Ch. 4: Managing in the Global Environment

Question 1

What is an global organization?

Answer 1

An organization that operates and competes in more than one country.

Question 2

What is a global environment?

Answer 2

The set of global forces and conditions that operate beyond an organization’s boundaries but affect a manager’s ability to acquire and utilize resources.

Question 3

What is task environment?

Answer 3

The set of forces and conditions that originate with suppliers, distributors, customers, and competitors and affect an organization’s ability to obtain inputs and dispose of its outputs because they influence managers daily.

Question 4

What is general environment?

Answer 4

The wide-ranging global, economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic, political, and legal forces that affect an organization and its task environment.

Question 5

What are suppliers?

Answer 5

Individuals and organizations that provide an organization with the input resources it needs to produce goods and services.

Question 6

What is global outsourcing?

Answer 6

The purchase or production of inputs or final products from overseas suppliers to lower costs and improve product quality or design.

Question 7

What is a distributor?

Answer 7

Organizations that help other organizations sell their goods or services to customers.

Question 8

What are customers?

Answer 8

Individuals and groups that buy the goods and services an organization produces.

Question 9

What are competitors?

Answer 9

Organizations that produce goods and services that are similar to a particular organization’s goods and services?

Question 10

What are potential competitors?

Answer 10

Organizations that presently are not in a task environment but could enter if they so choose.

Question 11

What are barriers to entry?

Answer 11

Factors that make it difficult and costly for an organization to enter a particular task environment or industry.

Question 12

What are economies of scale?

Answer 12

Cost advantages associated with large operations.

Question 13

What is brand loyalty?

Answer 13

Customers’ preference for the products of organizations currently existing in the task environment.

Question 14

What are economic forces?

Answer 14

Interest rates, inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and other factors that affect the general health and well-being of a nation or the regional economy of an organization.

Question 15

What is technology?

Answer 15

The combination of skills and equipment that managers use in designing, producing, and distributing goods and services.

Question 16

What are technological forces?

Answer 16

Outcomes of changes in the technology managers use to design, produce, or distribute goods and services.

Question 17

What are sociocultural forces?

Answer 17

Pressures emanating from the social structure of a country or society or from the national culture.

Question 18

What is a social structure?

Answer 18

The traditional system of relationships established between people and groups in a society.

Question 19

What is natural culture?

Answer 19

The set of values that a society considers important and the norms of behavior that are approved or sanctioned in that society.

Question 20

What are demographic forces?

Answer 20

Outcomes of changes in, or changing attitudes toward, the characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, ethnic origin, race, sexual orientation, and social class.

Question 21

What are political and legal forces?

Answer 21

Outcomes of changes in laws and regulations, such as deregulation of industries, privatization of organizations, and increased emphasis on environmental protection.

Question 22

What is globalization?

Answer 22

The set of specific and general forces that work together to integrate and connect economic, political, and social systems across countries, cultures, or geographical regions so that nations become increasingly interdependent and similar.

Question 23

What are the four principal forms of capital?

Answer 23

1) Human capital: the flow of people around the world through immigration, migration, and emigration.
2) Financial capital: the flow of money capital across world markets through over- seas investment, credit, lending, and aid.
3) Resource capital: the flow of natural resources, parts, and components between companies and countries, such as metals, minerals, lumber, energy, food products, microprocessors, and auto parts.
4) Political capital: the flow of power and influence around the world using diplomacy, persuasion, aggression, and force of arms to protect the right or access of a country, world region, or political bloc to the other forms of capital.

Question 24

What is tariff?

Answer 24

A tax that a government imposes on imported or, occasionally, exported goods.

Question 25

What is a free-trade doctrine?

Answer 25

The idea that if each country specializes in the production of the goods and services that it can produce most efficiently, this will make the best use of global resources.

Question 26

What are values?

Answer 26

Ideas about what a society believes to be good, right, desirable, or beautiful.

Question 27

What are norms?

Answer 27

Unwritten, informal codes of conduct that prescribe how people should act in particular situations and are considered important by most members of a group or organization.

Question 28

What are mores?

Answer 28

Norms that are considered to be central to the functioning of society and to social life. Mores include proscriptions against murder, theft, adultry and incest.

Question 29

What are folkways?

Answer 29

The routine social conventions of everyday life.

Question 30

What is individualism?

Answer 30

A worldview that values individual freedom and self-expression and adherence to the principle that people should be judged by their individual achievements rather than by their social background.

Question 31

What is collectivism?

Answer 31

A worldview that values subordination of the individual to the goals of the group and adherence to the principle that people should be judged by their contribution to the group.

Question 32

What is power distance?

Answer 32

The degree to which societies accept the idea that inequalities in the power and well-being of their citizens are due to differences in individuals’ physical and intellectual capabilities and heritage.

Question 33

What does Hofstede’s Model of National Culture reflect?

Answer 33

Hofstede’s five dimensions along which national cultures can be placed.

Question 34

What is achievement orientation?

Answer 34

A worldview that values assertiveness, performance, success, and competition.

Question 35

What is nurturing orientation?

Answer 35

A worldview that values the quality of life, warm personal friendships, and services and care for the weak.

Question 36

What is uncertainty avoidance?

Answer 36

The degree to which societies are willing to tolerate uncertainty and risk.

Question 37

What is long-term orientation?

Answer 37

A worldview that values thrift and persistence in achieving goals.

Question 38

What is short-term orientation?

Answer 38

A worldview that values personal stability or happiness and living for the present.