Topic: Management & Organization

Instructions:

After reading the below scenario, In solid paragraphs, answer the following questions.

1. After reading all of the information, Identify what kind of organizational structure United Airlines most likely has. (Tall, flat, vertical, horizontal, centralized, decentralized)

2. Imagine you are a consultant that has been called in to propose an organizational structure that might prevent this type of crisis from ever happening again. Using all of your knowledge so far, Describe the type of organizational structure you might recommend and explain why you believe it will sustain effective employee decisions going forward.

3. In your opinion, What caused the flight attendants to remove the passenger with violent force? Describe how groupthink may have played a part. Do you believe groupthink is more prevalent in vertical and/or centralized organizational structures? Why or why not?

4. Define relational coordination and explain how this concept may be critical in describing Uniteds organizational problems.

Scenario:

At this point, anyone with access to a smartphone is aware of the United Airlines customer service disaster. On Sunday, April 9, 2017, United Airlines flight 3411 was oversold. Once all the passengers were seated, the gate agent realized four additional seats were needed to return United employees to their base in Kentucky. After unsuccessfully begging for four volunteers to give up their seats, the United Airlines computer system chose four passengers randomly. These passengers were asked to leave the aircraft. One of them was Dr. David Dao. It was the last flight to Louisville and Dr. Dao had patients to see the next morning. He had upcoming surgery consultations. When the United flight attendant told him he would have to leave the aircraft, he became angry and belligerent, questioning the reasoning and the process. Everyone knows what happened next. Simply put, Dr. Dao was forcibly removed from the aircraft, kicking and screaming, bloodied, and even unconscious at some points. It was horrifying.

These events were horrific enough, but it was Uniteds response that stunned everyone most. First, the CEO, Oscar Munoz, did not respond until Monday morning. Second, Munoz immediately placed the blame on the passenger. In fact, Munoz actually apologized to the other passengers on the plane! Dr. Dao was characterized as belligerent and disruptive.

Meanwhile, as the informal passenger videos were quickly going viral on the internet, the company was ignoring a full-blown customer relations nightmare. It wasnt until Wednesday that Munoz took full responsibility and vowed to make it right.

However, in the years since this event, United has continued to experience customer service nightmares. On April 14, 2018, The Washington Post reported that more dogs die on United Airlines than any other carrier. Clearly, the problems have continued.

Any paying airline passenger has no doubt recognized that airlines have compressed the legroom and seat size in an effort to squeeze as many passengers as possible on every flight. Most flights are regularly overbooked or oversold. The experience of flying on any airline is marginal at best. It would be easy to point to customer service as the underlying problem for United, but could customer service simply be a symptom of a much larger structural problem?