The Role of Leadership and Technology in Successful and Sustainable Airline Management: A Case of Two Carriers

Airline-Specific Leadership Approaches

The findings concerning airline-specific leadership approaches revealed that integrative leadership, diversity management, innovation as well as crisis and change management in a global context, has become increasingly important in the 21st century. The recent literature suggests that the topic of crisis and change management especially in combination with risk management and emergency preparedness programs and the respective enabling technologies takes precedence over other aspects. Therefore, one needs to consider crisis and change management a major contributor to effective leadership in the airline industry.

Apart from taking the critical success factors outlined above into consideration, effective airline executives need to align their leadership approaches in a way that allows for innovation and unorthodox problem-solving strategies, empowerment of the workforce, strategic realignment of organizational and individual objectives, and finally an organizational culture of entrepreneurialism (Brenneman, 1998; Bruch, Gerber & Maier, 2005; Lumpé, 2008). Recent findings from scholars in the field of management science and practitioners in the area of airline management suggest that participative-transformational leadership methods, especially when combined with simulation technologies, could constitute an adequate approach to successful airline leadership in the context of crisis and airline-specific risk management. Although the insights gained from recent research allow for understanding of the mechanics of the change management initiated by Jürgen Weber and Gordon Bethune in the 1990s, little has been published since then with regard to the sustainability of the changes mentioned.