OB Exam 3 Review

Which of the following is a characteristic of an adaptive corporate culture?

Employees continuously question past practices.

________ refers to any behavior that attempts to alter someone's attitudes or behavior.

Influence

________ is the cornerstone of effective value creation.

Information

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

Integrators

Which of the following happens during the preemployment stage of organizational socialization?

It encompasses the learning and adjustment that occurs before the first day of work.

Which of the following is an advantage of having a moderate level of organizational conflict?

It energizes people to evaluate alternatives.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about reality shock?

It is usually common in most organizations.

Which of the following is a limitation of the personal attributes perspective of leadership?

It views leadership as something within a person.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about using the separation strategy?

It works best when two merging companies operate in unrelated industries.

Which of the following is the most accurate definition of leadership?

Leadership is influencing, motivating, and enabling others to contribute toward the effectiveness and success of the organization.

Which of the following statements is most consistent with the view of shared leadership?

Leadership of an organization is broadly distributed rather than assigned to one person.

________ theory identifies conditions that either limit the leader's ability to influence subordinates or make a particular leadership style unnecessary.

Leadership substitutes

What is the relationship between emotional intelligence and relationship conflicts?

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

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

Upward appeal

________ involves actively applying legitimate and coercive power to influence others.

Assertiveness

________ leadership refers to how well leaders are aware of, feel comfortable with, and act consistently with their self-concepts.

Authentic

Which of the following is an example of ingratiation?

flattering a boss

Which of the following types of third-party intervention approaches do managers and those in other positions of authority usually adopt?

inquisitional

Servant leadership emphasizes the notion that

leaders serve followers, rather than vice versa.

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

openness

The personal attributes perspective of leadership

presents the view that certain personal characteristics distinguish great leaders from the rest of us.

Which of the following interpersonal conflict management styles represents a purely win‒win orientation?

problem solving

Unfreezing refers to

producing disequilibrium between the driving and restraining forces of change.

The "optimal conflict" perspective on organizational conflict is that

some level of conflict is necessary and promotes organizational effectiveness.

People who seldom trust coworkers and tend to use cruder influence tactics have

strong Machiavellian values.

Which of the following are the observable indicators of organizational culture?

artifacts

When the acquired firm has a weak, but similar culture compared to the acquiring firm, it is best to use the ________ merger strategy.

assimilation

According to the attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory, job applicants

avoid employment in companies whose values seem incompatible with their own values.

Which of the following conflict management styles is associated with low cooperativeness and low assertiveness?

avoiding

Path-goal theory argues that

effective leaders select the most appropriate behavior based on the situation.

________ represents the heart of transformational leadership.

Strategic vision

________ leadership includes behaviors that define and structure work roles.

Task-oriented

Which of the following is TRUE about organizational culture?

The strength of an organization's culture refers to how widely and deeply employees hold the company's dominant values and assumptions.

Which of the following is a third-party conflict resolution strategy with low process control and high decision control?

arbitration

Referent power is typically associated with

charisma.

When a member of a network has shorter, more direct, and efficient paths or connections with others in the network, we say that the member has high

closeness

B&D Systems, a small company, wants to go in a different direction with the manufacturing of several products that are needed as quickly as possible for the Christmas season. Allison has worked for the company for several years and has a great deal of influence with the other employees in her group, and they have been slowing down management plans. After her manager tried several tactics, unsuccessfully, to get Allison on board with the proposed changes, the quickly approaching holiday deadlines forced management to fire Allison. Which of the following strategies is being used?

coercion

Which of the following strategies to reduce the restraining forces should be used only if all other strategies fail?

coercion

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

coercive 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

The three stages of organizational socialization, in order, are

preemployment, encounter, and role management.

The perceived ability to manage uncertainties in the business environment is a form of ________ power.

expert

A best alternative to a negotiated agreement (BATNA)

represents the estimated cost of walking away from the relationship.

Which of these forces are commonly called resistance to change?

restraining forces

Jackie is the CEO of a struggling company. She has listened to her employees' concerns about where the corporation is going and has developed a new vision that she feels will help foster a common bond throughout the organization. Jackie then hosted a company-wide picnic where she delivered an inspiring speech about the new plans for the business, including her plans for more open communication between management and employees. After her speech, management and employees all participated in trust-building exercises, and then each employee had a one-on-one conversation with Jackie. Which perspective of leadership most closely resembles Jackie's actions?

transformational

Lewin's force field model emphasizes that effective change occurs by ________ the current situation, moving to a desired condition, and then ________ the system so it remains in the desired state.

unfreezing; refreezing

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.

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

Betweenness

Which of the following is a difference between rituals and ceremonies?

Ceremonies are usually formal, whereas rituals are informal.

Which of the following statements is TRUE of countervailing power in organizational relationships?

Countervailing power is the weaker party's power to maintain the stronger party's continued participation in the relationship.

Which of the following statements is TRUE about superordinate goals?

They are higher order aspirations such as the organization's strategic objectives.

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.

Action research is

a process that diagnoses the need for change, introduces the intervention, and then evaluates and stabilizes the desired changes

Jessie and Preston are both managers at CPA4U, a large accounting firm. Each has a very different management style. Jessie frequently checks on her subordinates to see if there is any way she can help them to complete their projects. As a supervisor in the financial sector, Jessie maintains her moral integrity and is not swayed by pressures to take shortcuts. She tries to know a little bit about her employees' outside interests and always remembers everyone's birthday. Preston keeps to himself more and communicates with his subordinates mainly through emails; he's not particularly interested in his employees' after-work activities. His subordinates know exactly what is expected of them; they submit daily reports on their progress toward the weekly goals he has assigned them. Which type of leader is Preston?

a task-oriented leader

Refreezing refers to

aligning an organization's systems with the desired behaviors to support and reinforce the new role patterns.

