Organizational Behavior Test 3

Persuasion works best

through media-rich communication channels.

What is the purpose of Toyota's obeya room?

to improve team performance on complex problems through face-to-face interaction

People with high Machiavellian values tend to

use more socially acceptable forms of power to influence others.

Which of the following communication channels has the highest media richness?

videoconference

________ is the cornerstone of effective value creation.

Information

________ involves explicitly manipulating others' access to critical work issues for the purpose of changing their attitudes and/or behavior.

Information control

________ are employees who coordinate the activities of work units toward the completion of a shared task or project.

Integrators

What effect does "noise" have in the communication model?

It distorts and obscures the sender's intended message.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about the bargaining zone model of negotiations?

It includes a target point, which is the team's realistic goal or expectation for a final agreement.

Which of the following statements is TRUE of active listening?

It is essential in communication as it motivates and directs the speaker.

Which of the following statements is TRUE of relationship conflicts?

It is ideal to use humor to maintain positive group emotions in teams with low relationship conflict.

One of the three organization-wide communication strategies is workspace design. One way Pixar Animation Studios factored in workplace design was to encourage what it called the "bathroom effect." To what does this refer?

Team members must leave their isolated pods to pick up their mail, have lunch, or visit the restroom.

Which are the task-related characteristics in the "Five Cs" model of effective member behaviors?

coordinating, cooperating, and communicating

Organizational politics may be reduced by

encouraging leaders to become role models of organizational citizenship instead of symbols of successful organizational politicians.

A new employee in the finance department of the Hogan Company prominently displays diplomas and past awards indicating his financial adeptness. What type of power is this employee most likely trying to attain?

expert

Which of the following conditions would necessitate the use of nonverbal communication instead of verbal communication?

increased noise

According to the communication process model,

information flows through channels between the sender and receiver.

Employees at Charlotte International have been frustrated with the management on just about everything. The conflict episodes are being viewed by both sides as personal attacks rather than attempts to resolve problems. Both sides have decided to seek third-party dispute resolution. The management prefers a third-party intervention that has high process and decision control, while employees prefer a high level of process control and low decision control. The management at Charlotte International appears to prefer which of the following types of third-party intervention?

inquisitor

Which third-party conflict resolution strategy manages the process and context of interaction between the disputing parties but does not impose a solution on the parties?

mediation

Inflated team efficacy and evaluation apprehension

hinder organizational decision making in teams

Which of the following is a disadvantage of teams?

A) Performance deteriorates when employees work near others, especially when coworkers become benchmarks of comparison. B) Teams typically provide poorer customer service than knowledgeable individuals. C) People are always less motivated when working in teams than when working alone. D) Correct Team members need time and effort to develop mutual understanding of their goals.

Which of the following statements is TRUE of power?

A) Power exists only when one person has something of value for a second person, but the second person has nothing of value for the first person. B) Power is the actual practice of influencing others. C) Correct Power requires asymmetric dependence in a relationship. D) Power exists only when the power holder is able to change someone's behavior.

Which of the following is a factor in social acceptance?

A) the media richness of the selected channel B) Correct the symbolic meaning of the chosen channel C) the diplomatic acceptance of the message D) the bandwidth of the channel

________ literally refers to how much you are located between others in a network.

Betweenness

________ is the strongest outcome of influence, whereby people identify with the influencer's request and are highly motivated to implement it even when extrinsic sources of motivation are no longer present.

Commitment

Which of the following statements is TRUE about Internet-based communication?

Email is asynchronous, hence there is little need to coordinate a communication session.

Although there are many forms of brainwriting, what is the one common feature that each form has?

Individuals write down their ideas.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about email?

It is usually inappropriate for ambiguous and novel situations.

Which of the following is a positive consequence of workplace conflict?

It makes for better decision making by reexamining assumptions.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about conflict?

It usually undermines team cohesion and performance.

Which of the following generally occurs during the storming stage of team development?

Members try to establish norms of appropriate behavior and performance standards.

Which of the following is a major problem associated with team-building activities?

Question 3 options: A) Team building attempts to slow down the team development process. B) Team building consists of informal activities rather than formal activities. C) Correct They are used as general solutions rather than as specific solutions. D) They cannot be used to clarify the team's performance goals.

What is the relationship between emotional intelligence and relationship conflicts?

Relationship conflict is less likely to occur if emotional intelligence is high.

Which of the following statements is TRUE of the relationship conflicts in a highly cohesive team?

Relationship conflict is suppressed when the conflict occurs.

