How national institutions limit turnaround strategies and human resource management. A comparative study in the airline industry

The influence of national institutions, particularly employee representation, on managers' turnaround strategiesremains largely unexplored in the literature. Therefore, this paper assesses the pressures that affected two Europeanairline companies, British Airways (BA) and Iberia, and their turn...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Santana, Mónica, Galán González, José Luis, Valle, Ramón
Format: article
Publication Date:2019
Country:España
Institution:Universidad Pablo de Olavide (UPO)
Repository:RIO. Repositorio Institucional Olavide
Language:English
OAI Identifier:oai:rio.upo.es:10433/12440
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10433/12440
Access Level:Open access
Description
Summary:The influence of national institutions, particularly employee representation, on managers' turnaround strategiesremains largely unexplored in the literature. Therefore, this paper assesses the pressures that affected two Europeanairline companies, British Airways (BA) and Iberia, and their turnaround responses in a context of economic crisisand austerity, particularly from the perspective of strategic human resource management (SHRM). Our case studiesshow that when national institutions grant a number of rights to employee representatives, an innovative HRM strategy enables the recovery strategy required to deal with internal sources of decline. In contrast, when nationalinstitutions provide fewer rights to employee representatives, there is room for company HRM strategy to challengeor resist institutional pressures. Our research focuses particularly on how coercive pressures exerted by employeerepresentation, according to the legal framework governing labor relations, affect turnaround strategies.