Southwest Airlines is one of the largest airlines in the United States. With its headquarters in Dallas, Texas, the airline has a workforce of around 45,000 employees and operates 3400 flights daily. In recent years, Southwest Airlines has overtaken its competitors to become the largest domestic carrier in the United States. In fact, for its entire’s existence, the company has primarily focused on domestic flights. Most of the company’s customers are therefore domestic travelers moving from one city or one state to another. Currently, the airline offers flight services across 89 destinations in the US. These include cities and towns in 42 different states. Later this year, Southwest Airlines will commence offering international flight services to countries in the Caribbean as part of its diversification strategy.
Being such a large corporation, there are bound to be environmental forces that affect its organizational domain. These forces fall both in the specific and general environment. Forces in the specific environment are those from outside stakeholders that affect Southwest’s ability to secure resources and these include customers, suppliers, distributors, competitors and the government. Forces in the general environment are those that shape the specific environment and that affect the airline’s ability in its environment to obtain various resources. They include political forces, technological forces, economic forces, environmental forces, international forces, cultural forces and demographic forces.
All these forces cause some kind of environmental uncertainty for Southwest Airlines with the major sources of uncertainty being environmental complexity, richness and dynamism. In Southwest Airline’s case, there is great interconnectedness between the specific and the general environment forces and this creates massive environmental complexity. However, there is not much environmental dynamism because being such a well-established company, Southwest has enough resources and capabilities to predict the forces that will affect its supply of resources. Finally, in terms of environmental richness, Southwest Airlines has a large number of resources available to support its domain and it can thus be said to have a great environmental richness. In light of this, the level of uncertainty in Southwest environments is relatively low. This is in fact one of the reasons why the company has witnessed massive growth in recent years.
Finally, although Southwest Airlines has tried its best to manage its environment, there is still more that it can do. For instance, to improve its ability to obtain resources, the company should utilize more linkage mechanisms apart from the two currently in use. These could for instance include strategic alliances or even mergers and takeovers of the firms that produce these resources.
References
Jones, G. R. (2010). Organizational theory, design, and change (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN-13: 9780132729949
Gittell, J. H. (2003). The Southwest Airlines way: Using the power of relationships to achieve high performance. New York: McGraw-Hill.
