Contemporary Organization Evaluation Research Assignment

Contemporary Organization Evaluation
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Contemporary Organization Evaluation
In today's fast-paced and global community, most organizations are faced with changes caused by disruptive technology. The airline industry is one of the sectors that have been largely affected by the innovations in the industry. As an example, British Airways (BA) is one of the UK's oldest and largest international airline carriers. It has a home base at London Heathrow. BA owns a fleet of more than 280 aircraft that flies to more than 170 destinations in 70 countries. The company serves over 40 million customers with a range of services such as free food and drinks on flights. BA has been operating as a traditional airline enjoying a little competition. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, new companies emerged using new attacks such as no-frills and low cost to gain a competitive position in the market than the incumbent. This was a disruptive technology that aimed at out-doing BA from the industry. The profits of the company drastically dropped. To remain competitive in the market, the company devised several strategies such as investing in their traditional business model, attacking back and setting up a different unit to respond to the disruptive technology posed by the new companies entering the industry.
When the BA realized that new companies such as the easy Jet were directly attacking them through no-frills and cutting down the prices, first the company decided to continue investing in its traditional ways of differentiating itself in the market (Markides, 2013). While the new companies attempted to differentiate themselves through low prices, BA continued to differentiate itself through improving the quality of its products and services to the customers. The company could use quality attributes to demonstrate to the customers how unique they were and the customers realized that despite the fact that the new companies were cheaper; the quality of services offered by BA by-passed them by far (Markides, 2013). BA, therefore, did not rush to combat the attacks by lowering their prices but by differentiating themselves in the market through improving the quality of their services as was entailed in their traditional business model (Markides, 2013).
Apart from product differentiation, BA decided to fight back the disruptive innovations brought by the new companies by disrupting the technologies (Taneja, 2016). Even after improving the quality of services, BA Company realized that the new companies like easy Jet were still taking away a significant number of their customers who had been dissatisfied with the high prices and lack of additional services such as hotels and apartments and free airport parking (Taneja, 2016). BA responded to this scenario by emphasizing on the luxury and comfort of its services by launching the first airline flat bed. Now, the luxury at BA Company was enhanced than in the new companies and the disruptive technology of low prices had been disrupted through high-class comfort and luxury that made the customers reconsider the company again (Taneja, 2016).
Besides investing in traditional ways of differentiation and disrupting the disruptive technology, the BA Company...