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Case Study of SAir (Swissair) Group

What Role Does Organisational Culture Play in Organisational Resilience: a Case Study of SAir Group (Swissair) 1998-2001
by Raphael Rues, Senior Partner MinimaRisk and RiskResilience

This paper aims to show the role of organisational culture in organisational resilience found at the airline Swissair, head of the Qualiflyer Group, which had to file for bankruptcy in autumn 2001 and ceased its operations by spring 2002. Drawing on the concept of organisational culture, a research study among 180 former employees was conducted. The research measured and examined the specific organisational cultural components manifested by the organisation through a pluralistic research methodology. Along with interviews and the study of documents, the research created a ‘resilience inventory’, from which it was possible to obtain a comprehensive view of the resilience grade of the organisation. The theoretical grounding for such an inventory was provided mainly by the works of Ian Mitroff, Thierry Pauchant, Edgar Schein, Geert Hofstede, Dietrich Dörner, Irving Janis, James Reason, Brian Toft and Simon Reynolds.
Based on the analysis of the variables extracted from the above mentioned ‘resilience inventory’ this paper presents the specific aspects of SAir Group’s culture which affected organisational resilience. The paper will emphasize the research findings which contributed to a continual pattern in the failure of SAir Group organisation to properly deal with the events leading to the collapse and therefore to develop an organisational resilience in order to face the demise.

1 Background to the collapse of Swissair
The liberalization of air traffic in Europe in the eighties led to an increase in competition. Swissair, recognizing the positive aspects of building alliances, spent much of the late eighties and early nineties building up strategic alliances. A major merger project with Dutch KLM, Scandinavian SAS, and Austrian AUA was ended abruptly in the early nineties, most likely because no agreement was reached as to who was going to take lead in the proposed alliance. Moreover, in 1992 the Swiss people rejected at the poling booth the possibility of Switzerland joining the European Economic Region (EER). Any official alignment of Swissair with other airlines in the EER was thus made most unlikely.
This political blow forced the Swissair management to find an alternative plan for the further existence of the airline. An integral part of this plan was the expansion of Swissair to become the fourth largest European airline. Given Switzerland’s small population (approximately 7.1 million) and the well established rival European aviation partnerships, Swissair created its own alliance, the so-called ‘Qualiflyer Group’. Eager to position itself as one of the Europe’s leading carriers, Swissair spent much of the mid and late 1990s aggressively buying into airlines (AOM/Air Libertè from France, Volare from Italy, LOT from Poland, and LTU from Germany) – including a disastrous 49 per cent stake in the ailing Belgian carrier Sabena, a strike-plagued company that had never turned a profit (DGET, 2000). This aggressive expansion plan, begun in 1998 under the name ‘hunter strategy’, ironically led Swissair from hunter to the hunted.
As the network of partner airlines was increasing, structural problems began to affect the operations and image of the group. SAir Group began to have serious problems with the punctuality of its flights, but also with its partners (SFN, 2000; Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 1999). The Qualiflyer partners were soon affected by cash-flow problems and union disputes for which Swissair had to provide compensation or was otherwise directly affected (BBC, 2001). On top of this, SAir Group had a cost structure which was almost twice that of the best European airline; this, combined with the fact that passenger numbers remained well below expectations and the incipient world recession, meant that SAir Group was unable to finance its ambitious plans and accumulated a gigantic debt burden ( The Economist, 2001b).
By 2001, that high-risk strategy, combined with a global economy already beginning to cool and a bitterly competitive aviation industry, saw revenues of the SAir and Qualiflyer Groups collapse. The year opened with major leadership upheavals, many of them within the Swissair Group’s board (The Economist, 2001a). In March of that year, nine out ten board members resigned ahead of the disastrous declaration on April 2 of a CHF 2.9 billion (USD 1.8bn) annual loss for 2000. Within 90 days, SAir Group changed three CEOs. On August 30, 2001, the group reported first-half losses of CHF 234 million (USD 145m). Job cuts and asset sales (almost entire business units) were announced. By September 11 – when the terrorist attacks in the United States all but stalled the global aviation industry – Swissair’s survival was in the balance. Ten days later, the airline calculated losses caused by flight cancellations in the wake of September 11 at CHF 65 million (USD 41m) (The Economist, 2001c).
The final blow came on October 2, 2001, when the Union Bank of Switzerland (UBS) declared a company-bridging loan off limits for daily operations. Swissair’s never-ending ‘cash burn’ was finally extinguished. The result was the immediate dismissal of almost 20,000 Swissair staff worldwide – 7,000 of them in Switzerland. Thousands more had followed by spring 2002.

