The airline also operates scheduled services from 34 airports in Turkey though 25 of them handle domestic flights only. Turkish Airlines is the leader of domestic market with the help of its low-cost spin-off company AnadoluJet. Its rivals are Onur Air, Pegasus, (half-owned by Turkish Airlines) and (Company Report 2007).
1.2 Human Resource Problems Facing the Turkish Airways
Turkey Airline is the largest domestic flight company, a market leader in the country. As one of the market leaders in the flight industry, the company is highly reputed among customers and has established a high level of credibility and goodwill in the domestic flight market. The staff is highly competent in their respective profession and departments. However, as identified from existing research, certain issues pertaining to the human resource department to this organisation remains a puzzle. These problems include poor communication and lack of information flow between the various departments, headhunting of key staff members by competitors, weak organisational structure, weak reward strategy and organisational culture. While the main issue of finding reputable international staff remains an issue, the company has adopted a number of human resource management strategies of late.
The company has neglected the soft sides of its business, that of the organisational culture. Today, culture is a core competence of an organisation. Culture being the taking for granted assumptions used to be absent in the company’s routines, procedures, staff training and opportunities for individuals to take care of individual needs are absent. While this has been resolved, it has created a high level of trust and commitments amongst workers. The entire business requires direct interaction with the customers, and it is through a strong culture that cost can be reduced. The recent establishment of career advancement track for workers, performance reward systems, supportive work environment, and defined duties for workers has pushed the organisation into a situation of being up to date with the market demands, though some key personnel are being head hunted by competitors.
- Human Resource Strategy of Turkish Airways
According to Sveiby (1997) a key to retaining personnel in knowledge based-organisation is ensuring that employees had the opportunities to work on interesting projects with interesting careers challenges clearly defined. At Turkish Airlines, the very first priority for the employees is making the working environment a memorable and enjoyable one. According to one of the employees, “the work place is forming a new social group, workers spend about 65% of their day at the work place, our priority is to let them enjoy, feel relax while they work”.
From a review of the company webpage, the Human Resource Department of the Turkish Airlines tends to be very goal/employee oriented and one can deduce that the management believes that conductive workplaces are an argument against competitiveness. According to Sveiby (1997), organisations under such a situation should create and incorporate healthier psychological work environments. This was the same position echoed by Gilbreath (2008) when the researcher postulates that, healthy psychological environments contribute to career conduciveness.
According to Gilbreath (2008), creating strong HRM policies requires creating a strong psychological environment in which employees can thrive. Such an environment requires conducting stress audit, monitoring the work of the environment, matching people and work environment and using teams of employees and researchers to study the work environment. The Turkish Airline should eliminate unnecessary stressors (e.g., poor job design, ineffective supervisor behaviour, poor communication, mismatches between employee’s skills and job demands). The Human Resource Department can also facilitate this through greater involvement, employee’s autonomy, physical comfort, organisational security and recognition. At the Turkish Airline, there is no substitute for these as security of its activities have increased with regard to terrorist treats.
To be critically useful to management, Ellis et al(2007) argue that an overall HRM framework should capture and integrate various functions and also clarify how various aspect of HRM add value to an organisation. Gilbreath supported this argument when the researcher calls for organisation facing communication and job satisfaction problems to institutes good fit between employees and their work environment. Under good fit theory, demand ability fit, suppliers value fit, self concept jobs fit and person group fit should be primary for workers integration and commitments. At the airlines, the employee’s recruitment and retention strategies lay emphasis on this.
One factor that affects the implementation of HRM practices that has received significant attention is culture. Culture can be defined at different levels that range from the group to the organization to the national level (Erez&Earley, 1994).
Culture comprises values and norms that guide individuals’ behavior. Many view organizational practices and theories as culturally bound (Adler, 1997; Hofstede, 1980) which would mean that the values of a country should be compatible with a management practice for it to result in employee motivation. The company has a strong culture, defined by a hierarchy, routines, procedures values and norms (Company Report 2007)
Kotter (1995), in his article “Why transformation efforts fail”, argues that, the bad outcome of most change efforts is caused by the management’s failure to take the company through a series of important change steps. According to the author, these failures are caused by generally underperforming management rather, the researcher postulates that, there is little experience out there when it comes to organisational change processes and as he states; “Even capable people often make at least one big error”. It is important to recall here that, one big problem identify with “The Airline” was resistance to change.
