Singapore Airlines: Achieving Sustainable Advantage Through Mastering Paradox

Abstract

We explore how Singapore Airlines has become one of the highest performing and respected airlines in the world through its ability to transcend organizational paradoxes. We address four paradoxes: cost-effective service excellence, simultaneous decentralized and centralized innovation, being simultaneously a follower and a leader in service development, and accomplishing standardization as well as personalization in customer interactions. We employ empirical data from multiyear case research on Singapore Airlines to outline how the organization simultaneously balances dual capabilities (seen as poles of the paradoxes) that most other organizations would consider distinct or incompatible. We conclude that the ability to balance opposing poles and in this way transcend paradoxes is what affords Singapore Airlines its sustainable competitive advantage and that this ability is becoming more and more relevant to organizational effectiveness as competition intensifies. © The Author(s) 2014.