Recommendations
Many questions have been rising concerning all these organizational behavior issues and some even question whether the Canadian Airline can be saved or not. We came up with the idea that all hopes should not be lost as some crucial initiatives can surely put Air Canada right on track. But one thing is certain: they will need to act as soon as possible before it gets too late.
The idea is that the airline should improve in three domains: They will have to motivate their employees a lot more; they will have to improve their leadership and finally they will have to modify their management style.
We would recommend the management to apply all the several theories of motivation to be able to re-motivate the employees and limit the consequences of their dissatisfactions:
Here will be stressed the usefulness of the motivators and the usage of rewards and punishments to encourage their desired or undesired behavior. As [person we interviewed] has confirmed to us, unlike what the numerous researches on motivation theories tell us, the combination of punishments and rewards can be very effective and will still be seen as very influential in most of the companies. What surely happened here is that the management may have underestimated the importance of money as a motivator (our interviewed persons did not want to reveal so much about it) which is a critical mistake as pay is one of the most important if not the most important motivator that contributes not only to performance, but also to the employees self-esteems. The management could therefore use pay more often to shape a stronger, more motivated workforce, and encourage the workers to perform better. While money may be far from being the only motivator, it is still a very powerful and dominant one that can make an impact in an organization.
What is said about cash is that it can persuade the people of an organization to work harder towards accomplishing common organizational goals and failing to apply it may result in much less motivated workers that will therefore reduce their contribution to the development of the company. In Air Canada’s case here we can observe this incident and think that it might be one of the explanations of their recent financial crisis.
As [name of professor interviewed], professor at John Molson School of Business said, every individuals have specific needs, some being more important than others. According to him the most important needs that an individual will look for will include security needs such as job security, medical, retirement plans and social needs. Then will arise some secondary needs such as self-accomplishment, promotions and social status.
What Air Canada’s management should do is that they should make sure that the psychological needs of the employees are satisfied and that their job is secure enough. For instance, if the employees’ job were secure, the three employees mentioned previously would have not gotten into trouble and would have not been mistreated. While we were analyzing this specific incident, we noticed that the job security of Air Canada’s employees was not guaranteed at all: the three employees were doing nothing but expressing their feelings and displeasure towards the management of the airline, and this act lead them to being fired. The fact that the workers of the company can’t even express their discontent to their “superiors” just illustrates what has been said earlier and shows there is still room for improvement in this specific area.
As McClelland’s theory of needs explained, individuals all had different kind of needs: need for power, need for affiliation and need for achievement. And people with these needs usually preferred situations where they had their personal responsibilities, their own objectives and generally set moderate difficult goals. Most of the time they would like to work somewhere where they would receive performance feedbacks. These individuals like to control and