The Culture of Southwest Airlines

Ashley Foster

Leadership and Organizational Behavior
Dr. Jelena Vucetic
August 22, 2014
What does organizational culture mean? Organizational culture is the system of shared actions, values, and beliefs that develops within an organization and guides the behavior of its members.(Schermerhorn, Osborn, Uhl-Bien, and Hunt, 2012) So, between the choices of picking an organization, I chose Southwest Airlines. In this paper, I will discuss Southwest Airlines, what they are trying to accomplish for their company, and what their culture means to the company. So the question is who is Southwest Airlines and why does the culture there make them from other airlines around the United States?
Who is Southwest Airlines? Southwest Airlines was created in the 1971 by Herb Kelleher and Rollin King. Kelleher is legendary in the airline industry for doing things differently than the competition. Before he found himself Southwest's pitchman, Kelleher was a lawyer retained by the airline to get it off the ground - a fight that took him all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. It seemed the last thing Southwest's competitors wanted to see was a low-cost upstart doing nothing but flying around Texas in and out of Dallas Love Field.(CBS News, 2007) CEO James Parker feels that it is all about the people and it starts with finding and hiring the right people. We at Southwest put a lot of effort into our selection process. We received over 100,000 applications every year and hired a very small percentage of those people, maybe 2,000 or 3,000. We used to say that we hired for attitude and trained for skill, which is obviously a little bit of an oversimplification.(Holstein, 2008) Southwest Airlines took their first flight between Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio.(Smith, 2005) The reason why this team created this airline is because they wanted