Team Oriented

TEAM ORIENTED

Team oriented leader is participating directly with the employees throughout the process. The leader is involved in every aspect of the work and is there to offer ideas, advice, and support to his or her employees. This style offers a great deal of teamwork within the work community, and it can allow for a lot of collaboration and brainstorming, stimulating ideas from every member of the team.

EMPLOYEE ORIENTED

 “Employees come number one, customers come number two. If you have a happy workforce, they’ll look after your customers anyway.”

Believing that hierarchy does not work in his company, Fernandes mentioned that “everybody has my contact number so people from errand boys to the senior management will just call, SMS, and email me directly, and they get problems solved very quickly. You do not need to go through layers of bureaucracy.” This breaks down barriers between him and his team members where everyone can see him and approach him anytime. He is the manager, but he is also part of the team.

Tony Fernandes also say that Our people are our greatest asset. They make all the difference in the world. Our driving force has always been our people. From our humble beginnings to the present family size of 5,000 people, we stand united and share one common culture. This one-of-a-kind corporate culture is the reason Airasia is so successful with low turnover rates.

CULTURES & VALUES

In AirAsia, corporate culture reflects Tony Fernandes’ own personality. The Group prides itself on building a strong, team-orientated corporate culture, whereby employees understand and subscribe to the Group’s core strategy and actively focus on maintaining low costs and high productivity AirAsia motivates its employees by awarding bonuses based upon each employee’s contribution to AirAsia’s productivity, and expects to increase loyalty through its ESOS [employee share ownership scheme] which will be available to all employees. The Group’s management encourages open communication that creates a dynamic working environment, and meets all its employees on a quarterly basis to review AirAsia’s results and generate new ways to lower costs and increase productivity. Employee’s frequently communicate directly with AirAsia’s senior management and offer suggestions on how AirAsia can increase its efficiency or productivity. In AirAsia, loyalty is a crucial element that is looked into and encourages its employee’s to be always loyal, honest and work as a team.

MOTIVATION

Motivation can be defined as “the attribute that moves us to do or not to do something” (Lai, 2011). In AirAsia motivation comes from many different aspects. There are so many of aspect that we can see in the organization such as letting know that the employees have done a good job itself is a motivation. Other than that, having the employees a chance to meet up with higher executives and present their idea or showing the progress of their work is another motivation to the employees. A high portion of AirAsia costs was the salaries and benefits for its employees. Hence, the airline implemented flexible work rules, streamlining administrative functions that allowed employees to perform multiple roles within a simple and flat organizational structure. In AirAsia’s case, a flatter hierarchy improved sped-up communication, resulting in an effective and focused workforce.

All employees were offered a wide range of incentives such as productivity and performance-based bonuses, share offers, and stock options. This motivated employees, giving them a sense of ‘ownership’. In AirAsia Berhad, it is identified they are using Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory, which is hygiene and motivators factors. For the hygiene factors, in AirAsia Berhad they practice an open culture-friendly, whereby opinions are accepted. Moreover to the organization their employees come first then customers. Meanwhile, in terms of motivational factors the organization practiced job rotation for example during the interview the interviewer mentioned if a baggage handler would want to shift to an administration job, Tony Fernandes will agree in order they have the passion and dreams.

MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE

It is said that employees that is trained and disciplined in AirAsia Berhad are constantly reminded to face changes to remain in the competitive market. Through organizational learning employees are trained and encouraged to learn as they make improvements, amending and making corrections wherever whenever it is required of them in AirAsia Berhad. Based on systems theory, it states that organizations are open systems and is open to the environment and external factors of personnel and resources (Scott, 1987). AirAsia Berhad has to regulate and control processes to keep these processes stable in order for good performance. The organization put is effort in providing opportunities to it employees and readily resources in order for quick response, creative thinking and critical thinking. However, researchers criticize that difficulty arises in relating organizations structure to performance and there is no agreed definition of ‘good performance’ (Mansfield, 1984). AirAsia Berhad strongly believes in multitasking system and is introduced in various workstations to empower the team to self-sustained on their resources in order to operate efficiently. Management of change is important to be understood in this world of globalization in order to deliver employees competency skills in their respective fields for the better.