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Essay on Employee Relationship of British Airways (Ba)

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Employee Relationship of British Airways (BA)

• Brief description of organisation

British Airways happens to be the ninth largest airline in the world, in terms of the number of passengers it carries. At the international level, it operates to more destinations than any other airline and therefore is considered as an airline possessing the strongest network in the international market. At present, it is operating to 167 different destinations in 87 different countries around the globe (British Airways Plc and British Caledonian Group plc, 2002).

British Airways has the major advantage of being based in a premier location, i.e. London Heathrow, which is considered the heart of the European air travel and is a major business hub. …show more content…

Collectivism, like individualism, has two extremes ranging from "willing cooperation at one end to a grudging acceptance at the other" (Farnham D, 1993, p36-7) It is important to understand that no company is strictly individualist or collectivist and the links between the two employee relations are not incompatible with each other. Overall, BA has the collectivist approach because large emphasis is on the group. One such example is the nurturing of cabin crew. "Families" of staff are created to work the same shift patterns. This was pursued to encourage mutual support, make cabin crew feel comfortable about their working environment, and as a result, facilitate the production of emotional labour (I Grugulis and A Wilkinson, 2001, p13).

 Unitary or pluralist management styles?

As for a particular type of Management style in practice, this is difficult to say, as there is overlap between the two main categories; unitary and the pluralist. BA has some of the characteristics of the unitary approach in the sense that the different departments consist of teams of people working together towards common aims and there's a presence of strong leadership to create loyalty. Strong emphasis is placed on employee training, which BA takes very seriously in order to create

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