Just to put things into perspective- SAA had received more than R30bn (approximately, US$3 billion) in government guarantees and loans from the Government of South Africa since 1999. Recent financial reports indicate that the SAA had no equity and was surviving on R14.5bn (approximately, US$1.5 billion) of government guarantees given to it since 2007.
The loss-making SAA has had a staggering nine turnaround strategies in fifteen years. Four CEOs and one acting CEO have left in the past six years. None of these previous CEOs ever completed their tenure, they all left SAA under controversial circumstances. Some of the unresolved issues between these former SAA CEOs are at various litigation stages in South Africa’s Labour Court.
This suggests that SAA is not a “learning organization” in the way that Herbert Simon views organizational culture in his classic 1947 organizational theory book, Administrative Behavior.
Indeed, L. Gardner & C. Stough in their instructive 2002 article, Examining the relationship between Leadership and Emotional Intelligence in Senior Level Managers, observe that organizational culture is primarily the outcome of leadership efforts. This means that at SAA, successive CEOs have failed to create a culture that supports and sustains a coherent leadership development process. Key leadership thinkers, such as Connaughton et al. judiciously argue in their prominent 2003 article, Leadership Development as a Systematic and Multidisciplinary Enterprise, that leadership development is one of the core tools that leaders should utilize to positively influence organizational culture in the long term. This is obviously not possible at SAA where there has been a continuous leadership crisis that has undermined the development of a conducive organizational culture to support and enrich the much-needed leadership development matrix in the long run.
In fact, the leadership crisis at SAA is also a reflection of a broader leadership failure at the highest levels of the department responsible for all the state-owned-enterprises in South Africa, the Department of Public Enterprises- each time there is a cabinet reshuffle, the new Public Enterprises Minister dismisses the sitting board and appoints a new one, which is believed to be more loyal to him/her.
Yet, according to P.G. Northouse in his key 2004 book, Leadership: Theory and Practice, page 3:
“Leadership is a process where an individual influences a group of individuals to achieve a common goal.”
Due to the unstable organizational culture at SAA due to high leadership turnover, the SAA has failed to put in place that process that continuously identify as well as develop leadership talent in order to ultimately and effectively meet the vision, mission and organizational goals of the SAA. This is indeed, a vicious cycle-poor leadership leads to weak organizational culture and poor leadership development processes. Unfortunately, SAA appears to be caught up in this quagmire.
As of today, SAA still continues with an opaque organizational culture that does not value leadership development. There is no Group CEO just an acting Group CEO in Musa Zwane. He got this position about a year ago when he replaced the former acting Group CEO Nico Bezuidenhout who interestingly still works at SAA but now as the head of a subsidiary within.
