MAN 3760 Module 7 Final Project: Leadership Communication at Boeing and the 737 MAX Example

When Concerns Do Not Travel Up: Leadership Communication and the Boeing 737 MAX

Student Name

Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership, Thomas Edison State University

MAN-3760: Leadership Communication

Mentor Name

Month Day, Year

When Concerns Do Not Travel Up: Leadership Communication and the Boeing 737 MAX

The Facts

The 737 MAX was a new version of Boeing's best-selling airliner, certified in 2017. It included a flight control system, the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, designed to push the nose down in certain conditions. On October 29, 2018, Lion Air Flight 610 crashed in Indonesia, killing 189 people. On March 10, 2019, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed, killing 157. Investigations linked both crashes to MCAS activating repeatedly based on a single faulty sensor. Regulators worldwide grounded the aircraft in March 2019; the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration cleared it to fly again in November 2020. Boeing's board removed chief executive Dennis Muilenburg in December 2019.

Communication With Pilots and Regulators

A congressional investigation found that Boeing had not disclosed MCAS in pilot manuals for the 737 MAX, partly to avoid the need for simulator training that would have made the aircraft more expensive for airlines to adopt (U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, 2020). The report described a culture of concealment and found that information about MCAS's design changes was not fully shared with the FAA. Communication that should have flowed outward, to pilots who needed to know how the aircraft behaved, was held back for commercial reasons.

Communication Inside the Company

The same report and internal messages released in January 2020 showed that some employees had raised concerns about the aircraft and the certification process. In one widely reported exchange, an employee wrote that the plane was "designed by clowns." Detert and Burris (2007) found that employees speak up more when leaders are open to input and when speaking up feels safe. At Boeing, concerns raised by employees did not reach, or did not change, the decisions of those who could have acted.

Culture and Ethics

Hackman and Johnson (2013) argue that ethical leadership communication requires honesty and attention to the consequences of messages for all stakeholders. Kish-Gephart et al. (2010) found in a meta-analysis that unethical choices in organizations are shaped by individual characteristics, the moral intensity of the issue and the organization's ethical climate and culture, the "bad apples, bad cases and bad barrels" of their title. The 737 MAX case involves all three: individual decisions, an issue with life-and-death stakes and a culture in which schedule and cost pressures shaped what was disclosed. Hackman and Johnson also emphasize that ethical communication includes disclosure of information others need to make decisions, which is precisely what pilots lacked about MCAS.

Crisis Communication With the Public

After the first crash, Boeing's public statements emphasized that the aircraft was safe and that pilots could follow existing procedures. After the second, the company was slower than many regulators to support grounding. Coombs (2007) notes that when an organization's responsibility is high, accommodative responses, such as apology and corrective action, are needed to protect reputation. Boeing's early statements were defensive rather than accommodative, which deepened the loss of trust when the facts emerged. Coombs's framework suggests that once evidence pointed to MCAS, an accommodative response, acknowledging responsibility and committing to fixes, would have protected more trust than continued defense of the aircraft.

Recommendations

First, leaders must build channels that carry safety concerns to decision makers and protect those who use them, including an independent safety reporting line to the board. Second, disclosure to pilots and regulators should be treated as a safety obligation, not a commercial variable. Third, crisis communication should acknowledge uncertainty and responsibility early rather than defend the product before the facts are known. Fourth, leadership development should include training in hearing and acting on dissent. Each recommendation addresses one of the communication failures identified above: blocked upward communication, withheld outward disclosure and defensive public statements.

Lessons for Leadership Development

For my own development, the case reinforces the lesson of Module 1, that leaders must ask and listen, and of Module 6, that silence does not mean agreement. On a smaller scale, a ramp supervisor who does not hear a handler's concern about a loading procedure risks the same kind of failure.

Conclusion

The 737 MAX crashes involved engineering decisions, but they were also failures of leadership communication: information withheld from pilots and regulators, employee concerns that did not change decisions and public statements that lagged the truth. Research on ethics, culture, voice and crisis communication explains each failure, and the recommendations address the channels and values that leaders control.

References

Coombs, W. T. (2007). Protecting organization reputations during a crisis: The development and application of situational crisis communication theory. Corporate Reputation Review, 10(3), 163-176. https://doi.org/10.1057/palgrave.crr.1550049

Detert, J. R., & Burris, E. R. (2007). Leadership behavior and employee voice: Is the door really open? Academy of Management Journal, 50(4), 869-884. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2007.26279183

Hackman, M. Z., & Johnson, C. E. (2013). Leadership: A communication perspective (6th ed.). Waveland Press.

Kish-Gephart, J. J., Harrison, D. A., & Treviño, L. K. (2010). Bad apples, bad cases, and bad barrels: Meta-analytic evidence about sources of unethical decisions at work. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(1), 1-31. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0017103

U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. (2020). Final committee report: The design, development and certification of the Boeing 737 MAX. U.S. House of Representatives.