Chapters 1-2

Question 1

what is the primary responsibility of top management?

Answer 1

To Determine an organization’s goals, strategy, and design

Question 2

What is an organization’s mission?

Answer 2

• sometimes called official goals

- refers to the formally stated definition of business scope and outcomes the organization is trying to achieve

Question 3

What is a mission statement?

Answer 3

• communicates to current and prospective employees, customers, investors, suppliers, and competitors what the organization stands for and what it is trying to achieve.
• communicates legitimacy to internal and external stakeholders

Question 4

What are operative goals?

Answer 4

• designate the ends sought through the actual operating procedures of the organization and explain what the organization is actually trying to do.
• describe specific measurable outcomes
• often concerned with the short run

Question 5

What are your typical Operative Goal Categories?

Answer 5

1) Overall performance
2) Resources
3) Market
4) Employee Development
5) Innovation and Change
6) Productivity

Question 6

compare Official goals and Operative Goals?

Answer 6

• Official goals describe a value system for the organization
• Official goals legitimize the organization
• Operative goals represent the primary task of the organization
• Operative goals are more explicit and well defined.
• Operative goals can provide employees with a sense of direction so they know what they are working toward

Question 7

Compare Strategy vs Goals?

Answer 7

• Strategy is a plan for interacting with the competitive environment to achieve organizational goals.
• Goals define where the organization wants to go
• Strategy is how the organization will get there

Question 8

Explain Porter’s Competitive Strategies?

Answer 8

• low-cost leadership > increase market share by emphasizing low cost compared to competitors
• Differentiation > attempt to distinguish their products or services from other in the industry
• Focus > organization concentrates on a specific market or buyer group

Question 9

What is Miles and Snow’s Strategy Typology based on?

Answer 9

• based on the idea that managers seek to formulate strategies that will be congruent with the external environment

Question 10

What are the four strategies associated with Miles and Snow?

Answer 10

• Prospector: strategy is to innovate, take risks, seek out new opportunities, and grow
• Defender: almost the opposite of prospector. concerned with stability or even retrenchment. seeks to hold onto current customers but neither innovates nor seeks to grow
• Analyzer: maintain a stable business while innovating on the periphery
• Reactor: not really a strategy at all. respond to environmental threats and opportunities in an ad hoc fashion. Top management has not defined a long-range plan or given the organization an explicit mission or goal.

Question 11

how does organizational culture affect organization design?

Answer 11

An organizational culture that values teamwork, collaboration, creativity, and open communication among all employees and managers,for example, would not function well with a tight, vertical structure and strict rules and regulations.

Question 12

What are the three contingency approaches to measuring effectiveness on different parts of the organization?

Answer 12

• Goal Approach
• Resource based
• Internal-process

Question 13

Discuss the Resource-Based Approach?

Answer 13

• assumes organizations must be successful in obtaining and managing valued resources in order to be effective
• Indicators: obtaining and successfully managing resources is the criterion by which organizational effectiveness is assessed.
• Usefulness: is valuable when other indicators of performance are difficult to obtain.

Question 14

Discuss the Internal-Process Approach of measuring effectiveness?

Answer 14

• effectiveness is measured as internal organizational health and efficiency
• Indicators: One main indicator is the organization’s economic efficiency.
• Usefulness: important because efficient use of resources and harmonious internal functioning are ways to assess organizational effectiveness. However, total output and the organization’s relationship with the external environment are not evaluated

Question 15

What are the seven indicators of an effective organization as seen from an internal process approach?

Answer 15

1. Strong corporate culture and positive work climate
2. Team spirit, group loyalty, and teamwork
3. Confidence, trust, and communication between workers and management
4. Decision making near sources of info, regardless of where those sources are on the organizational chart
5. Undistorted horizontal and vertical communications; sharing of relevant facts and feelings
6. Rewards to managers for performance, growth, and development of subordinates and for creating an effective work group
7. Interaction between the organization and its parts, with conflict that occurs over projects resolved in the interest of the organization

Question 16

Discuss the Goal Approach of measuring effectiveness?

Answer 16

• consists of identifying an organization’s output goals and assessing how well the organization has attained those goals.
  Indicators: The important goals to consider are operative goals. Efforts to measure effectiveness have been more productive using operative goals than using official goals
  Usefulness: used in business because output goals can be readily measured
  Problems: • Multiple and conflicting goals cannot be assessed by a single indicator, and high achievement on one goal may mean low achievement of another. The other issue is how to identify operative goals and how to measure goal attainment.

