When Safety Meets Corporate Culture: The Cause of Problems at Boeing

When Safety Meets Corporate Culture: The Cause of Problems at Boeing

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Abstract

A single problem rarely causes aircraft accidents. Instead, they are caused by a cumulative series of events with roots outside the cockpit. At the core of this series of events is corporate culture, an accumulation of the behaviors and beliefs that underline employee and management & leadership relationships. The current paper discusses how corporate culture or neglect of it contributed to Boeing 737 MAX crashes in Ethiopia and Indonesia. This is an important issue, primarily when technical and system aspects of aircraft and human errors are often blamed for causing crashes. The paper adds corporate culture to the list of issues that must be addressed in preventing aviation accidents. In this discussion, the paper draws from a history of crashes experienced by Korea Air and highlights similarities on how corporate culture is at the center of bad decisions that lead to crashes. The crashes contributed to MCAS malfunction, pilot training, lack of candor, and undue pressure. In this regard, the paper recommends that Boeing consider an open communication approach and increase the accountability of decision-makers.

Keywords: Boeing, organizational culture, corporate culture, crash, airline, culture.
 
When Safety Meets Corporate Culture: The Cause of Problems at Boeing

1.0.Introduction

            Corporate culture refers to the behaviors and beliefs that determine how employees and management in an organization handle outside business transactions. Corporate culture is implied and not expressly defined (Gilliam Jr, 2019). It develops organically over time based on the cumulative traits of the people hired by the company. Corporate culture manifests through all aspects of an organization's operations like internal and external communication, hiring and promotion of employees, or through the organization's mission statement. On its website, Boeing defines its corporate culture as a Learning Culture (Boeing, 2021), which can also be defined as a safety-first-culture (Pasztor, 2020) in which the safety of customers and employees is paramount to significant decisions. However, recent events at Boeing have attracted scholarly scrutiny in which the organization's corporate culture continues to be blamed as the causative factor of the recent Boeing 737 Max crashes.

            The topic is important because it shifts the focus of investigative reports from the technical, system, and human errors that lead to aviation accidents to the organizational culture. Since corporate decisions affect outcomes in the cockpit, a vital benefit of the paper is that it highlights how decisions made by management and leadership can lead to crashes either directly or indirectly. Thus, airlines can utilize the information herein to assess their corporate culture and potential to reduce or heighten aviation accidents.

2.0.Problems at Boeing

            On October 29, 2018, the Lion Air Flight 610, destined for Pangkal Pinang, crashed into the Java Sea 13 minutes after takeoff killing all the 189 passengers, including the crew. The tragic incident marked the first significant event involving the noble Boeing 737 MAX series of aircraft, which came into operation in 2017. The incident also marked the highest death toll for any accident involving all Boeing Classic, Original, MAX, Next Generation, and 737 series and the deadliest accident in the history of Lion air. Five months later, the Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, scheduled for Nairobi, crashed six minutes after takeoff killing all the 157 people aboard, passengers and crew included. It remains the deadliest crash on Ethiopian soil and the most tragic for Ethiopian Airlines.

            What is standard across both accidents is that the Boeing 737 MAX airplanes were involved leading to intense scrutiny of events at Boeing, the manufacturer, to establish the causes of the crash. As part of this scrutiny, the Boeing 737 MAX passenger airliner was grounded between March 2019 to December 2020 because of safety concerns. Investigations into the Lions Air crash revealed several systemic or technical problems that led to the unnecessary loss of life. According to Indonesia's National Transportation Safety Committee (KNKT, 2018) report, the crash was caused by a combination of lack of pilot training & reporting, breakdown in safety oversight certification, design flaws, and improperly aligned angle of attack (AOA) sensor. The report indicated that no single problem led to the crash. Instead, a list of 89 findings by the KNKT involved many factors that led to the crash.