2 The link between organisational culture and the demise of SAir Group
Those responsible for SAir Group’s collapse were soon discovered. Incompetent managers, greedy banks and 9/11 were considered to be at the origin of the collapse. The collapse of SAir Group is still seen by large sections of the Swiss population (and former employees, as will be demonstrated) as an act-of-God for which few can be held responsible (Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 2002).
Such a view challenges the teaching of Risk, Crisis and Disaster Management: specifically, the fact that disasters are always triggered, using the words of Toft & Reynolds (1997:19-20), by an incubation period, that is the accumulation of an unnoticed set of events. The organisation, and its human members, are not able to recognise the weak signals of the impending tragedy. As Perrow (1984) noted, crises are essentially inevitable, especially in large and complex systems. Reason (1997:61) even argued that their avoidance is not only impossible but in reality cannot be successful due to the necessity of human involvement. If crises or collapses such as that of SAir Group are indeed inevitable, then the more important question is not how can the organisation avoid the crisis, but how can the organisation remain resilient to crises and collapses?
As illustrated above, disasters have an incubation time, during which the organisation may function with minor problems (Toft & Reynolds, 1997:21). The specific organisational culture of the organisation is the key to recognising the weak signals of impending disaster. A biased worldview and a mindset not geared to identifying potential failures will affect the organisation’s resilience in containing the crisis (Schein, 1992:23) .
Once that inner core of the organisational culture (deep beliefs, basic assumptions) of the organisation is ‘rotten’, it is probable that the organisation will fail to recognise dangers and most of all be resilient to internal and external changes in the environment, as the surface activities (behaviour, policies) will be heavily affected (Mitroff et al., 1989:273). The inner core value can be compared to a house and its foundations. Structural errors in the foundations will reduce the resilience of the house in the event of an earthquake or other natural disaster.
The purpose of the research was twofold: to characterize the organisational culture of SAir Group; and to examine the relationship between culture and resilience in the case of SAir Group.

3 Analytical Tools and Theoretical Framework
The characterization of culture and research into culture and resilience necessitated comparative measures of the organisational culture of SAir Group, indicating therefore the need for a combined qualitative/quantitative case study approach (Yin, 1994; Brewerton & Millward, 2001:55). For that reason, an instrument needed to be found that could be used to diagnose culture, and also incorporated relevant cultural features for studying SAir Group resilience. An empirical survey conducted by the author of existing instruments for measuring organisational culture revealed that none of the instruments could be used in this research without major adjustments being made (O‘Reilly, Chatman & Caldwell, 1991; Glaser, 1983; Checkland, 2000; OCQ, 2002). Therefore, the research led to the development of a ‘resilience inventory’ for measuring SAir Group culture, reflecting values that are expected to be related to culture and resilience, and that meet the psychometric requirements of reliability and validity. The framework of the ‘resilience inventory’ was considered to be central, as it provided the necessary scope for the research. It was decided to structure the framework not only on previous works and analysis such as Mitroff et al. (1989), but also to extend the framework to issues addressing specific indicators of group problems such as: de-individuation, prejudice, social loafing, the decision making process, group narcissism and ‘groupthink’ (see References for a full authors list). Since the goal of the research was to measure the influence of organisational culture on resilience, it was decided to construct the analysis on specific subchapters. This decision was made in the light of previous similar studies, particularly Mitroff and Pauchant’s studies (1988; 1989) on the so-called Self-Inflated Corporation (SIC) and Positive Self Regarding Corporation (PSRC). The ‘resilience inventory’ was therefore structured into the following eight items:

The working team behaviour at SAir Group
The relationship of SAir Group to its environment
Early Warning and weak signals interpretation
Coping with the past
The reality view concerning culture and problems
The worldview of SAir Group
The capacity to react to internal / external changes
Human relationships with other business units

This modularity was identified as providing an advantage in the analysis of the data by allowing the author to explicitly address issues of SAir Group organisational culture affecting the following aspects: basic assumptions, values, artefacts and practices.

