Can Southwest Airlines Sustain Its Approach as the Organisation Grows? Why/why Not?

Can Southwest Airlines sustain its approach as the organisation grows? Why/Why not?

It’s possible but challengeable for Southwest to keep its approach as the organization grows.

The success of the current approach rests on the low cost niche strategy, simple and incredibly efficient operations, unique point-to-point system and avoid-the-hub strategy. All of these are quite unique and difficult to be copied by Southwest’s rivals. Moreover, these strategies, which were built along with the birth of the company, have been integrated as a part of the company value and been proved efficient by the market. There is no evidence that these strategies are not suitable for the bigger company. From the perspectives of operation and admiration, it’s not difficult to continue and develop the strategies successfully in the future.

The other essential part of the current approach is the unique human resources strategy including the candidate screening process which focus on evaluating if the candidates’ personalities and values fits the company’s culture, the employees profit-sharing plan and the happy workforce that makes the employees feel at home. All of these guaranteed the impressive high employees’ productivity and high customers’ satisfactions, laying the foundation on which the low cost and efficient strategy became possible. However, these strategies seemed more suitable for the small company with comparative few employees and simple horizontal organization structure. It’s quite challengeable for Southwest to maintain its unique human policies as the organization grows. It’s hard deniable that the bigger companies, in order to improve the efficiency, usually tend to be more hierarchical, centralized and pay less attention to the individuals. If Southwest changes theses fundamental human policies, it will run counter to the current approach and lose its competitive advantages.  

Can United and/or Continental imitate Southwest’s approach? Why/Why not?

I don't think Continental and United can simply imitate Southwest’s approach because Southwest’s approach is highly unique and based on its characteristics.

Southwest enjoys huge benefits coming from its point-to-point transit system and avoid-the-hub strategy which allow its aircrafts highly punctual and cost effective. Whereas, most of its rivals heavily relied on the Hub and Spoke transit mechanism. Changing from the latter to the former is almost impossible especially considering the fragile state of the aviation industry.

Southwest’s a-plan-for-all strategy is incredibly unique, laying the foundation for its entire low cost strategies. By having Boeing 737 the only type aircrafts it flies, Southwest effectively cut the maintenance, training and inventory costs. It’s unimaginable that the huge airline company such as Continental and United can copy this sort of thing.

Most importantly, Southwest’s unique highly selective hiring process ensures that its employees share the same value with the company. Meanwhile, the happy and flexible environment as well as the employee profit sharing plan make the employees highly motived and productive. Actually, this cannot be easily applied by the bigger airline companies who are usually very hierarchical and formal.