________ teams allow employees to collectively plan, organize, and control work activities with little or no direct involvement of a higher-status supervisor.

Self-directed

________ goals are goals that the conflicting employees or departments value and whose attainment requires the joint resources and effort of those parties.

Superordinate

Which of the following is a feature of relationship conflict?

The conflict episodes are viewed as personal attacks rather than attempts to resolve the problem.

Which of the following happens immediately after the receiver receives the encoded message in the communication process model?

The receiver decodes the received message.

Which of the following is TRUE about an organizational grapevine?

The typical pattern of a grapevine is a cluster chain, whereby a few people actively transmit rumors to many others.

Which of the following best describes departmental teams?

These teams consist of employees who have similar or complementary skills.

Which of the following are described as virtual teams?

They are cross-functional groups of employees that operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries.

________ involves calling upon higher authority or expertise, or symbolically relying on these sources to support the influencer's position.

Upward appeal

Which of the following should corporate leaders do with the organizational grapevine?

Use the grapevine as a signal of employee anxiety and view it as a valid competitor to the company's formal communication system.

Which of the following conflict management styles may be necessary when it is apparent that the other party will take advantage of information sharing and other cooperative strategies?

Which of the following conflict management styles may be necessary when it is apparent that the other party will take advantage of information sharing and other cooperative strategies?

How do men and women generally differ in their communication styles in organizational settings?

Women are usually more sensitive than men to the listener's nonverbal cues.

Your team is allocated a project involving a major client, the Beswick Company. Although the organization has many clients, this client, and project, is the largest source of revenue and affects the work of several other teams in the organization. The project requires continuous involvement with the client, so any problems with the client are immediately felt by others in the organization. Jamie, a member of your team, is the only person in the company with whom this client is willing to deal. It can be said that Jamie has

a low degree of substitutability.

Management by walking around (MBWA) refers to

a practice in which executives get out of their offices and learn from others in the organization through casual face-to-face dialogue.

During the ________ stage of team development, team members shift their attention away from task orientation to a relationship focus.

adjourning

In organizational communication, "flaming" generally refers to

an emotionally charged email that communicates strong negative emotions.

Persuasion, impression management, and exchange are called "soft" tactics because they

are based on personal sources of power.

Employees can expand the data-carrying capacity of lean media channel if they

are highly proficient with the communication channel.

The encoding-decoding process is generally more effective when both parties

are skilled and enjoy using the selected communication channel

At DoubleTalk Inc., Jeremy, a supervisor, pushes his employees' performance by constantly checking their work and threatening them if they fail to keep their deadlines. After months of mistreatment, the employees get together and sign a letter to the human resources department to express their grievances. Which form of influence is Jeremy using?

assertiveness

Extreme forms of ________ include bullying, such as through explicit reminders of one's obligations and using threats of sanctions to force compliance.

assertiveness

Organizational politics typically involves

attempts to influence others to promote self-serving objectives.

Organizational politics is more common where decisions are

based on complex and ambiguous rules.

In terms of managing social networks, organizational leaders should

be aware of them, as they reflect the real distribution of power.

Your centrality in a social network is determined by your

betweenness, closeness, and degree centrality.

Magda works on a team of 15 people working in research and development for a toymaker. They have weekly meetings to discuss new toy ideas. Occasionally, Magda will have a good idea that she wishes to discuss, but it takes too long for all her other teammates to finish talking and then the meeting is over before she gets a chance to bring up her idea. This week, she suggested that the team try ________; it minimizes production blocking by removing conversation during idea generation, and generates more ideas in the allotted time that members can further build upon.

brainwriting

In the negotiation process, a key objective of ________ is to establish and maintain trust.

building the relationship

Which contingency of power are unions mainly applying by going on strike at a critical time in the company's business cycle?

centrality

Your importance in a social network is called your

centrality

Referent power is typically associated with

charisma

"Strong ties" are

close-knit relationships.