4 Methodology
As explained above, the complexity of the research required a pluralistic approach, combining qualitative and quantitative methods (Gilbert et al., 2001:33-34). Such an approach allowed the use of the ‘resilience inventory’ framework as a quantitative large-scale empirical analysis, combined with the qualitative focused interviews which not only provided supplemental information, but also served to double check the data collected in the ‘resilience inventory’ (Yin, 1984).
4.1 Participants
The data were collected by an online questionnaire during July 2003 (166 responses) and through interviews during July and August 2003 (11 interviews). The online questionnaire consisted of demographic data and 64 questions based on organisational culture and resilience, after the works of Mitroff et al. (1989), Pauchant and Mitroff (1988), Hofstede (1997), Reason (1990; 1997) and Dörner (1996). The validity and reliability of the instrument were found to be acceptable . The content of the survey was also well understood by the respondents: 34.3% stated that questions were easy, 62.2% moderate and only 3.5% of a difficult nature.
Regarding the online ‘resilience inventory’, 19.9% of the respondents were female. Altogether 60.2% of the respondents worked 11 years or longer for the organisation. Of all respondents, 67.5% declared that they were in a management position. The response rate was 33%. The most represented business unit was SAir Lines with 76 responses (45.8%), followed by SAir Services with 53 responses (31.9%), SAir Group Management with 27 responses (16.3%), SAir Logistic with 6 responses (3.6%) and SAir Relations with 4 responses (2.4%).
4.2 Measurement
As illustrated above, the key aspect was the ‘resilience inventory’ where the questionnaire questions aimed to measure the organisational culture of SAir Group. By mean of multiple choice and 5-point Likert scale, the questions were organised into the following eight main chapters.

1. The working team behaviour at SAir Group
The goal of these questions was to test the working and group behaviour. The first question aimed to measure whether the group insulated itself from external information and opinion. Of all respondents, 72.3% stated that consensus in the group was important or most important. The same importance (72.8%) was attributed to loyalty within the working groups. 77.2% of the answers stated that problems were openly discussed. To the question: ‘Was the working group composed only of individualists’, 83.7% answered no. Finally the place where problems relating to SAir Group were most discussed was within the organisation (50%). The other two possibilities accounted respectively: cafeteria (40%); in private or with friends (10%).

2. The relationship of SAir Group to its external environment
SAir Group’s relationship to the external environment in general was regarded as very important by 75% of the respondents. A similar number of answers (77%) stated that SAir Group was dependent on the external environment. A mere 16% stated that SAir Group reacted promptly to changes in the external environment (total Likert scale 1 and 2). The questionnaire attempted then to measure the importance of internal and external stakeholders. The results gave the importance of stakeholders as: Customers 82%, Management 72%, Employees 60%, Financers 58%, Competition 55%, Partners 45%, Shareholders 39% and Government 35%.

3. Early Warning and weak signals interpretation
These questions measured which early warning indicators were used by SAir Group in order to forecast the upcoming crisis. 39.7% of the respondents were still undecided (note 3 midpoint) as to whether the management foresaw the environmental changes. To the question as to whether the top management was able to spot specific weak signals that could forecast the disaster, 57.6% of respondents answered no. To the question whether the collapse of SAir Group was a worsening of the situation encountered in summer 2001, answers were almost equally distributed along the metric scale; the highest value (5 = strongly agree) counted 26.1% of answers.

4. Coping with the past
This group of questions aimed to measure the extent of ‘lessons learned’ by the top management: a rather subjective question, for which respondents were expressly asked to indicate the reasoning behind their interpretation. 46.8% of the respondents stated that the management knew somewhat (scale 3 midpoint) the effects / consequences of its decisions. However, according to 78.4% of the respondents, the management did not learn from the errors of other organisations (e.g. airlines). Such a view is confirmed by the question asking whether the management employed sufficient self criticism to be able to learn from past actions. 86% of respondents stated that the management did not learn from past mistakes. For the last question of this group only 18.1% of the respondents affirmed that SAir Group management knew the company to its full extent (organisation structure and processes).

5. The reality view concerning culture and problems
The survey attempted to evaluate with this group of questions the mindset with regard to the handling of problems, specifically of operational problems. Operational problems were understood to be the discrepancy/difference between actual and nominal value (e.g. defined goals cannot be achieved). The specific question ‘which of the following statements related to dealing with errors best represents the organisational culture of SAir Group during 1998-2001’ was answered as follows:

50.3% errors and/or failures were denied
39.2% errors and failure were classified as unavoidable
9.4% the organisation learned from its mistakes
1.2% errors of other organisations were particularly intensively analysed.

