Review on Airline Operation

Question: Discuss about the Review on Airline Operation. Answer: Introduction: Airline companies in order to maintain their standard of service delivery and to reduce variability in services provided to different customers, have standardized their service delivery process and is constantly working towards developing dependable service delivery for their customers. However, the cultural norms and values of a specific customer can dictate their thinking and actions. Culture plays a crucial role on the process of service delivery and design and hence it becomes important for organisations to formulate their service delivery policies keeping in mind the nations culture where they are operating. Employees who are imbibed with their own cultural norms and beliefs are more prone to be bias in their designing and delivery of systems, processes, procedures and even communication of the organisation. Literature Review of the Article: The article discusses in detail the impact of national culture on the airline operation management. Since airline industry caters to diverse customers from around the globe, hence they should be aware of their own cultural biases, both positive and negative, on the designing and deliverance of services. The quality of airline services includes the ability to provide high quality structural (such as seats and meals), infrastructural (in form of employee service to customers), and supply chain services (in the form of check-in, transfer and arrival services) to passengers (Choi, Lee Olson, 2015). Airline uses their culture as basis to differentiate their brand in a homogenised world of fierce competition. For example, the high crash rate in Korean Airlines is attributed to the national characteristics of the employee. Since in the Korean culture, employees would not challenge their managers even it means losing their lives. On the other hand, the concept of individuality is strongly en couraged in the U.S. culture (Arif, Gupta Williams, 2013). In order to study the customer satisfaction and their perception of service quality in the airline industry scholars have used service quality measures and customer assessment surveys (Baker, 2013). Airline industry has attracted a lot of attention for the standpoint of cultural norms and values and the impact it has created on the operation of the airline as well as behaviour of the airline crew. According to Hofstede, the culture of a nation plays an important role in the management theory and has been identified as an important variable in the cultural studies of many global organisations across disciplines (Namukasa, 2013). National culture is associated with the country where the airline is based and studies have found that majority of the airline employees belongs to their local culture. For example, in a multicultural country like United States, 84 per cent of the workforce has been born and brought up in America (Hussain, Al Nasser Hussain, 2015). Based on the framework proposed by Roth and Menor, a service firm makes choices in terms of structure, infrastructure and service supply chain, which are followed by the implementation of choices within a service delivery system. It can be said that, the experience of a passenger is indeed a combination of the design of the product and how it is delivered on-board (Shaw, 2016). People coming from high Power Distance culture (PDI), accept hierarchical order, in which everybody has an assigned place and which needs no further justification (Wu Cheng, 2013). However, the concept of PDI is not useful and effective when it comes to employee-boss relationship in the workplace. This can be very well perceived in the Korean airline industry where hierarchical mindset in the organisation has led to poor service delivery and a failure in service delivery. The uncertainty avoidance characteristic makes people of a particular society or culture feel uncomfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity (Karatepe Vatankhah,2014). Both service providers and employees from a culture of high uncertainty avoidance ten to act with extensive detailed planning and risk aversion. These traits do not help in todays highly competitive market, design dominant, fast and innovative service environment of the airline industry. Like other service industries, even in airline industry interaction with customers vary from one individual to another and thus uncertainty is an integral part of such transactions. Most service industries have quality rating firms that evaluates and analysis the success of a particular firm with regard to its service delivery process. This also helps customers in the initial phase of purchasing a service by viewing the service delivery rating and review. The are various dependent variable which are interconnected and plays a crucial role in determining the quality of service in airline industry. These factors include behavior of the front-line staff, service efficiency, quality of meals, comfortable seats and smooth process of check-in, transfer and arrival services. Sytrax is a world recognized brand that provides professional audit and service bench-marking programs of product and service quality. Rating firms service quality assessment can be grouped into three categories they are construction, infrastructural, structural and service supply chain based on Roth and Menors Service Delivery Systems Architecture (Karatepe Vatankhah, 2014). Conclusion: This report thus analyses the impact of national culture on the operation and service quality of airline industry. Various researchers have studied and found out how characteristics of different cultures influence airlines success of service design and delivery. The most important cultural characteristics are uncertainty avoidance, individualism and future orientation. While individualism and uncertainty avoidance hinders airlines ability to provide good quality service to passengers, future orientation strengthens and enhances the services provided by the airline industry. Thus it can be concluded by saying that, there exist an important relationship between national culture and airline service quality. Therefore awareness must be created in order to avoid culture based partiality in the operation and service delivery of airline industry. References: Arif, M., Gupta, A., Williams, A. (2013). Customer service in the aviation industryAn exploratory analysis of UAE airports.Journal of Air Transport Management,32, 1-7. Baker, D. M. A. (2013). 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