At DoubleTalk Inc., Jeremy, a supervisor, pushes his employees' performance by constantly checking their work and threatening them if they fail to keep their deadlines. After months of mistreatment, the employees get together and sign a letter to the human resources department to express their grievances. What form of influence are the employees using?

coalition formation

Kristi's boss in the accounting department initially rejected her proposal for a new budgeting process. So, Kristi spoke to and received support from the heads of two departments that would benefit from the proposed budgeting process. She also found support from several coworkers in the accounting department because they believed the new budgeting process would be simpler and fairer. When Kristi's boss realized that several key people supported the new budgeting system, he agreed to test it in a pilot project. What form of influence is Kristi mainly using here?

coalition formation

Dictionaries of symbols, language, gestures, idioms and other tools used to convey information are referred to as ________ and help the sender and receiver encode and decode more effectively.

codebooks

Employees have ________, ranging from sarcasm to ostracism, to ensure that coworkers conform to team norms.

coercive power

In order to maintain the exchange relationship, the dependent party must have ________ over the dominant party.

countervailing power

Which of the following sources of conflict is typically associated with mergers and acquisitions, where everyone wants the company to succeed, but they fight over the "right way" to do things because of their unique experiences in the separate companies?

differentiation

If a dysfunctional norm is very deeply ingrained in a team, the best strategy is probably to

disband the group and replace it with people having more favorable norms.

Research suggests that effective workspace design mainly balances the trade-off between

employee privacy and social interaction.

At Sunshine Toys, several employees must work together to develop a new product. No one in this group has worked with any of the others before, and the development of this product has not been attempted previously. According to the media richness model, which of the following communication channels is most appropriate in this situation?

face-to-face meetings

According to the communication model, which of the following represents the first three steps in sequence?

form message, encode message, and transmit message

Calculus, knowledge, and identification are the three

foundations of trust in teams.

The unstructured and informal organizational network that is founded in social relationships rather than organizational charts or job descriptions is called the

grapevine.

Which of the following is NOT a source of power in a social network?

isolation

Based on the characteristics of constructive conflicts, which of the following would help a manager create constructive conflicts during a debate?

keeping the debate focused on the issue

Edgar works on a team with four other accounting professionals within a company's accounting department. Edgar doesn't particularly agree with some of his teammates' ideas, such as leaving work early and taking long lunches. However, he works comfortably with the group because they possess top-notch accounting skills and have never let him down while working on a project together. What foundation of trust does Edgar have in this team?

knowledge-based

Which of the following are two features that distinguish virtual teams from conventional teams?

lack of co-location and dependence on information technology

Which of the following factors leads to relationship conflicts in teams?

low levels of communication

In the negotiation process, a key objective of ________ is to discover in the other party and communicate your own relative importance of each issue being negotiated.

managing concessions

Which of the following immediately follows conflict perceptions and emotions in the conflict process model?

manifest conflict

The capacity of a communication medium to transmit information is referred to as

media richness.

For everyday disputes between two employees, managers should use ________ as a third-party intervention.

mediation

Employees at Charlotte International have been frustrated with the management on just about everything. The conflict episodes are being viewed by both sides as personal attacks rather than attempts to resolve problems. Both sides have decided to seek third-party dispute resolution. The management prefers a third-party intervention that has high process and decision control while employees prefer a high level of process control and low decision control. The employees at Charlotte International prefer which of the following types of third-party intervention?

mediator

A central feature of the communication model is the channel, also called the ________, through which information is transmitted.

medium

Effective managers should

minimize the relationship conflicts that exist in the organization.

In the context of the communication process model, ________ refers to the psychological, social, and structural barriers that distort and obscure the sender's intended message.

noise

When team norms encourage ________, team members learn to appreciate honest dialogue without personally reacting to any emotional display during the disagreements.

openness

High team efficacy can cause team members to be ________ their decisions.

overconfident about

According to social identity theory,

people define themselves by their group affiliations.

Conflict is ultimately based on

people's perceptions.

NewTel is a telephone company with a policy of filling positions internally through promotions, rather than hiring from outside. Until recently, the company had a strong engineering focus and tended to promote people to senior executive positions from the engineering areas. Consequently, almost all of the company's 14 senior executives joined the company over 20 years ago as junior engineers. There is increasing pressure on NewTel to become more market and service oriented. As a result, four people were hired last year from firms to fill new senior executive positions in marketing and service departments. The external hires were necessary because current employees were not sufficiently qualified. Now, there are signs of tension among senior executives, particularly during budget deliberations where there is limited discretionary spending on new corporate activities. The four new hires have been thwarted in their attempts to have the company invest more in marketing and customer services instead of investing in technological research, and they blame the senior executives for being hard-headed. The conflict episodes are being viewed by both sides as personal attacks rather than attempts to resolve the problem. The marketing executives and the other executives operate independently. However, they share the resources and money in the organization. This kind of interdependence is referred to as

pooled interdependence relationship

Magda works on a team of 15 people in research and development for a toymaker. They have weekly meetings to discuss new toy ideas. Occasionally, Magda will have a good idea that she wishes to discuss, but it takes so long for all her other teammates to finish talking that she will often just not bother to bring it up. Occasionally, there are arguments about which new project should have the most resources devoted to it, but Magda finds her coworkers always maintain respect for each other and work out a solution. Magda's problem getting her ideas out in meetings is known as

production blocking.