The next question aimed to measure the quality of ‘business excellence’ at SAir Group organisation at the moment that the respondent first joined the company. This question was not only deemed important to measure the specific mindset of the organisation, but also to trace back in time which were the founding aspects of the organisation. By merging the metric 4 and 5 (agree and strongly agree) we obtained the following distribution:

61.4 % stated that the results obtained were far over the usual norm;
42.1 % stated that SAir Group organisation constantly exceeded its own expectations;
76.6 % stated that SAir Group had lifelong growth.

The mindset for problem solving within the organisation, illustrated at the beginning of this paragraph, was confirmed by the fact that 55% of the respondents answered that problems were solved only partially (metric 3 midpoint). For 56.7% of the respondents the top management was not sensitive to operational problems. Despite the deficiency in handling problems, for 34% of the respondents communication was efficient even in crisis periods; 33.9% answered somewhat (metric 3 midpoint). A further confirmation of the strong group identity was also given by the fact that for 59.1% of the respondents, errors by individuals were tolerated. The solving of problems seems to be for 59.1% of the respondents not directed at the real cause; 30.4% were undecided, answering with the metric 3 (midpoint).

6. The worldview of SAir Group
With this group of questions it was attempted to ascertain the way the organisation’s members regarded the world and made sense of it. The initial focus was given to evaluating how the media were perceived. 57.3% of the respondents affirm that the media very likely influenced the situation beginning in January 2001. More than 1/3 of respondents, 36.3% of the answers, were undecided (midpoint – note 3) about the reliability of the media as a source of information. A drastic 64.3% affirm that the management was not able to withstand media pressure. Finally, for 57.3% of respondents, the media did not report objectively on what was happening at SAir Group.

7. Capacity to react to internal / external changes
This group of questions aimed to measure the ability of the organisation’s members to interact within their working group. 60.9% answered that the organisation was not bureaucratically organised, explicitly that it was no ‘paper tiger organisation’. The positive feelings about the organisation were confirmed by 69.2% of the respondents who affirmed that team mates within their own business unit were efficiently assigned to their job tasks. The compactness of the group was also confirmed by the fact that 82.2% stated that they had an exact job/task description. 56.8% affirmed that SAir Group was efficient in controlling/monitoring their work activities. For 61.5%, the achievement of goals within their department was always measured and controlled.
The strong cohesion of the group is further shown by the fact that for 79.3% of the respondents, their business unit team members displayed a high degree of social competence (soft skills). For 82.8% the knowledge exchange within their working group was excellent. The strong group values are further supported by the answers to the question asking if the respondent could identify himself with the organisation: a mark of 92.9% was obtained. Finally, only 13.1% of the respondents answered that the team members acted as individualists.

8. Human relationship with other business units
This final group of questions attempted to measure the interaction of specific business units with other SAir Group units. For 68.1% of the respondents, their specific unit was integrated into the organisation. By contrast, only 8.3% stated that their business unit was isolated. The question asking whether the specific respondent’s business unit had a similar culture to other units was answered in the form of a standard distribution: the middle value accounted for 32%; the min and max, respectively 10.7/15.4%. 58.6% of the respondents stated that they had a close and very cooperative working relationship with working teams from other business units. Finally, 54.4% of the respondents met with colleagues from other departments at least once a month.

