Psychology of Work
Power does not exist until the power holder actually applies power to influence someone else.
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Prospect theory and self-justification are the main causes of satisficing.
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Reality shock improves the organisational socialisation process by forcing newcomers to pay more attention to work activities.
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Research indicates that people almost always make ethical decisions even when under pressure to make unethical decisions.
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Self-leadership suggests that goals should be set by the employee's supervisor with or without the employee's involvement.
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Skill-based pay plans give employees a higher rate of pay on those days when they perform two or more jobs at the same time.
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Successful organisations never 'unlearn' knowledge that they have previously gained.
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Task identity is the degree to which the job has a substantial impact on the organisation and/or larger society.
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Teleworking is more successful when employers evaluate employee performance based on 'face time' rather than work output.
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The MBTI is a good indicator of certain personality traits and improves individual self-awareness as well as being a good predictor of performance.
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The decision-making process is more effective when problems are defined in terms of their solutions.
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The emerging expectations of effective leaders are inconsistent with how many women prefer to lead.
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The highest level of employee involvement should occur when the problem is structured (i.e. it is a programmed decision).
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The incubation stage of creativity is more effective when the decision maker sets aside all other activities and focuses attention on the issue or problem.
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The integration strategy for combining corporate cultures usually creates conflict as employees from the acquired firm resist the cultural intrusions.
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The level of work quality tends to increase with the level of job specialisation.
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The meaning of leadership is so different across cultures that there are no universal leadership characteristics.
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The perceptual process begins by attributing behaviour to internal or external causes.
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The philosophy behind scientific management is to increase job enrichment and decrease job specialisation.
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The rational choice paradigm assumes that decision makers have restricted information-processing capabilities and engage in a limited search for alternatives.
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Corporate leaders should use the grapevine to send messages to employees further down the organisational hierarchy.
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Creative ideas can emerge when asking people unfamiliar with the problem to explore the problem with you.
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Cultural values shape the expectations that followers have of their leaders.
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Deviating from preferred work methods is counterproductive behaviour when quality standards are not maintained or are threatened
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Due to the lack of face-to-face communication, virtual teams tend to have fewer problems with status differences.
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Positive self-talk motivates employees by increasing their effort-to-performance expectancy.
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Post-decisional justification causes decision makers to forget what decision they made.
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Professions gain power in the marketplace by reducing their substitutability through the control of tasks and knowledge.
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Psychology and sociology have contributed many theories and concepts to the field of organisational behaviour.
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Relationship conflict focuses on interpersonal differences between or among parties as the source of conflict.
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Resilience is the capability of individuals to cope successfully in the face of significant change, adversity or risk.
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Resolving differences with the opposing party through direct communication is not as comfortably applied in collectivist cultures.
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Reward systems and employees' skills are substitutes for task-oriented leadership.
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Reward systems, communication systems and physical space are three elements of the organisational and team environment.
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Self-concept refers to an individual's beliefs about themselves and their self-evaluation.
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Self-directed work teams control most work inputs, work processes and output quality.
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Self-fulfilling prophecy tends to have a stronger effect on employees who are new to the job than on employees who have worked in that job for a few years.
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Some critics argue that financial rewards discourage creativity and distract employees from the meaningfulness of the work itself.
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Some distortion in the psychological contract occurs during pre-employment socialisation because job applicants are reluctant to ask questions that may convey a negative impression of them to employers.
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Stereotyping is a natural process that helps us to economise mental effort.
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Student responses to poor grades are influenced to a large degree by whether they take responsibility for these or attribute the failure to external causes.
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Subjective expected utility refers to how much the selected alternative benefits or satisfies the decision maker.
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Successful change requires a well-articulated and appealing vision of the desired future state.
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Team rewards increase employee preferences for team-based work arrangements.
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Teams develop their first real sense of cohesion during the norming stage of team development.
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The conflict process is really a series of episodes that potentially link together into an escalation cycle.
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The higher the level of employee involvement, the more influence people have over the decision process.
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The ideas that appear during the insight stage of creativity are quickly forgotten unless documented.
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The individual's energy level and ability to cope with stress decrease at the beginning of the general adaptation syndrome.
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Mental imagery is one of the most beneficial outcomes of job enrichment.
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Nearly all of the socialisation adjustment process occurs during and after the first day of work.
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Neuroticism, sensing and locus of control are three of the 'Big Five' personality dimensions.
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One feature of influence is that it operates down the corporate hierarchy but not up or across that hierarchy.
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One of the main problems with instant messaging is that the sender communicates with only one receiver at a time.
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One reason why employees resist change is that they dislike predictable role patterns.