According to Kotter, successful organisation implementing change process needs to follow and adopt his eight-step model for transforming organisation. This model includes establishing a sense of urgency, forming a powerful guiding coalition, creating a vision, communicating the vision etc.
Cobb Gnyawali & Offstein (2006:315) argued that while effective human resource management and policies have, indeed, been linked to strategic outcomes, human resource management theory has yet to link human assets and HR practices directly to the building blocks of strategy and competitive behavior. Accordingly, their model of strategic human resources links both micro and macro literature streams
“The resource base view of the firm infers that firms create competitive advantage by implementing unique combinations of resources and business practices that are difficult (or impossible) for competitors to imitate” from this viewpoint, Human resource practices are key components of overall firm strategy. In fact, the success of some well-known firms has been attributed attributed to their HR practices as a competitive advantage (e.g. Southwest Airlines and SAS).
When faced with conflicting priorities and guided by the rational behind investment theory effective human resource policies need to be put in place to gain employees commitment, flexibility and for creating a “core resources” and competitive advantage to sustain performance.
According to Piercy (1995) the larger the gap between a company's employees and customer's perception concerning both service product and service delivery the smaller the probability of satisfying the customers. If properly implemented, HR compliance is a process. It's a way of defining proper individual and group behaviors, and assuring that laws and policies are understood and followed. This means you must know the laws and develop appropriate policies in relation to these laws. Compliance also means you and your managers need to communicate these policies to the troops, along with your expectations for adherence and the consequences for non adherence. The latter requires specific investigative and punishment procedures.
Effective HR compliance programs have been instituted in to the airline activities. Compliance has to start at the top and trickle down to all levels, so everyone in the company knows that the workplace must be kept safe and discrimination won't be tolerated.
So far, many researchers have been able to recommend the following methods as a pathway towards effective human resource development.
- Keep abreast with the laws. Human Resource policies changes most often and to be on the safe side requires organisation to be responsive to current laws and their environment. This will enable the organisation develop appropriate policies and facilitate communication with employees. At the Turkish Airlines, the routines procedures and values lay emphasis on this.
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The next step will be for the organisation to hire Human Resource professionals with the skills and talents to forge ahead with compliance measures. In the absence of this organizations should contract with human resource consultants. The airline has a strong human resource department, and do not make use of agency personnel.
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Organizations are also called upon to develop a handbook that meets their respective human resource needs and which can be expanded subsequently. The human resource department should make sure new policies are reviewed with the lawyer prior to implementation.
Another important factor can be drawn from agency theory. Aligning the interest of the principal and the agents requires a fair play where neither the principal nor the agents are worst off.
Cobb Gnyawali & Offstein (2006:6) see strategic human resource planning and policies
as vital and primary to an organisations survival. To make this a success, these researchers on their work “A strategic human resource perspective for firm’s competitive behaviour” refer to human capital as a full range of knowledge, skills, and abilities an individual can use to produce a given set of outcomes and at the “upper echelon of the organization, human capital is usually deployed to scan the internal and external environment, process information, solve problems or recognize and seize opportunities”. Drawing from Portals five forces framework, Cobb Gnyawali & Offstein (2006) postulate how internal human assets and human resource practices of a firm help drive the specific competitive activities that result into market advantage.
- Conclusion and Recommendation
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the human resource management strategies of Turkish Airlines. Judging the human resource management strategies of Turkish Airlines with the work of leading experts in the field of Human Resource Management strategies, we found out that:
At Turkish airlines management has created a conductive environment, with more workers participation, career succession planning, career relevant training, greater opportunities for higher roles, job satisfaction, trust and commitment to enhance employee commitment and satisfaction. If these findings are properly implemented by other organisations, a number of benefits could be achieved which include developing a set of shared values, reducing costs when the relationship finishes and increasing profitability as a greater number of end users customers are retain.
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