British Airways

British Airways
Abiola Adeshokan
Dr. J: Jim Jeremiah
MFV 1249A
January 14th, 2013

British Airways
In the case study, the British Airways which was swipe car debacle, British airways (BA) introduced a system for electronic clocking in that would record employee started and finished work for the day. This was a unilateral decision made by BA management to introduced swipe card, but, lack proper and adequate consultation with the affected staff members (Palmer, Dunford, & Akin, 2009). As a result, the BA staff held a twenty-four hour wildcat strike which caused BA to to cancel its services to over 10,000 passengers stranded. The lack of change management is apparent and ways of avoiding a repeat of this situation is addressed (Aspery, 1990).
The changes in perspective such as organizational development, change management, sense making, processual and contingency from the wildcat strike cats are the key issues to understand. For instance, organizational development process of BA was questionable at the time of the strike. This is because all parties involved in the smooth running of the airline operations which includes the staff and management were unintentional not involved, thus the organizations plans to increase in efficiency resulted in a disaster. The mission, vision, strategies and goals of the management in regards to swipe card introduction was not in unison with the expectation of the staff members in terms of proper consultation before introducing a key system that was going to affect their working and life patterns. The objectives of BA management should have gone hand in hand with every staff members in order to make the swipe card implementation a success. “Different groups will apply their own retrospective sense-making in order to understand emerging organizational events” (Palmer, et al, 2009 p, 207). In change management the BA management failed to get the staff to buy-in. The decision to implement swipe card was made without taking into...