Ch 1 ASSIGNMENT
When gaining objective knowledge about organizational behavior, students must participate in which of the following activities?
Research Scientific activities -Objective knowledge comes from research and scientific activities. Information gained in chat rooms is often not objective, and individual or group practice activities are used to gain skills, not objective knowledge.
Proctor & Gamble Co., or P&G, makes a wide variety of cleaning and personal care agents. You have probably used Bounty paper towels and/or Tide detergent, two of their more famous products.
Sector of economy Manufacturing -Manufacturing organizations actively create physical products that are used by their customers either as finished goods or resources to create new goods. Proctor & Gamble creates a wide range of physical products in the beauty, baby care, home care, and health and grooming segments.
The Human Rights Watch is a human rights organization that produces more than 100 reports and briefings a year on human rights conditions in 90 countries.
Sector of economy Non profit -The Human Rights Watch is a non-profit organization dedicated to helping people without distributing money to the organization's shareholders, leaders, or members.
All Wrapped Up is a company in Mill Valley, CA, which provides mailbox rentals, packaging, gift wrapping, and a notary public who can authenticate the true identity of document signers.
Sector of economy Service -Service organizations provide goods and services to customers, but they do not create resources used by their customers. All Wrapped Up is a service company focused on helping customers with mailing and documentation needs.
You are a mid-level manager at a Fortune 500 company. At your last performance review, your boss asked you to take three actions that will improve quality in your company. Which of the following four actions will you take?
Start a participative management program. Reward employees for actions that improve quality. Tell employees about quality actions that went right and those that went wrong. -Participative management programs, rewarding quality actions, and giving employees information about quality program successes and failures can all help improve quality in an organization. Cost-cutting is not an effective approach to improving quality.
Fernando is trying to develop his organizational behavior skills. He has just completed a role play activity in which he played the part of a manager who was giving negative feedback to an employee. Now he is looking at feedback from his partner, trying to decide which skills he used effectively and which skills he did not use well. Fernando is in which step of the "Learning from Structured Activity" model?
Conducting a systematic review of the structured activity -Fernando is engaged in a systematic review of his structured activity (the role play). He has not yet developed conclusions from his review, nor has he completed the process of acquiring new or modified skills, but he is analyzing his actions to see what skills he may or may not have used correctly.
The following table contains the steps used in learning about organizational behavior. Identify the order in which the steps are usually taken.
Develop specific skills and abilities. 2 Apply knowledge and skills. 3 Master basic objective knowledge. 1 -The process for learning about organizational behavior consists of the following three steps: 1. Master basic objective knowledge.2. Develop specific skills and abilities.3. Apply knowledge and skills. Note that each step in the process contains a critical component. When you are mastering knowledge, you must learn to think critically, questioning the validity of new information, and comparing pieces of information to see how they relate to each other. When you master new skills, it is best to do so in a non-threatening environment, such as a classroom, using structured group or individual activities. Finally, when applying skills, the knowledge acquired in the first part of the process is linked to the unstructured environment of the workplace.
A manager who is trying to figure out the best design of work might use concepts from which discipline?
Engineering -Engineering is the applied science of energy and matter. Managers who are interested in the design of work often use concepts from engineering to help employees work more efficiently and effectively. Anthropology concepts are used to understand organizational culture; psychology concepts are used to understand human behavior, including motivation; and sociology concepts are used to understand groups and group dynamics.
Lila just can't seem to do anything right. You wonder if this is because she never received any training on how to work in a team.
External -Your belief that Lila's poor performance is caused by a lack of training is an example of an external theory of human behavior. External theories focus on factors outside of the individual, including external events, consequences, and environmental forces.
The fact that a company manufactures only swimsuits and not other types of athleticwear
Formal organization -A company's products are visible to all and are therefore formal parts of the company.
Why are students ultimately asked to apply their skills in both the classroom and at work when learning about organizational behavior?
In order to transfer new skills from a structured to an unstructured setting -Ultimately, students participate in skill application exercises so they can transfer their new skills from a structured classroom to an unstructured work environment. Practicing skills does not necessarily give students new objective knowledge. Instead, it shows them how to use the objective knowledge they gained from earlier instruction and research. And while the students may develop new hypotheses or theories about effective organizational behavior during in-class activities, they are less likely to do so during work activities.
You are researching Wash & Wear, an established dry cleaner in your neighborhood. In order to get a good understanding of the company, you spend several days working with the employees who are responsible for cleaning and ironing clothes. Over this time, you find out a little about their beliefs about their work, the things that they value most, their group norms, and their daily feelings. You are looking at the informal parts of the organization.
Informal -Informal parts of the organization are not visible, and they include beliefs and assumptions, perceptions and attitudes, values, feelings, group norms, and informal leaders. Formal parts of the organization are more easily seen. Legitimate parts of the organization include goals and objectives, policies and procedures, job descriptions, financial resources, authority structure, communication channels, and products and services.