Your centrality in a social network is determined by your

betweenness, closeness, and degree centrality.

Which of these refers to the degree and nature of interdependence between the power holder and others?

centrality

At a meeting, the senior management of a firm cites the accomplishments of lower-level employees and announces the rewards for good performance. Such meetings occur annually at the firm. In the context of organizational artifacts, this is specifically an example of a(n)

ceremony.

The highest priority and first strategy required for any organizational change is to

communicate the need for change.

You are assigned to resolve a conflict between two departments of an organization. Both parties have equal power. Both parties are under time pressure to resolve the conflict. You also realize that the parties lack trust/openness for problem solving. You are actively searching for a middle ground between the interests of the two parties. Which of the following conflict resolution styles would you use in this situation?

compromising

The process in which one party perceives that its interests are being opposed or negatively affected by another party is called

conflict.

XYZ Office Supplies is about to introduce a new customer service program that will affect all its 355 sales and service employees. Job duties will be changed and the employee rewards system will be altered to fit this new customer focus. Moreover, the company wants to improve the efficiency of work processes, thereby removing some of the comfortable (and often leisurely) routines that employees have followed over the years. Top management is concerned about the different types of forces resisting change that the company will potentially experience during this change process. XYZ attempts to assist the change process by putting employees in direct contact with customers. Here, the company is trying to

create an urgency for change.

In which strategy does the acquiring company impose its culture and business practices on the acquired organization?

deculturation

The number or percentage of connections you have in a network is called

degree centrality.

Which of the following leadership styles in path-goal theory is the same as task-oriented leadership?

directive

According to path-goal theory, a combination of ________ leadership is best for employees who are (or perceive themselves to be) inexperienced and unskilled.

directive and supportive

The four stages of appreciative inquiry, in order, are

discovery, dreaming, designing, and delivering.

The freedom to exercise judgment in an organization is called

discretion.

Companies A and Z are both large manufacturers of personal computers. Neither company had provided any type of support for their systems once customers had owned them for 30 days. Company A decided to offer free "live person" support for 90 days and for a minimal fee thereafter. Company Z noticed a dip in sales almost immediately and an increase in customer complaints. According to Lewin's force field analysis model, "evolving client expectations" would be a ________ pushing Company Z toward a new state of affairs.

driving force

Which of these forces push organizations toward a new state of affairs?

driving forces

BusCorp. wants to introduce a new procedure to improve how customer requests are handled. This change will require employees to break old routines and adopt new role patterns. The company decides to adopt two new programs, one in which employees learn how to work in teams as the company changes. The other involves forming task forces within the company to help determine new customer service practices. The formation of task forces to minimize resistance to change is an example of

employee involvement.

Employees are more likely to comply with a supervisor's legitimate power when the

employees have high power distance.

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?

forcing

Social networks exist everywhere because people

have a drive to bond.

Which strategy for merging two distinct cultures is most effective when the two companies have relatively weak cultures with overlapping values?

integration

Which of the following change management strategies should be given a priority when employees need to break old routines and adopt new role patterns?

learning

Organizational socialization is best described as a process of ________ where newcomers try to make sense of and adapt to the company's environment.

learning and adjustment

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

low levels of communication

One advantage of countercultures is that they

maintain surveillance over and critically review the company's dominant culture.

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

The main purpose of a bicultural audit is to

minimize cultural clashes in corporate mergers.

In the organizational change process, strategic visions

minimize fear of the unknown.

Effective managers should

minimize the relationship conflicts that exist in the organization.

Many employees get a reality shock on their first day at work because

newcomers test how well their preemployment expectations fit reality, and many companies fail this test.

Which of the following refers to the strategy in which employees deliberately inflate problems with changes that they did not initiate, just to prove that those ideas were not superior to their own?

not-invented-here syndrome

XYZ Office Supplies is about to introduce a new customer service program that will affect all its 355 sales and service employees. Job duties will be changed, and the employee rewards system will be altered to fit this new customer focus. Moreover, the company wants to improve the efficiency of work processes, thereby removing some of the comfortable (and often leisurely) routines that employees have followed over the years. Top management is concerned about the different types of forces resisting change that the company will potentially experience during this change process. The employees at XYZ discreetly weaken the new customer service program to prove that the decision is wrong and that the new program is not effective. Which of the following reasons to resist change is depicted in this scenario?

not-invented-here syndrome

Legitimate power occurs when

people in certain roles can request a set of behaviors from others.

Leadership prototypes refer to

preconceived beliefs about the features and behaviors of effective leaders.

Although Joanna expects much from her employees, the people that work for Joanna identify with her values, like her, and respect her as a person. Joanna has ________ power.

referent

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.

Situations with both ________ produce the highest risk of conflict.

scarce resources and high task interdependence

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

silent authority

Which of the following refers to availability of alternatives?

substitutability

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

task conflict and relationship conflict.

The customer-service department at Park-E Bank complains it is unable to keep track of its new business clients as the department handling data compilation has failed to enable a free exchange of information between the two departments. This has hindered the customer-service department to follow up on its customers' queries and update their relationship status with the bank. This has also impacted the department's sales target. This scenario exemplifies conflict due to

task interdependence.

In organizational settings, power is defined as

the capacity to influence others.

The bargaining zone model states that

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

Charisma refers to

the personal traits that provide referent power over others.

Persuasion works best

through media-rich communication channels.

As a manager of XYZ Company, you are assigned to resolve a conflict between two departments of your organization, Department A and Department B. Both parties have equal power. Both parties are under time pressure to resolve the conflict. You also realize that the parties lack trust/openness for problem solving. If instead of equal power, Department A had considerably more power than Department B, what would Department B's best conflict resolution style be?

yielding