5 Discussion
The analysis conducted with the instrument ‘resilience inventory’, when combined with the analysis of the interviews, allowed the identification of the elements of organisational culture of the SAir Group organisation which affected the organisational resilience. By isolating and analysing the various elements of organisational culture, it is possible to frame the particular organisation culture of SAir Group as follows.
The importance of consensus (72.3%), of loyalty (72.8%) and absence of individuals (83.7%) do indicate a marked inclination towards a collectivist orientation of the working group. The impression of an excessive esprit de corps is further supported by the interview with ‘Person 11’, who stated:
‘everything was fine as long as your opinion remained the same as that of the group; bringing up elements and aspects that would not follow the group mainstream was almost impossible.’
The absence of individuality (83.7%) marks very much the fact that polarization could also assume the proportion of denial or disavowal of the real situation (Pauchant and Mitroff, 1988:57). As we will see later on with the analysis of the question relating to the operational problems, the initial impression is that SAir Group had a style of management that effectively prevented the discussion of differences, and there was most likely a high power distance between top management and managerial workers (Interview Person 7; Schein, 1992:132-133; Hofstede, 1997:35-37). This indicates a potential lack of realism and divergent thinking in group decision making that will manifest itself later on.
The research has illustrated the fatalistic attitude of the organisation’s members towards the collapse. For many of them, the collapse is seen as a freak-event with no incubation time. A validation of such a biased assessment of the situation is also given by the Ernst & Young investigation into SAir Group’s demise:
The Board of Directors did not have the implementation of the hunter strategy monitored by professional risk management. The financial information at their disposal for this purpose was inadequate. Financial and liquidity planning tailored to SAir Group’s earnings potential and investment activities was not in place. An overall investment plan, which would have enabled the monitoring of the hunter strategy’s implementation and in particular the financing thereof, was missing. (Ernst & Young, 2003)
The documents analysed for this research indeed show how on the tactical level there was some risk management, e.g. risk management of information technology projects; but on the strategic level, as confirmed by the interview with ‘Person 6’, an external consultant for the supply management chain, no comprehensive risk management was ever adopted. We shall see later on how such a fatalistic approach in all probability lead to the ignoring of warning signs and causal agents: people were lead into excessively sanitising the world of hazards and thereby ignoring signs of impending danger (Pauchant and Mitroff, 1988:58;Toft, 2002:9).
It is interesting to note how the 166 respondents viewed the environment largely from the standpoint of what it can provide (the only exception being customers), focusing therefore on internal stakeholders. With such a mindset it does not come as a surprise that competition, suppliers, shareholders and regulators were in a second rank of importance, merely viewed as a means for the accomplishment of corporate objectives. We have here an oversimplification of reality combined with a limited ‘intelligence’ activity, characteristic of the so-called Self-Inflated-Corporation, which leads automatically to the disregarding of any interfaces with the outer context (Pauchant and Mitroff, 1988:57). The fact that customers were valued so highly (82%) compared to other external stakeholders (Competition 55%, Partners 45%, Shareholders 39% and Government 35%) could also illustrate the overly strong orientation towards a single value. That is, there was no contingency or crisis mitigation plan in case of a collapse. The fact is that customers’ loyalty to SAir Group drastically diminished over time, specifically during the period 1998-2001, as more and more travel agencies, upset by the low commission margins on SAir Group ticket sales, switched their bookings to other airlines (Tages-Anzeiger, 2001; The Economist, 2001c). More and more customers complained also about the delays, or considered other cheaper flying possibilities, such as low-cost carriers.
The cohesion of the group fostered within SAir Group an attitude close to ‘nothing can stop us!’ (Janis, 1982:36). By adopting such a paradigm, the organisation dealt poorly with the analysis of problems and weak signals affecting its operations (Toft & Reynolds, 1997:54). A marked optimism caused an oversimplification of the complex situation of the airline business . Suppliers, regulators and competition were not regarded as entities which could possibly provide signals for impending crises. By never or hardly checking the consequences of decisions taken, the SAir Group management in all likelihood believed that the deficiency had been corrected, and therefore turned to new problems. This behaviour, termed by Dietrich Dörner as ballistic, has the great advantage of also relieving the individual of any accountability (Dörner, 1996:178-179).
These elements so far illustrate the lack of realism (see the overwhelming ‘business excellence’ confidence) and divergent thinking in group decision making. The sense of business excellence was characterised by a sort of ‘group euphoria’ underlined by the ‘we-feeling’ of the organisation’s members. SAir Group cultivated the illusion of being invulnerable to major dangers and crises that might arise from its Group activities, as demonstrated by the poor handling of operational problems and the absence of organisational learning.
Specifically with reference to resilience, the overly strong group identity cultivated in the past, combined with a an attitude of self-centeredness and narcissism of the organisation, did most likely not only prevent the organisation but also the individual members from developing flexibility in order to be resilient. Such a reactive approach to a crisis explains the emotional impact of the collapse on many employees. The gravity of such behaviour was also confirmed by the interview with ‘Person 8’, who gave following statement in the interview:
The collapse of SAir Group hit me very hard. I wasn’t psychologically prepared. The consequences were that I wasn’t able to communicate and behave in a normal way with my environment [family and business] for a long time. Only at the beginning of 2003 have I regained my former self-confidence.
Negative reactions from inside and outside were quickly stereotyped, leading not only to a loss of reality but also to the unconditional defence of the dogma followed by the organisation. This lead, in all probability, to a shifting of responsibility, attempting to transfer the blame onto someone else’s shoulders (Mitroff et al.,1989:275). As noted by Dörner:
If, the moment something goes wrong, we no longer hold ourselves responsible but push the blame onto others, we guarantee that we remain ignorant of the real reasons for poor decisions, namely, inadequate plans and failure to anticipate the consequences. (Dörner, 1996:27)
The high overall mark of 92.9% relating to the identification of the group members with their task further illustrates the almost sectarian belief that what the individual members of the organisation were doing was right. The analysis of these aspects could be termed in the author’s own words as ‘childhood dream syndrome’. The organisation, as analysed so far, is best characterised as a closed group, with a biased relationship with the external environment. Added to this is the conviction of the organisation’s members that they worked for one of the best companies. In fact Swissair, for most of the eighties and early nineties, was considered ‘the’ Swiss company par excellence. Therefore, the group members, having achieved their goal to work for the ‘best’ organisation, fully devoted themselves to it. That is, there was a remarkable conviction on the part of the group members that everything the organisation was doing was right. It is interesting to note that from the analysis of the interviews it is clear that most of the people wanted nothing more than to work for Swissair. It is almost a love relationship, which annulled any possible and sound criticism of the organisation. The high requirements for joining the organisation, as well as its reputation, reduced the members’ capacity to critically observe the situation, especially since the individualist position within the group was undermined by an overly marked belief in the cohesion of the group. It should be noted that SAir Group had a very high rate of staff retention. According to the interview with ‘Person 2’, the overall annual rate of staff turnover (average of all business units) was less than 5%. This rate did not change throughout 2001, when the collapse was forthcoming. As illustrated in the interview with ‘Person 7’, people left SAir Group only if they were laid off. Very few, most likely individualists, left the company voluntarily.