Question 17

what is the Competing Values Model?

Answer 17

• A perspective on organizational effectiveness that combines diverse indicators of performance that represent competing management values
• based on the assumption that are disagreements and competing viewpoints about what constitutes effectiveness

Question 18

What are the value dimensions of the Competing Values Model?

Answer 18

• Organizational Focus: whether dominant values concern issues that are internal or external to the firm
• Organizational Structure : whether stability versus flexibility is the dominant structural consideration.

Question 19

What are the four approaches to effectiveness values?

Answer 19

• open-systems: external focus and flexible structure
• rational-goal: structural control and external focus
• internal-process: internal focus and structural control
• human relations: internal focus and flexible structure

Question 20

What are the current challenges facing organizations?

Answer 20

1. Globalization
2. Ethics and Social Responsibiltiy
3. Speed of responsiveness
4. The digital workplace
5. Diversity

Question 21

What is an organization?

Answer 21

• Social entities that are goal directed, designed as deliberately structured and coordinated activity systems, and linked to the external environment.

Question 22

What are reasons why organizations exist?

Answer 22

1. Bring together resources to achieve desired goals and outcomes
2. Produce goods and services efficiently
3. Facilitate innovation
4. Use modern manufacturing and information technologies
5. Adapt to influence a changing environment
6. Create value for owners, customers, and employees
7. Accommodate ongoing challenges of diversity, ethics, and the motivation and coordination of employees

Question 23

Compare Closed Vs Open Systems?

Answer 23

• closed system does depend on its environment. it is autonomous, enclosed, and sealed off from the outside world.
• Open system must interact with the environment to survive; it consumes resources and exports resources to the environment. It must continuously adapt to the environment.

Question 24

What are the five parts that every organization has? (Mintzberg)

Answer 24

1) Technical Core
2) Top Management
3) Middle Management
4) Technical Support
5) Administrative support

Question 25

Organizational dimensions fall into which two types?

Answer 25

• Structural

- Contextual

Question 26

What are the 6 Structural Dimensions?

Answer 26

1) Formalization: amount of written documentation in the organization
2) Specialization: degree to which tasks are subdivided into separate jobs
3) Hierarchy of Authority: describes who reports to whom
4) Centralization: hierarchical level that has authority to make decisions
5) Professionalism: level of formal education and training
6) Personnel Ratios: deployment of people to various functions/departments

Question 27

What are that 5 Contextual Dimensions?

Answer 27

1) goals and strategy: define the purpose and competitive techniques that set it apart from other organizations.
2) environment: all elements outside the boundary of the organization
3) Size: number of people in organization
4) culture: underlying set of key values, beliefs, and norms
5) Technology: tools, techniques, and actions used to transform inputs into outputs

Question 28

How do understanding varying perspectives and structural and contextual dimensions of organizations help?

Answer 28

• help us design organizations in such a way as to achieve high performance and effectiveness

Question 29

What is Organizational Theory?

Answer 29

• a way of thinking about organization. Not a collection of facts

Question 30

Ways people looked at organizations in the past?

Answer 30

• Efficiency is everything - scientific management
• How to get organized - Administrative principles. contributed to development of bureaucratic organizations
• People - Hawthorne Studies: positive treatment of employees improved their motivation and productivity
• Environment: Many problems occur when all organizations are treated similar, which is the case with scientific management

Question 31

What is the Contemporary Organizational Design?

Answer 31

• are shifting from a mindset based on mechanical systems to one based on natural and biological systems
• Chaos theory: suggests that relationships in complex, adaptive systems
• shifting from strict vertical hierarchies to flexible, decentralized structures that emphasize horizontal collaboration, widespread info sharing, and adaptability
• Learning organizations

Question 32

Compare transition from Efficient Performance to Learning Organizations?

Answer 32

• From vertical to horizontal structure
• From routine tasks to empowered tasks
• From formal control systems to shared information
• From competitive to collaborative strategy
• From rigid to adaptive culture

Question 33

Compare Organizational behaviour and Theory?

Answer 33

• Organizational behaviour: micro approach. focuses on the individuals in an organization
• Organizational Theory: macro approach: examines organizations as a unit
• Meso theory: concerns the integration of both micro and macro levels of analysis.

Question 34

What are the four levels of analysis normally characterizing organizations?

Answer 34

• External environment
• Organization level of analysis
• Group level of analysis
• Individual level of analysis