A manager's belief that employees will work hard if they are paid properly
Informal organization -Beliefs and assumptions cannot be seen—they must be inferred by words or actions. Hence, they are an informal part of the organization.
Last week, your employee, Azula, missed an important deadline. You are convinced that she didn't get the work done because she doesn't care about the company.
Internal -Your belief that Azula's feelings about the company caused her poor performance is an example of an internal theory of human behavior. Internal theories say that behavior is caused by a person's thoughts, feelings, past experiences, and needs.
Last week, Jill found out that her company was implementing a new accounting system. Jill's manager told her that she would need to start formatting all her reports differently and that she would need to learn the details of the new system quickly. Jill is threatened by these changes, and she isn't sure they will be good for the company. Which of the following actions is she most likely to take?
Jill may look for keycodes in the new system that are the same as the keycodes used in the old system. Jill may look for ways in which the new reports are similar to the reports she has already been filing. Jill may dive into training for the new system, hoping to learn as much about it as possible. -During times of change, people often become rigid and reactive, relying on well-learned and dominant forms of behavior. In this case, those behaviors would involve looking for things in the new accounting system that are similar to things in the old accounting system. Jill is less likely to dive into a training program for the new system or ask if she can train others on the system because she is experiencing change as a threat.
Reay, Golden-Biddle, and Germann (2006) suggest that change is most successful when managers implement three microprocesses: "(1) cultivating opportunities for change, (2) fitting a new role into prevailing systems, and (3) proving the value of the new role" (p. 977). Your textbook authors suggest that using these microprocesses, plus other actions, can make a change successful. Suppose that you are a manager of a six-person team of advertising managers, and you want your team to become much more involved in the client recruiting process. This will require that they learn new skills and start working together with the other employees in your advertising agency. Which of the following activities would be most likely to make your change successful?
Letting your employees know how their new jobs will use the skills they acquired in their old jobs Explaining to your employees how the change will benefit them, as well as benefiting the company as a whole Reprimanding employees who do not change their behaviors quickly enough to implement the change properly -According to the authors of your text, change success comes through the accumulation of small wins and use of microprocesses. Letting employees know about the similarities between their old and new jobs is an example of the microprocess of fitting a new role into an existing system, while explaining the benefits of the change is an example of the microprocess of proving the value of a new role. Finally, rewarding the group for small steps forward is an example of small wins. Reprimanding employees and gathering a coalition of managers are less likely to make a change successful.
Many people eat at Chipotle for lunch or dinner. Satisfied customers are outputs for Chipotle, while the tortillas Chipotle buys from tortilla bakeries are inputs . The process of making a chicken burrito is a throughput for Chipotle.
Outputs Inputs Throughputs -In an organization, inputs are the resources brought into the company to allow it to fulfill it's mission, throughputs are the processes and work used to fulfill the mission, and outputs are finished, transformed resources.
Putting in total quality programs makes it more likely that a company will have organizational success for a variety of reasons. Which of the following is not one of those reasons?
Supplier leniency -Total quality programs do not make suppliers more lenient. In fact, they often make suppliers less lenient, as they are more likely to work for fewer customers when a total quality management program is in place. But total quality management programs do improve organizational success by making the organization more responsive to their customers' needs and requests, helping the organization to achieve results more quickly, and helping the organization to use the resources they have more effectively.
Customers at Nordstrom's stores choose to pay a higher price for their purchases because they believe they are better made, and they think Nordstrom is constantly improving to provide them with better quality service and meet their expectations. Based on these two factors alone, Nordstrom is likely to have
a total quality management program -Having quality (better made) products and continuous improvement are signs of a total quality management program. Having such a program is one step in receiving a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, but that award depends on results in seven categories. A computer-driven algorithm may be used to help achieve a total quality program, but it does not necessarily have continuous improvement. Finally, a Six Sigma program is business-results oriented, rather than being quality oriented.
The organization as open system Select the correct labels for components of the open-systems model of organizations.
a. Inputs b. Organizational Behavior c. Technology -This image presents an open-systems theory of organizations. Open-systems theorists believe that all organizations act as living entities—they take in "nourishment", or inputs, from the external environment, transform it (or them) in some way, and send the transformed "nutrients" back into the environment as outputs. There are two critical concepts to master in this model: (1) all parts of the model are interconnected so that a change in any one part will affect every other part; and (2) the model contains a feedback loop—whatever the organization puts out into the environment will affect the organization in some way in the future.
Organizational behavior is defined as the study of
individual behavior and group dynamics -Organizational behavior is defined as the study of individual behavior and group dynamics in organizations. It is important to look at both groups and individuals when trying to understand organizational behavior. Sociology and psychology are both interdisciplinary influences on the study of organizational behavior, but sociology tends to focus more on groups while psychology tends to focus more on individual behavior.
