Flight Centre Case Study
Uploaded by joe3442 on Jan 11, 2007
Flight Centre
Graham Turner structured the company as families, villages and tribes. The creation of this unique system has also worked to the company’s advantage. It provides incentives based on outcomes. The Flight centre’s system is based on the idea that people work best in their preferred environment within the larger organisation rather than trying to fit them into the company’s mould. The employees believe ‘what gets rewarded gets done.’ they are hard workers but also enjoy the many social aspects of the company including buzz nights, award ceremonies and team get-togethers.
This essay would focus on how flight centre has structured with the four aspects of the organisation structure. Explains how flight centre has integrated the Mintzberg’s five elements to its structure. This essay would also highlights the roles of functional and social specialization. Finally, the metaphors used by flight centre would be discussed.
Structure of Flight Centre
The importance of organisational structuring and restructuring to organisational effectiveness cannot be over emphasized. Effective organisational design or organisational structuring pays immense dividends, no matter how large or small the organisation is (HRODC , 2006). The founder of the Flight Centre Ltd, Graham Turner claims that people are hard wired to work in small groups within larger groups. To understand this unique structure the four aspects of organisation structure, complexity, formalization, centralization and coordination, can be used.
Complexity refers to the way in which the organization is divided into different divisions, departments, groups, or individual roles, each with its own tasks and responsibilities. Vertical differentiation refers to the number of hierarchical levels in an organization (Robbins & Barnwell, 2006). At the Flight centre, the operation level involves retail shops. Each shop involves three to seven people working on one brand which is called a family. The area or a ‘village’ involves 7 or 10 families within one geographical region. The tribal country is a set of three or four villages. Each tribe is a different brand, brands include corporate traveler, flight centre and student flights (refer appendix 1).
In horizontal differentiation, different parts of the organization become specialized in different activities to increase efficiency (Robbins & Barnwell, 2006). All shops of flight centre sell similar services even though the names (corporate traveler, flight centre and student flights) are different which makes it easy to coordinate activities and to communicate among families. Moreover, due to the similarities of jobs within a family, there...