Jetblue Case Study Analysis

As we saw in class, “a firm is a group of people who work interdependently toward some purpose”. Thus, when an element of this group is not working properly, the firm is in danger. In 2002, JetBlue experienced this situation. In fact, the rapid growth of this company created a leadership gap: “many employees with little supervisory experience were being hired or promoted” (JetBlue case document), meaning that employees were not managed correctly. With this problem, JetBlue realized that all the employees, managers, and supervisors needed a leadership development program to help them become more effective in managing people. One of this program’s foundation is the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator instrument (MBTI).

We can now ask ourselves why

This is exactly why one of the fundamental aspects of the second step of the leadership program (the POL in Action course), is introspection. And this is where the MBTI tool plays its part. By taking a multiple-choice questionnaire, participants can determine the personality type that describes them the best. And by knowing their personality type, they can understand where their behaviors, skills, and attitudes come from, and thus select work environments that suits them best, and be the most effective and happy at work. Finally, this also leads to participants having a better understanding of others, their behaviors, skills, and attitudes, and even use this as a way to effectively use others “differences”. For instance, “An Intuitive type, who will naturally share a preference for change and future possibilities and who will focus on the big picture of patterns can seek support from their sensing type colleagues to include pertinent facts, to apply experience to problem solving, to read the fine print and keep track of essential details” (Melissa Stahl, Five benefits of learning your MBTI type, retrieved from http://www.trainingindustry.com/leadership/articles/five-benefits-of-learning-your-mbti-personality-type.aspx?altTemplate=pdfview).

Moreover, with the not so much experienced supervisors and managers, a workplace that did not reflect the leadership spirit that the CEO David and president Dave wanted to promote was being created. Since the “culture” of this company is what distinguish it from other airline companies, a tool was needed to make supervisors and managers understand other’s behaviors and their own, and understand how these behaviors affect the company’s culture in order to solve the leadership