West Jest vs Air Canada Essay - 1203 Words

How serious is the threat from conventional airlines that want to imitate the westjet culture? What does it take to imitate organizational culture? Can Air Canada compete against westjet’s employee productivity and its relationship with its employees? Ever since its establishment in 1996, WestJet has aimed to operate as a low-cost carrier while employing non-unionized members in a unique organizational culture. In its simplest form this unique organizational culture can be labeled as a labor managed firm. In a labor managed firm employees are owners, and they are affected by the company’s performance through profit sharing. Then it should not be surprising that in labor managed firms, the employees can voice their opinions and actually†¦show more content†¦A labor force in its most basic form, through profit maximizing practices, must be minimized, due to the cost associated with it, in order to drive up profit. And it is because of this outlook that WestJet has managed to outperform their competition, for example Air Canada. This theory is in sync with the findings of Jeffery Pfeffer in his 1995 paper â€Å"Producing sustainable competitive advantage through the effective management of people.† As described above, the organizational culture, the foundation of WestJet’s success, is heavily weighted on its people. Where as the competition, sees the workforce as a cost and aims to minimize it, WestJet looks at their work force as an asset and an investment. Conventional airlines run their business as any other company. They look out for the shareholder’s best interest and do not pay the slightest attention to their workforce. In WestJet’s culture, the workforce consists of the shareholders due to profit-sharing and co-operative environment. By nature capital managed firms will have a hard time converting to labor managed firm. They will have to change a lot of rules and regulations that governs their everyday operations. They will face a large number of opposition by their shareholders. According to Fernandez Guadano (2009) even if they do manage to adopt similar practices as labor managed firms, they will never be able to achieve the same rate of employe e ownership and profit-sharing as their counterparts,Show MoreRelatedOne Significant Change That Has Occurred in the World Between 1900 and 2005. Explain the Impact This Change Has Made on Our Lives and Why It Is an Important Change.163893 Words   |  656 Pagesand the impact of human endeavors on the environment in previous epochs, Tucker focuses on how the exponential increase in human reliance on fossil fuel energy sources over the course of the long twentieth century has degraded the land, water, and air of the planetary environment. From multinational corporations to impoverished peasants burning away the rain forest for land to plant their crops or pasture their cattle, he seeks to identify the specific agents responsible for both pollution and