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Organisational commitment refers to an employee's contractual obligation to provide a minimum amount of time and effort to the organisation in return for a fair day's pay from the organisation.
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Organisational socialisation is the process of meeting other employees and spending more time with them throughout the work day.
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Self-leadership includes the practice of self-reinforcement.
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According to the MARS model of individual behaviour and performance, employee performance will remain high even if one of the four factors significantly weakens.
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All groups are teams, but some types of teams are not groups.
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Arbitration has a high level of process control but a low level of decision control.
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Attitudes are fleeting physiological experiences we have in response to an attitude object.
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Bounded rationality adopts the main assumptions of the rational choice paradigm of decision making.
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Ceremonies have no impact on organisational culture and influence external stakeholders and observers only.
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Collective entities are called organisations only when their members have complete agreement on the goals they want to achieve.
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Combining goal setting with monetary incentives motivates many employees to set up difficult goals.
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Conflict begins whenever both parties realise that they have opposing interests.
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Conflicts could reduce the significance of organisational politics.
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Creative people tend to have a high need for social approval.
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Creativity occurs in only a few types of decisions.
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David McClelland's research on the need for achievement concluded that all needs are instinctive and fixed for life.
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During the role-management stage of organisational socialisation, employees are newcomers who test their pre-employment expectations against the perceived realities.
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Education is a primary category of surface-level diversity.
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Email is a very good medium for communicating emotions.
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Emotional dissonance occurs when we use our emotional intelligence on others but other people do not use their emotional intelligence on us.
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Employee involvement tends to weaken synergy in the decision-making process.
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Failure of mergers and acquisition has nothing to do with culture but more to do with understanding the financial systems in both organisations.
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Financial incentives to stay with the organisation (i.e. golden handcuffs) usually reduce continuance commitment.
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Having a positive sense of self-esteem is useful but when it is associated with self-aggrandisement, unwillingness to listen to negative feedback and a strong sense of entitlement then it becomes Machiavellianism.
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In a time of critical challenge, the use of processes such as discovery, dreaming, designing and delivering requires leaders who are prepared to take control.
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In grapevine communication, most employees serve as both sender and receiver.
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Increasing resources and creating more precise rules for the allocation of those resources represent two ways to increase conflict.
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Informal groups exist primarily to complete tasks for the organisation that management doesn't know about.
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Job enlargement increases an employee's growth need strength.
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Job specialisation usually reduces the employee's work efficiency.
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Jobs with a high level of task significance provide freedom, independence and discretion in scheduling the work and determining the procedures to be used to complete the work.
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Legitimate power is created whenever the organisation assigns a supervisor formal authority over subordinates.
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Mental imagery excludes visualising completion of a task.
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Path-goal theory states that effective leaders have high emotional intelligence, integrity and motivation to become a leader.
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People are more persuasive when they rely on logical arguments and avoid emotional appeals.
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People with a high power distance give money a low priority in their lives.
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The three steps in stereotyping, in order, are: (1) identify negative information; (2) behave in ways consistent with previous expectations; and (3) watch the employee form a positive or negative opinion of you.
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When the issue is extremely important to listeners, the speaker's personal characteristics are more important than the message content in persuading listeners.
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Women tend to use the participative leadership style less often than do men.
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A potentially useful creative practice is to list different dimensions of a system and the elements of each dimension, then think through the potential commercial usefulness of each combination.
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A symptom of groupthink is that the team feels comfortable with risky decisions because possible weaknesses are suppressed or glossed over.
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A unique feature of appreciative inquiry is that it breaks away from the problem-solving mentality by reframing relationships around what is positive and possible.
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According to learned needs theory, people with a high personalised need for power enjoy power for its own sake and use it to advance their careers rather than to benefit others.
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According to the behavioural perspective of leadership, task-oriented leadership is the opposite of people-oriented leadership.
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Action research is a problem-oriented process of organisational change.
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Active listeners constantly cycle through the three components of listening.
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All organisations have a collective sense of purpose, even though this purpose might not be fully understood or agreed upon.
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Artefacts of organisational culture may include the building's design, the way people are greeted and the food served in the company's cafeteria.
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Beliefs represent our perceptions about the attitude object.
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Cognitive dissonance will be greater when the dissonant behaviour is known to everyone, was voluntary and is not easy to change.
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Companies can improve employee role perceptions by describing the employee's assigned tasks clearly and providing meaningful performance feedback.
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Companies with the best team dynamics are more likely to have team-based rewards and a physical arrangement that encourages face-to-face dialogue.
