Why The United Airlines Failed

The recent debacle involving United Airlines has signaled its failure to the general public largely due to their imposed rules and the power the employees have given to enforce these rules to people who seemingly have little to no footing into the lawful reasons as to why these rules are largely antiquated and legally unenforceable, but are somehow still enforced anyway. Most of all, though, the United Airlines fiasco represents a failure of leadership throughout the entire organization as a whole. This incident will likely be analyzed for years to come as a case study in what can happen when leaders at every level of an organization don’t do their jobs; don’t ask questions; and subsequently stand by as policies and procedures undermine common …show more content…
United was without a doubt immediately clambering to alleviate this crisis, but a string of blunders only made matters worse. Instead of offering a swift and proper customer-centric response, he presented what many regarded as a less than contrite defense, in which he apologized for “having to re-accommodate customers and on the “disruptive and belligerent” passenger. (Zdanowicz & Grinberg, 2017). It showed no compassion and lacked empathy, which is another United core value. A day after Mr. Munoz issued his indifferent response to the incident, he issued another, much more suitable reply insisting that “no one should ever be mistreated this way” (Ibid.). When we are hard pressed to give information to our customers, employees or stakeholders it’s preferable not to send a hasty reply if you don’t have all the available facts. Munoz could have easily supported his employees and silumtaneously shown compassion for the passenger. Instead, his letter defended his employees and blamed the customer despite the fact that a viral video showing a bloodied passenger being dragged from the plane was making the rounds all over social media and news …show more content…
and China) are calling for a boycott (Selk & Aratani, 2017). We know that values play a fundamental role in ethics, and they are also highly influenced by one’s culture. Although it would be stereotypical to assume that Dr. Dao has adopted all the values typically associated with Chinese culture, it does seem fair to say that United Airlines should have employed more cultural sensitivity in how they handled this situation. For example, Dao claimed he would not get off the plane because he was a doctor and had patients to see the next day. Northouse (2016) has indicated that Confucian Asian cultures typically place a high value on in-group collectivism and institutional collectivism. Like Americans, Chinese people also tend to be high in performance orientation (p. 436). Putting all of this together, it would make sense that Dr. Dao was committed to following through on his responsibility to his patients. His work ethic and identity as a trusted physician would likely be very important to him. To be disgraced in such a public way is humiliating for any human being, but Dr. Dao may have felt the offense even more intensely than