6 Conclusions
The research has shown particular aspects of organisational culture affecting the SAir Group’s capacity to cope with the collapse, and therefore to be resilient. The research revealed the following crucial elements:

First, SAir Group organisation was too much based around the ‘group feeling’. Such a collectivist orientation led with time to the polarization of different issues: particularly to the cancelling of any individual trait in the working organisation. The analysis and discussion demonstrated how, once the ‘WE’ identity had been destroyed, the individuals experienced various problems recovering. Some of the organisation’s members were psychologically affected for months to come.
Second, the research identified a marked fatalism among the organisation’s members, as the collapse and its weak signals were not forecasted. The mindset of the organisation’s members, too much concentrated on past successes, did not allow the interpretation of any weak signals or early warning indicators, and therefore fostered a marked reactive approach to changes in the environment.
Third, the mindset was not only concentrated on past successes but predominately devoted to its own organisation. SAir Group world ended before the interface with the outer context. The organisation therefore lacked the capacity to understand what was happening in the environment, and to properly interpret any changes initiated by external stakeholders.
Fourth, as illustrated in this research, SAir Group had problems and difficulties with its own ‘organisational learning’. Problems were often demystified and discounted. Mind-set differences between the management and the workforce hindered the discussion and handling of operational problems. The consequences to pay in order to solve or declare a problem were, for the individual, too high to allow him to raise the problem officially.
Fifth, the attention of the group was focused on the media, deemed the ‘evil enemy’. That is, the media are seen, as evidenced by the analysis, as in part culprits for the demise of SAir Group. Therefore the organisation, by focusing its attention on this particular adversary, was able to further foster the already ‘too strong’ group identity.
Finally, the organisation believed too much in its own ‘business excellence’. This would also explain why SAir Group Management decided to create its own alliance, ‘Qualiflyer’, and to compete directly with the three major European airlines. Too marked a belief that SAir Group was all-powerful, all-omnipotent, all-perfect and almost all-excellent (as mistakes were not analysed) most likely led the group into a collective overconfidence. Such a trait, again merged with loss of reality, affected the resilience of the organisation once major mistakes and flaws came to the surface.

The research has illustrated the importance for an organisation to critically assess its position, not only in strategic issues but also in the decision taking of the group. A more humble approach, more critical in the analysis of operational problems and internally sustained by the principles of organisational learning, would have most likely allowed SAir Group to be more resilient to its demise.

7 References

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