Organizational Culture and Structure at Flight Centre: A Report

This report examines the organizational culture and structure of Flight Centre, a prominent travel agency. It explores Flight Centre's unique business model, which emphasizes employee incentives, a transparent structure, and a focus on employee well-being through a health-conscious culture. The report highlights the company's commitment to work-life balance, financial support, and rewards for good work, which contribute to its growth. Furthermore, the analysis delves into the relationship between organizational culture and structure, asserting that they are interdependent and that a strong culture requires a well-defined structure for effective communication and operational efficiency. The report concludes that the company's culture and structure are inextricably linked, influencing each other's success and overall business performance. The company's values and philosophies are also discussed, highlighting their importance in creating a positive work environment.

Running head: UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
Understanding organizational culture and structure
Name of the student
Name of the University
Author note

1
UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
Flight Centre is a well-known travel agent in Australia offering the cheapest flight
available to places domestically as well as international. It also provide other offers such as
holiday packages to families and couples, hotel booking facility, travel insurance and many
more. This has helped the company to gain a lot of name and fight competition in this
competitive industry. However, the growth of the company also depends on a great way on
the culture and structure it maintains in its organization. Thus, the company needs to maintain
a certain type of structure and culture in its organization that can help them gain growth
continuously. This paper discusses the role of organizational culture and structure and its
presence in Flight Centre. Further, it analyses the relationship between organizational culture
and structure by stating that whether it is intertwined or not.
Organizational structure is a set of principles and rules that an organization chooses or
formulates in order to carry out various activities in the organization. According to this
structure, the works and responsibilities are distributed among various employees (Foss, Woll
and Moilanen, 2013). This helps the organization to control the activities and coordinate in
case of any issues. The structure in a company also enables the easy flow of information
among various level within and outside the organization. Organizational structure is also
pointed out as a hierarchical arrangement in the level of authorities, which the lower level of
workers need to maintain. This hierarchical structure allows the organization to avoid
unnecessary confusions and complexities in the organization (Zingg et. al 2015).
Organizational culture is yet another important aspect of a company, which is crucial to its
prosperity (Babnik et. al 2014). It is the system of values and beliefs followed in the
organization that have a strong effect on the employees and every member of the
organization. It is considered as an ecosystem or a flower garden where something worthy
can grow if the equality of the soil and plant is good. Similarly, an organization will grow if

2
UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
there are good values embedded in the employees and managers (Carlos Pinho, Paula
Rodrigues and Dibb 2014).
Flight centre also maintain a unique organizational structure and culture in its
workplace. This has helped in continuous growth of the company (Danisewicz, Reinhardt and
Sowerbutts 2015). The business model maintained by the company is very different from
others. Firstly, it believes in giving equal opportunity to each employee in the profit and other
incentives of the company. However, incentives in the company are base on individual KPIs.
The company also maintained a universal standard system for carrying out her work. The
structure of the company is simple, transparent, and easily accessible by the employees. It
also has village and tribes as integral a part of the structure (Flightcentre.ca 2017). However,
the company also maintains a good and healthy culture in its organization. The culture they
follow helps the employees to be happy at work. The company aims to offer a healthy and
wealthy work environment to the people. It also offers dedicated learning, varied services,
financial support, balanced work time and many more to its employees. The company has
also formulated some of its culture to make their customers happy while trawling. They
understand the emotions of the travelers and thus offer the best in-house travel service for
booking best flights for them. The company aims at three most important work cultures in its
organization such as health life balance, personal finance and rewards for good work. The
company has a health company called HealthWise Global to help guide the employees
through good health programs. The financial team of the company is ready to offer good
financial guide to the members and formulate a good financial plan. Lastly, it has rewards
and recognition team to celebr8 the success of each employees. It also offers travel discounts
t its employees with their families. Such workplace culture has helped the company to grow
at a faster rate over the years of its existence (Flight Centre 2017).

3
UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
There is always a positive relationship between the organizational structure and
culture. Both are intertwined in a way that failure to maintain any one thing wills result in a
downfall of another. They are like a forest and tree where one is nothing without another.
Organizational culture is considered as a wide concept in an organization (Schwartz 2013).
However, it is seen that maintaining a culture cannot be possible without a well-planned
organizational structure. For example, the financial help that Flight Centre provides to its
people is not possible without a well-structured financial system in the company. A structured
environment is the one where communication can flow easily from one level to another in the
company. A failure to maintain that will obstruct the flow of communication and thus
misbalances the culture that the company wants to maintain (Goetsch and Davis 2014). Thus,
it is seen that the culture in the company can only spread is wing after getting a good support
beam from structure. However, sometime it can also happen that the company formulates its
culture that it wants in its workplace and then think about the structure to carry out the
planned culture. Planning the culture of the organization first is better because sometime
these cultures are also influenced by the external factors. For example, government policies
and laws influence organizational laws. Thus designing the culture prior to the structure can
be a good move for the organization. However, from the above discussion it is seen that in
any way organizational culture and structure is interdependent on each other (Carlos Pinho,
Paula Rodrigues and Dibb 2014).
From the above analysis it can be deduced that culture and structure of an
organization is interrelated and influenced by each other, the culture designed by a company
cannot be successful if it is not carried out in a structured manner. Structure on the other hand
cannot be successful if it is not followed by a good culture. This is because lack of culture
means lack of values among the employees, which will automatically ruin the structure of the
organization.

4
UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
References
Babnik, K., Breznik, K., Dermol, V. and Trunk Širca, N., 2014. The mission statement:
organisational culture perspective. Industrial Management & Data Systems, 114(4), pp.612-
627.
Carlos Pinho, J., Paula Rodrigues, A. and Dibb, S., 2014. The role of corporate culture,
market orientation and organisational commitment in organisational performance: the case of
non-profit organisations. Journal of Management Development, 33(4), pp.374-398.
Carlos Pinho, J., Paula Rodrigues, A. and Dibb, S., 2014. The role of corporate culture,
market orientation and organisational commitment in organisational performance: the case of
non-profit organisations. Journal of Management Development, 33(4), pp.374-398.
Danisewicz, P., Reinhardt, D. and Sowerbutts, R., 2015. On a tight leash: does bank
organisational structure matter for macroprudential spillovers?.
Flight Centre. 2017. Values and philosophies. [online] Available at:
https://www.flightcentre.com.au/careers/values-and-philosophies [Accessed 22 Aug. 2017].
Flightcentre.ca. 2017. Our Culture | Flight Centre Canada Careers. [online] Available at:
https://www.flightcentre.ca/careers/culture [Accessed 22 Aug. 2017].
Foss, L., Woll, K. and Moilanen, M., 2013. Creativity and implementations of new ideas: do
organisational structure, work environment and gender matter?. International Journal of
Gender and Entrepreneurship, 5(3), pp.298-322.
Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence.
Upper Saddle River, NJ: pearson.

5
UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND STRUCTURE
Schwartz, M.S., 2013. Developing and sustaining an ethical corporate culture: The core
elements. Business Horizons, 56(1), pp.39-50.
Zingg, W., Holmes, A., Dettenkofer, M., Goetting, T., Secci, F., Clack, L., Allegranzi, B.,
Magiorakos, A.P. and Pittet, D., 2015. Hospital organisation, management, and structure for
prevention of health-care-associated infection: a systematic review and expert consensus. The
Lancet Infectious Diseases, 15(2), pp.212-224.