A significant finding indicated that the MCAS system could become unintentionally activated, producing a cascading string of effects (Bellamy III, 2019). When pilots were not adequately detected and corrected, the effects caused the airplane to nose-dive. This finding was also established in the crash investigation report (2019) regarding the Ethiopia accident, which revealed that the value of the left angle of attack sensor deviated, reaching 74.5 degrees against a suitable sensor deviation of 14.3 degrees (FSF, 2019). Findings from the DFDR indicated that automatic aircraft nose down trim command was triggered four times without the pilot's intervention (ICAO, 2020).

Findings from both reports shift blame to Boeing, the American-based organization responsible for manufacturing the Boeing 737 MAX series. Indeed, the organization was found culpable by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which proposed a fine of $5.4 billion for defective 737 Max parts and a further $2.5 billion for fraud conspiracy (DOJ, 2021). The good results from investigations reveal a failure within the organization to work on internal and external problems with a concerted effort to cover up information from the investigative agency. Internal communications among employees revealed concerns about the safety and reliability of the 737 Max series. In a public disclosure of internal messages, one employee was quoted saying that "clowns design this (Boeing 737) …supervised by monkeys" (Johnson & Beene, 2020). The released communication painted a disturbing picture of the lengths the organization was willing to go to evasion of scrutiny from employees (whose concerns were ignored), flight crews, the flying public, and investigative agencies, a phenomenon that can only be attributed to the organization's leadership. More importantly, the released messages involving significant concerns were drafted by technical pilots and personnel working to qualify the Max simulators, people whose concerns should be taken seriously if Boeing lived by its safety-first corporate culture.

3.0.Corporate Culture and its Influence on Safety – The Case of South Korea Air

            In August 1997, Korean Air flight 801 crashed in Guam, leading to the death of 228 people. Twenty years before KAL 801, a Korean Air Boeing 707 was shorted down by the Soviet military over the Barents Sea after wandering into the Russian airspace. Within the decade since the Russian incident, Korea Air suffered more accidents: Boeing 747 crash in Seoul in 1983, Boeing 707 crash in the Andaman Sea in 1987, two crashes in Seoul and Tripoli in 1989, and another crash Jeju in 1994. Between 1988 and 1998, the average loss rate for a typical American carrier was 0.27 per million departures (IATA, 2021). In other words, such carriers lost an airplane through an accident in every four million flights. In the case of Korea Air, however, the airline’s rate of loss was 4.79 per million departures, a record 17 times higher than the American average (Song, 2018). In response to this series of accidents, the then Korean president indicated that this was an organizational problem and a national problem.

            While investigations around the problems that caused these crushes revealed many causative factors, the airline did not turn around its public reputation until it addressed the underlying cultural issues that had a significant yet undetected influence on the behavior of crews on flights. It was revealed that mitigated speech between captains and other crew members played a significant role in the crashes (Cookson, 2015). According to Samuelson, Plejert, and Anward (2014), Mitigated speech is a linguistic term that describes indirect or deferential speech inherent in communication between individuals with a high-power distance between them. In this case, an example is a communication between a captain and the co-pilot or other individuals in the cockpit. Power distance forms part of Hofstede's cultural dimensions, ranking Korea among the countries with the highest power distance (Harding, 2016). Essentially, the power distance between captains and co-pilots caused co-pilots not to communicate indirectly or correct the captains in the face of errors instead of resorting to mitigated speech (Cookson, 2015). Mitigated speech, consequently, resulted in poor communication, a key causative factor of the Korean crashes as established by the National Transportation Safety Board (Song, 2018). Essentially, people who grow and live in a high-power distance culture are more likely to resort to mitigated speech, especially when dealing with people in authority. This does not mean that mitigated speech is entirely wrong. It means that in the face of danger, such as a plane crash, mitigated speech may not be as helpful in passing on relevant information.

            In the earlier definition of corporate culture, the current paper established that it grows organically based on the traits of people hired in an organization. Suppose a majority of employees are from a culture that promotes mitigated speech. In that case, the corporate culture in that organization is more likely to have mitigated speech as one of the communication traits that form the relationships between employees, management, and leadership. Therefore, in the case of Korean Airlines, the national culture spilled into the organizational culture, which led to the poor co...