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Southwest Airlines leadership crisis

Leadership crisis has existed long time before anything and it has been present in every
situation not only in organizations. Nevertheless, I choose a very interesting company that
have had several leadership crisis through time, Southwest Airlines is an American airline
based on Dallas, Texas. Here I will present to crisis the airline went through back in 2011
and in 2018.

The first crisis was the one after 9/11 when the U.S government order all airlines to
ground their entire fleet and shut down for some days and all their employees were
stranded across the country and even when the airline could have avoid any extra
expenses for the time that order lasts, a different type of leadership were shown as they
encouraged employees to leverage their trademark fun approach to business and to help
the stranded customers to enjoy themselves at the movies or places nearby, this
shutdown brought some other complications and many airlines were forced to cut staff,
nevertheless the then-CEO, James Parker, announced three days after 9/11 that the
company will keep all of its employees as well as issuing a profit-sharing payment.

All this actions held by the CEO and the company itself lead to encourage and motivate
employees to keep working there but even better to become loyal to the company
through this compensation method and to apply a class concept, here were used the
sense of fairness which relies into the equity theory, here the perception of fairness was
raised from my point of view, because the Southwest Airline did the opposite to the other
airlines to keep their employees motivated through this hard times for the country.

Another crisis the airline had to manage was back in 2018, this was considered the biggest
crisis of all the times because in the flight Southwest 1380, an engine ruptured on a New
York-to-Dallas trip and shrapnel broke a window, blowing a women partly out of the
airplane and she eventually lost her life and this was registered as the first dead on this
airline in its 51 year history and the first death of passenger on a U.S flight since 2009, plus
the crisis was even bigger because passengers in the flight used every social media to
communicate what was going on and how they felt and thus became viral content, not
good one for the airline.

Although it was a highly stressful situation for the airline, the managing director of
communication got a good strategy to manage this crisis and use fully the ¨evidence¨ and
content the passengers were streaming to find faster solutions and respond better to the
situation, the first step was the CEO sending an empathy message to the family affected
and marked the importance they gave in the moment to do everything they can to help
them, all of their social media turned to a gray broken heart and all the flight passengers
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were compensated with $5,000, a credit of $1,000 toward Southwest airfare and
transportation to their destination out of Philadelphia.

Finally as seen in the class a concept that can be applied here can be the interactional type
of justice, because the situation was so harsh that the airline did the correct thing on treat
all their passengers and even more the family of the deceased one with respect, dignity
and kindness, if the airline would have not do this then the problem would have escalated
to a much bigger scale and this also motivates employees to know the place they work in
is valuable and acts based on ethics.

Resources:

Fladung, T. (2018, November 29). 2018’s Best Crisis Management Response: The Crisis

Was Live, Southwest Airlines Was Ready. Hennes Communications.

https://www.crisiscommunications.com/2018s-best-crisis-management-response-

the-crisis-was-live-southwest-airlines-was-ready/

How Leaders Emerge During Challenging Times – 3 Case Studies. (2020, October 9).

University of Notredame.

https://www.notredameonline.com/resources/leadership-and-management/how-

leaders-emerge-during-challenging-times/