Brainstorming requires team members to

provide as many ideas as possible.

To manage virtual teams effectively, organizations should

provide documented work processes and clear objectives.

Fun Incorporated, a major gaming software company, is experiencing a conflict between the young Internet-savvy employees who design the games and the older, less computer-literate executives who run the company. The company has hired team leaders who could work with the executives and who are also highly computer-literate. By hiring these team leaders as liaisons between the executives and employees, Fun Incorporated will

reduce conflict by reducing task interdependence.

Buffering, summarizing, and omitting are ways to

reduce information overload.

Alphatech Systems Inc. uses software rules to redirect email from distribution lists to folders that may or may not be looked at. Incoming messages are organized into mailboxes and junk mail is identified. As a result, employees in this company can quickly identify the most important email messages and overlook the junk mail. This email feature improves communication by

reducing information load.

NewTel is a telephone company with a policy of filling positions internally through promotions, rather than hiring from outside. Until recently, the company had a strong engineering focus and tended to promote people to senior executive positions from the engineering areas. Consequently, almost all of the company's 14 senior executives joined the company over 20 years ago as junior engineers. There is increasing pressure on NewTel to become more market and service oriented. As a result, four people were hired last year from retail firms to fill new senior executive positions in marketing and service departments. The external hires were necessary because current employees were not sufficiently qualified. Now, there are signs of tension among senior executives, particularly during budget deliberations where there is limited discretionary spending on new corporate activities. The four new hires have been thwarted in their attempts to have the company invest more in marketing and customer service instead of investing in technological research, and they blame the senior executives for being hard-headed. The conflict episodes are being viewed by both sides as personal attacks rather than attempts to resolve the problem. The conflict at NewTel appears to be a

relationship conflict.

When compared to people in low-cohesion teams, members of high-cohesion teams

resolve conflicts swiftly and effectively.

Shantal recently went to a communication workshop to improve her workplace performance. She learned that, in effective communication, she should resist forming an opinion until the speaker has finished, then attempt to empathize with the listener, and, finally, respond effectively to the speaker. She learned techniques regarding maintaining eye contact and sending back channel signals to show interest. The techniques she learned with regard to showing interest will help her improve the specific skill of

responding.

Which of the following is the most common form of influence in high power distance cultures?

silent authority

Charlotte noticed that several of her team members were checking email and looking at Facebook during their meeting, letting a couple people do all the work. When people exert less effort when working in groups than when working alone, it is referred to as

social loafing.

Which one of the following functions does the text say that Facebook most strongly emphasizes?

strong emphasis on maintaining relationships but relatively low emphasis on sharing information or forming communities

The gap between two clusters in a network is called a

structural hole.

In the context of information overload, which of the following is a way to reduce it?

summarizing

According to the emerging view on organizational conflict, there are two types of conflict with opposing consequences. They are

task conflict and relationship conflict.

Prime Inc. has come up with a new product development project for which the project manager forms a team. The team includes Cam, Demarco, Tamara, and Aisha from accounting, marketing, manufacturing, and sales divisions respectively. On completion of the project, the team disperses and the four return to their original departments. However, each week, the four meet after work on Thursdays to play darts at a local pub. The type of team formed by the project manager is an example of a(n) ________ team.

task force

The degree to which team members have collective confidence in how well they work together and the likely success of their team effort is called

team efficacy.

High-cohesion teams perform poorer than low-cohesion teams when

team norms undermine the organization's performance.

A task force refers to any

temporary team formed to solve a problem, realize an opportunity, or design a product or service.

Initial offer points, target points, and resistance points represent three elements in

the bargaining zone model.

Brooks's Law says that adding more people to a late software project only makes it later. This law is mainly referring to

the existence of process losses.

Betweenness gives power because the more of it you have,

the more you control the distribution of information to people on either side of you.

The bargaining zone model states that

the negotiation process moves each party along a continuum in opposite directions with an area of potential overlap.

A role is a set of behaviors that people are expected to perform because

they hold certain positions in a team and organization.

Grace makes sure that she walks by her boss's office several times a day and tries to greet and make eye contact with her. She is trying to increase her

visibility