Ch 1: Managers and Managing

Question 1

What is an Organization?

Answer 1

Collections of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes.

Question 2

What is a manager?

Answer 2

Person responsible for supervising the use of an organization’s resources (human and other) to meet its goals.

Question 3

Organizational Performance

Answer 3

A measure of how efficiently and effectively a manager uses resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals.

Question 4

Organizational performance increases in direct proportion to increases in efficiency and effectiveness, true or false?

Answer 4

True

Question 5

Effectiveness

Answer 5

A measure of the appropriateness of the goals an organization is pursuing and the degrees to which the organization achieves those goals. (Organizations are effective when managers choose appropriate goals and achieve them.)

Question 6

Efficiency

Answer 6

A measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve a goal. (Organizations are efficient when managers minimize the amount of input resources ex. labor, raw materials and component parts.)

Question 7

What are the tasks of management?

Answer 7

Planning, organizing, leading, controlling.

Question 8

Planning

Answer 8

Identifying and selecting appropriate goals and course of action; they develop strategies for how to achieve high performance.

Question 9

What are the steps involved in planning?

Answer 9

1. Deciding which goals the organization will pursue.
2. Deciding what strategies to adopt to attain those goals
3. Deciding how to allocate organizational resources to pursue the strategies that attain those goals.

Question 10

Strategy

Answer 10

a cluster of decisions about what goals to pursue, what actions to take, and how to use resources to achieve goals.

Question 11

Organizing

Answer 11

Structuring working relationships so organizational members interact and cooperate to achieve organizational goals. (Organizing people into departments according to the kinds of job specific tasks they perform lays out lines of authority and responsibility between different individuals and groups.)

Question 12

Leading

Answer 12

Articulating a clear vision and energizing and enabling organizational members so they understand the part they play in achieving organizational goals. (involves managers using power, personality, influence, and persuasion, and communication skills to coordinate people and groups so their activities are in harmony)

Question 13

Controlling

Answer 13

Evaluating how well an organization is achieving its goals and taking action to maintain or improve performance.

Question 14

What are the essential managerial skills?

Answer 14

Conceptual skills, human skills, technical skills.

Question 15

Conceptual skills

Answer 15

The ability to analyze and diagnose a situation and to distinguish between cause and effect.

Question 16

Human skills

Answer 16

The ability to understand, alter, lead, and control the behavior of other individuals and groups.

Question 17

Technical skills

Answer 17

the job specific knowledge and techniques required to perform an organizational role.

Question 18

Core competency

Answer 18

Specific set of departmental skills, knowledge and experience that allows one organization to outperform its competitors.

Question 19

Departmental skills that create a core competency give an organization a ______?

Answer 19

Competitive advantage.

Question 20

Empowerment

Answer 20

The expansion of employees’ knowledge, tasks, and decision-making responsibilities.

Question 21

What has been increasingly used to empower employees by expanding the employees job knowledge and increases the scope of their job responsibilities?

Answer 21

IT

Question 22

Self-managed work teams

Answer 22

A group of employees who assume responsibility for organizing, controlling, and supervising their own activities and monitoring the quality of the goods and services they provide. (causes company to better utilize its workforce)

Question 23

Competitive advantage

Answer 23

The ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services mored efficiently and effectively than they do.

Question 24

What are the four building blocks of competitive advantage?

Answer 24

Superior efficiency, quality (speed, flexibility), innovation, and responsiveness to customers.

Question 25

Speed

Answer 25

How fast they can bring a new product to the market.

Question 26

Flexibility

Answer 26

How easily they can change or alter the way they perform their activities to respond to actions of their competitors.

Question 27

Innovation

Answer 27

The process of creating new or improved goods and services or developing better ways to produce or provide them.

Question 28

Restructuring

Answer 28

Downsizing an organization by eliminating the jobs of large numbers of top, middle, and first-line managers and non managerial employees.

Question 29

Outsourcing

Answer 29

Contracting with another company, usually abroad, to have it perform an activity the organization previously performed itself.