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• Case | HBS Case Collection | March 2018 (Revised August 2020)

  Alaska Airlines: Empowering Frontline Workers to Make It Right

  Ranjay Gulati, Andrew O'Connell and Caroline de Lacvivier

  This case documents the ongoing efforts by Alaska Airlines to enhance its efforts to become more customer centric by empowering its employees using a service framework. It explores how the airline starts with a completely hands-off approach to empowerment in which employees are encouraged to do whatever it takes to please customers. An economic downturn leads them to swing the pendulum the other way and develop a rules-based framework with strict guidelines. Ultimately, they settle on an intermediate model in which employees are given “freedom within a framework.” This forces them to try and shift from a rules-based to a principles-based culture. The case explores not only what they did but also how the framework was rolled out. All this seems to be working until they acquire Virgin America in 2016. Virgin too espouses customer centricity and front-line autonomy but does so in a different way. The dilemma now is blend the two cultures that are both trying to achieve similar goals but do so quite differently.

  Keywords: Employee empowerment; Customer Focus and Relationships; Employees; Service Delivery; Organizational Culture; Integration; Air Transportation Industry;

  Citation:

  Gulati, Ranjay, Andrew O'Connell, and Caroline de Lacvivier. "Alaska Airlines: Empowering Frontline Workers to Make It Right." Harvard Business School Case 418-063, March 2018. (Revised August 2020.)  View Details

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• Case | HBS Case Collection | April 2018 (Revised August 2020)

  The Future of GE's Global Growth Organization

  Ranjay Gulati and Rachna Tahilyani

  Citation:

  Gulati, Ranjay, and Rachna Tahilyani. "The Future of GE's Global Growth Organization." Harvard Business School Case 418-079, April 2018. (Revised August 2020.)  View Details

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• Article | Academy of Management Annals | July 2020

  The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence

  Marlo Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Luciana Silvestri and Ranjay Gulati

  Interdependence is a core concept in organization design, yet one that has remained consistently understudied. Current notions of interdependence remain rooted in seminal works, produced at a time when managers’ near-perfect understanding of the task at hand drove the organization design process. In this context, task interdependence was rightly assumed to be exogenously determined by characteristics of the work and the technology. We no longer live in that world, yet our view of interdependence has remained exceedingly task-centric and our treatment of interdependence overly deterministic. As organizations face increasingly unpredictable workstreams and workers co-design the organization alongside managers, our field requires a more comprehensive toolbox that incorporates aspects of agent-based interdependence. In this paper, we synthesize research in organization design, organizational behavior, and other related literatures to examine three types of interdependence that characterize organizations’ workflows: task, goal, and knowledge interdependence. We offer clear definitions for each construct, analyze how each arises endogenously in the design process, explore their interrelations, and pose questions to guide future research.

  Keywords: interdependence; organizational behavior; work design; Organizational Design; Goals and Objectives; Knowledge Sharing;

  Citation:

  Raveendran (formerly Goetting), Marlo, Luciana Silvestri, and Ranjay Gulati. "The Role of Interdependence in the Microfoundations of Organization Design: Task, Goal, and Knowledge Interdependence." Academy of Management Annals 14, no. 2 (July 2020): 828–868.  View Details

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