executive briefing you would present to the CEO – so wherever that leads you is fine…just be sure to bring in some of the course material. Great assignments will link some of the course material, but not do so in a forced way that looks like you were trying really hard to make some idea that doesn’t fit, fit. What I am saying is that the briefing should partly draw from some content from the textbook. This criteria will actually help you because there is a LOT to draw from – there are a lot of important principles operating here that are relevant to understanding the root causes of some of these issues. The point of this is to figure out how some of the course topics/ideas/principles are directly related to proper understanding and better solutions to real-world problems.  
• Content: 12 points 
  • Criteria: Accurate and insightful framing of contributing issues/principles/factors, ideas presented demonstrate divergent thinking (not all similar ideas), action steps are practical and realistic and show good judgment/understanding of key factors. Briefing minimizes technical jargon or is free from jargon that the audience may not easily understand. Recommendations are potentially implementable and show good use of organizational resources. Briefing appears to be based on reasonable and practical assumptions.