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During six months as CEO, you have been relentless in bringing radical change to the organisation. You have put all your energy into the job and great progress has been made. But you are beginning to feel tired. Today, you have been informed that your biggest competitor is launching a new product that will make your current best seller look out of date. Your best option is to shift to an incremental change process to address this issue.
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Effective transformational leaders 'walk the talk' by making meeting agendas, work schedules and other executive symbols, patterns and settings more consistent with the strategic vision.
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Employee engagement is typically described as emotional involvement in, commitment to and satisfaction with work.
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Employee involvement mainly refers to controlling the resources for one's own job.
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Employee share ownership plans and share options tend to create an 'ownership culture' in which employees feel aligned with the organisation's success.
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Employees are more likely to quit their jobs and be absent from work if they are dissatisfied with their jobs.
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Employees tend to be less creative in organisations that punish failure.
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Ethically sensitive people tend to have more empathy and knowledge about a situation.
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Fads, consulting models and pet beliefs are often embraced by corporate leaders without any evidence of their success.
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Feedback can be more frequent when employees perform short rather than long job cycles.
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Four team-based activities that potentially improve team decision making in team settings are brainwriting, brainstorming, electronic brainstorming and nominal group technique.
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Globalisation may have both positive and negative implications for people working in organisations.
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Goal setting tends to be more effective when the goals are specific rather than general.
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Historically, stereotyping was defined as exaggeration or falsehood.
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Homogeneous teams with relatively few members and a high level of interaction tend to have high cohesiveness.
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Homogenisation and differentiation are two processes in social identity theory.
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In Lewin's force field analysis model, refreezing occurs when the organisation's systems and structures are aligned with the desired behaviours.
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In terms of cross-cultural values, Australians tend to have relatively high individualism with an average achievement orientation and low power distance.
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In the equity theory model, a 'comparison other' is an individual or group of people against whom the person compares his or her outcome/input ratio.
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Incubation is the stage of creativity in which the problem is simmering at the back of your mind while you are doing something else.
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Inflexible work schedules and long commuting time to work may cause stress in the employee's family relationships.
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Interacting with people from other backgrounds is more likely to minimise stereotyping when these people have equal status with you throughout the interaction.
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Jargon improves communication efficiency when both the sender and receiver understand this specialised language.
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Job enlargement increases skill variety.
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Job enrichment tends to increase the quality of products or services.
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Leadership competencies or traits have been discussed since the beginning of recorded civilisation.
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Learned capabilities refer to the skills and knowledge that you have actually acquired.
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Maslow's needs hierarchy theory takes a holistic approach by condensing the long list of needs into a hierarchy of five basic categories.
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Mediation has a high level of process control but a low level of decision control.
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Most organisational events may be studied from all three levels of analysis-individual, team and organisation.
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Negotiation and the norm of reciprocity are associated with the influence process of exchange.
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Negotiators tend to be more competitive and less willing to give concessions when their audience directly observes the negotiations.
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Networking helps to increase a person's expert power and centrality.
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Non-verbal communication is less rule-bound than is verbal communication.
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One reason why the problem identification stage is imperfect is that various stakeholders try to 'frame' the decision maker's view of the situation.
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Organisational politics flourishes when resource allocation decisions are ambiguous and complex with no formal rules.
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People sometimes resist change because the situation undermines their attempts to change.
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People who learn to empathise with others are less likely to engage in attribution errors.
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People with a high need for achievement make better entrepreneurs.
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Perceptions, filtering and jargon are three types of noise in the communication process.
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The introduction of email in organisations tends to reduce some face-to-face and telephone communication but to increase the flow of information to higher levels in the organisation.
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The more that employees see a direct connection between their daily actions and the reward, the more they are motivated to improve their performance.
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The most appropriate influence tactic depends in part on the influencer's power base and position in the organisation.
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The principles of viral and word-of-mouth marketing are adapted to organisational change processes when information is transmitted through social networks on the basis of friendship.
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The separation strategy is most appropriate when the merging companies are unrelated industries.
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Transformational leaders shape a strategic vision of the future that focuses employees on a superordinate organisational goal.
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Two drives identified in four-drive theory are the drive to acquire and the drive to bond.
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Two ways to enrich jobs are by clustering jobs into natural groups and by establishing client relationships.
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Unfreezing occurs by making the driving forces stronger, weakening the restraining forces, or a combination of both.
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When conflict reduces each side's motivation to communicate, they rely more on stereotypes to reinforce their perceptions of the other side.
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When sending a message, the choice of medium also communicates information from the sender to the receiver.
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Whether or not the emotions we experience in a situation represent intuition depends largely on our level of experience in that situation.
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Workforce diversity potentially improves decision making and team performance on complex tasks.
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