Global aviation human resource management: contemporary compensation and benefits practices

Abstract

The commercial airline is an extremely competitive, safety‐sensitive, high technology service industry. People, employees and customers, not products and machines, must be the arena of an organisation’s core competence. The implications are vast and pervasive affecting no less than the organisation’s structure, strategy, culture, and numerous operational activities. Completed by 13 respondents (executives), this audit presents a series of select findings of a human resource management audit carried out in 2001‐2 and contains extensive data on airlines from nine countries from around the globe. The conclusion drawn from these three bodies of work is that, with the exception of a handful of high performing airlines, the industry as awhole continues to function as per a traditional, top‐down, highly divisionalised, industrial model of operations and governance. This model is manifestly inappropriate in such a highly knowledge‐based service market as the airline industry. HRM expertise in general and compensation and benefits in particular are required now,more than ever, to spearhead the strategic development of a customer‐centric, learning‐oriented workforce that is capable of adapting quickly to the strategic goals and change imperatives facing the airline industry.