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Staffing issues can gaive a huge impact on the company, and MAS also now suffers from staff
or work force issue. At the present, MAS has around 20,000 staff working for MAS. This is
shown that MAS facing a big problem because MAS need to pay monthly salary to the staff
and also other allowances. When an organization has too many staff then works surplus and
inefficiency will occurs and the overall company performance will decrease. MAS has more
than 20,000 employees (Jahabar Sadiq, 2012). According to a newspaper report on Berita
Harian on 18th July 2012, 2292 pilots has graduated from MAS as pilots since 2005 but 1174
found jobs as pilots. This is due to the fact that the company has been cutting 14 flights that
are bearing loss to the company and has oversupply of pilot
The over-supply of man-power has caused low productivity in MAS, low productivity is bad
for an organization because the company are paying more but are not getting the return for
what they has invested. MAS did not have a good mechanism to monitor the productivity and
the performance for most of their staff. This causes the performance of the staff to drop.
Although they have an excellent cabin crew and good service to the passenger, but the
management and other area in the organization is weak and are not effective and efficient.
MAS always bow down to the demand from its eight unions and association that
represent the workers. MAS should focus on making decisions that is for the best interest of
the company. There was an interesting quote by Max Lucado, he said To lead the orchestra,
you have to turn your back on the crowd. MASs top management should make up their
mind on for who they want to listen to, whether they want to listen to the stakeholder and
concentrate on building the company or bow down to the demand from its employee. We
believe that a company should put the interest of the company first than self interest, MAS
itself need to have courage to say no to excessive demand from the employees and
concentrate on performance of the company.

On top of that, MAS also do not have a strong organizational culture compared with
other airlines. An organization need to have organizational culture because culture consisted
of values. It is a mechanism for the top management to articulate the mission. However, the
challenge remains on the top management because interpretation of the concept might be
different with different individuals. MASs organizational culture is not as good as their
competitors such as AirAsia and Singapore-Airline.
Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Abdul Rahman said that Japan carries a different set of laws
and they carry it out drastically such as laying off thousands of workers. In MAS we have to
be careful as it is said that MAS is overstaffed. Tan Sri Abdul Aziz Abdul Rahman said that
maybe in some departments there are surpluses of workers but we have look at it in totality.
We cant lay off 5000 workers out of the employees which MAS has.
Some might say MAS is overstaffed. MAS with about 100 aircraft have 20,000
employees while AirAsia with 300 planes has only 9,000 staff. Obviously the number of
pilots and cabin crew cant be the same since the work rules are different. It is very clear that
AirAsia, Emirates and SIA have no unions.