Ch. 1: The Management Process Today

Question 1

What are organizations?

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 management?

Answer 2

The planning, organizing, leading and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational goals efficiently and effectively.

Question 3

What is organizational performance?

Answer 3

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

Question 4

What is efficiency?

Answer 4

A measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve a goal.

Question 5

What is effectiveness?

Answer 5

A measure of the appropriateness of the goals an organization is pursuing and the degree to which the organization achieves those goals.

Question 6

What characterizes the product of a high/low effective and or high/low efficient company?

Answer 6

Question 7

The four essential managerial tasks: What is planning?

Answer 7

Identifying and selecting appropriate goals; one of the four principal tasks of management.

Question 8

What are the four essential managerial tasks?

Answer 8

Question 9

What is strategy?

Answer 9

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

Question 10

The four essential managerial tasks: What is organizing?

Answer 10

Structuring working relationships in a way that allows organizational members to work together to achieve organizational goals; one of the four principal tasks of management.

Question 11

What is organizational structure?

Answer 11

A formal system of task and reporting relationships that coordinates and motivates organizational members so they work together to achieve organizational goals.

Question 12

The four essential managerial tasks: What does leading mean?

Answer 12

Articulating a clear vision and energizing and enabling organizational members so they understand the part they play in achieving organizational goals; one of the four principal tasks of management.

Question 13

The four essential managerial tasks: What does controlling mean?

Answer 13

Evaluating how well an organization is achieving its goals and taking action to maintain or improve performance; one of the four principal tasks of management.

Question 14

What is a department?

Answer 14

A group of people who work together and possess similar skills or use the same knowledge, tools, or techniques to perform their jobs.

Question 15

What does the first-line manager do?

Answer 15

A manager who is responsible for the daily supervision
of nonmanagerial employees.

Question 16

What does the middle-manager do?

Answer 16

A manager who supervises first-line managers and is responsible for finding the best way to use resources to achieve organizational goals.

Question 17

What does the top manager do?

Answer 17

A manager who establishes organizational
goals, decides how departments should interact, and monitors the performance of middle managers.

Question 18

What does the top management team do?

Answer 18

A group composed of the CEO, the COO, and the vice presidents of the most important departments of a company.

Question 19

What are conceptual skills?

Answer 19

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

Question 20

What is the difference between the ammount of time the top, middle and first-line managers spend on the four essential managerial tasks?

Answer 20

Question 21

What are human skills?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

What are technical skills?

Answer 22

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

Question 23

What is a core competency?

Answer 23

The specific set of departmental skills, knowledge, and experience that allows one organization to outperform another.

Question 24

What is restructuring?

Answer 24

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

Question 25

What is outsourcing?

Answer 25

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

Question 26

What is empowerment?

Answer 26

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

Question 27

What is a self-managed team?

Answer 27

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.

Question 28

What are global organizations?

Answer 28

Organizations that operate and compete
in more than one country.

Question 29

What is an competitive advantage?

Answer 29

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

Question 30

What are the four building blocks of competitive advantage?

Answer 30

Question 31

What is innovation?

Answer 31

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

Question 32

What is turnaround management?

Answer 32

The creation of a new vision for a struggling company based on a new approach to planning and organizing to make better use of a company’s resources and allow it to survive and prosper.