Module 2: Management of Organizations Flashcards
Everything we do in this module is about…
Getting high job performance.
Currently, the population is ___, but the labor force is ___.
(Potential Answers: increasing, decreasing)
increasing, decreasing
List the biggest losers. (5)
- Computer programmers
- Production workers
- Farmers
- Manual laborers
- Unskilled service workers
Why are computer programmers one of the biggest losers?
They can be outsourced.
Computerization of work can put around __% of U.S. jobs at risk of elimination.
50
What jobs are in peril at the hands of computerization?
Fixed, middle-skill, routine, repetitive jobs
What jobs are safe from computerization?
Jobs in non-static environments that involve judgment, flexibility, creativity, social intelligence and abstract thinking; manual labor
What jobs can be remedied with computerization?
Education, re-training, skill development
What are the three workforce generations?
Baby Boomers, Baby Busters, Baby Boomlets
Tell me about the Baby Boomers.
(b. 1946-1964), 53-71 years - Broad experience, loyal, health issues, old school, less flexible, less mobile, less tech savvy, homogenous
Tell me about the Baby Busters.
(b. 1965-1983), 34-52 years - Experienced, independent, latch-key past, self-directed, tech savvy (first learned about tech and integrated tech into their lives as they were growing up), wealth-oriented, heterogenous
Tell me about the Baby Boomlets.
(b. 1984-2002), 15-33 years - Inexperienced, low commitment, self-directed, tech dominant, independent, interest-oriented
In terms of age, the workforce is…
Getting older. (Median age is increasing.)
What are some concerns about the workforce getting older?
• There’s an 11 million person gap between the Boomers and the Busters. That’s 11 million jobs that may not be filled, because there aren’t enough Busters to fill those jobs.
• Boomlets are more numerous than the Busters – there’s some comeback, but not to the degree it needs to be to reach the Boomers.
→ Too few workers are coming into the workforce!
In terms of diversity, the workforce is…
Becoming increasingly racially and ethnically diverse.
What are some trends of increasing workforce diversity?
- Overtime, the white population is declining, African-American is remaining constant, and Latinx and Asian populations are rapidly growing.
- Our workforce is increasingly Asian and Hispanic.
- California has the most diverse workforce population.
How can increasing workforce diversity make management difficult?
More complex management. It’s hard to accommodate for everyone’s religious and ethnic traditions.
(For example, there is a cultural group that requires men to wear a ceremonial sword everyday. They are required to wear a deadly weapon. Companies have a policy that you cannot bring a deadly weapon to work. How do you resolve that?)
In terms of education, the workforce is becoming…
Less well-educated.
What is the implication of a less well-educated workforce?
High school graduation rates are declining. Implication: 90% of all jobs in the U.S. require a high school degree. So that segment of the workforce is excluded from 90% of all jobs. There’s not a lot of jobs they can do!
→ We are left with an underskilled workforce and a widening skill gap (more skilled jobs, fewer skilled workers).
More jobs are available that require ___; fewer jobs are available for ___ workers.
(Potential answers: skill, unskilled)
Skills, unskilled
At any given moment, ___ million jobs remain unfilled, because they cannot find the talent to do the work.
3
Many of the jobs that require just a high school education or less are projected to be eliminated by ___.
Computerization
___% of all jobs in the U.S. require a high school degree.
90
__% of high school graduates cannot read at an 8th grade level.
25
List the occupations most vulnerable to offshoring.
- Computer programmers ($72,000
- Actuaries ($95,000)
- Computer and information scientists ($100,000)
- Mathematicians ($90,000)
HB-1 visas limited to 85,000 workers total
What are the 5 implications that current business trends have?
- Job vacancies in areas we can least afford.
- Greater need for cultural awareness and ways of managing diverse cultures sensitively.
- Growing segment of US workforce that cannot qualify for higher paying jobs.
- Increasingly difficult to retain talented people in a company.
- Greater competition for skilled workers globally.
What are the 4 solutions to overcoming current business trend implications?
- Develop talent from within – increase the overall skill level of the workforce.
- Manage employees’ performance to maximize the talent we have – we cannot afford to throw away talent!
- Increase satisfaction of workers to build loyalty and commitment – people who are dissatisfied leave.
- Utilize talent wherever it is found! If you are rejecting people because they are unfamiliar, you are throwing away talent. You need to be blind to the way a person looks. You need to recognize what talent they bring and not what package they come in.
Most often, people who are most likely to leave are your ___ ___.
High performers
Why are high performers at risk of leaving?
High performers always have a place to go. Low performers don’t get offered jobs.
List the seven fundamental building blocks of an effective organization.
- Mission
- Business Goals
- Business Strategy
- Organizational Culture
- Management Processes
- Organizational Structure
- Leadership
Define “mission.”
Company’s purpose and how it will achieve its purpose. People need to be able to identify to the mission.
Define “business goals.”
The company’s performance targets – how it measures success.
Define “business strategy.”
Overarching plans and programs that outline how the company will meet its goals.
Define “organizational culture.”
Norms and values that guide how employees behave in the company. Social direction in what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior.
Define “management processes.”
Coordinated actions of the management team to best utilize resource.
List and describe the four management processes.
- Planning: Determining what is best to do and how best to get it done
- Organizing: Determining how best to arrange an organization’s resources and activities
- Directing/Leading: Guiding and motivating employees to meet objectives
- Controlling: Monitoring performance to ensure goals are being met
What does SWOT stand for?
Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats
What are the steps to formulate a strategy?
Set strategic goals → Analyze organization and analyze environment → Match the organizations and its environment → Formulate strategy
What does an environmental analysis look at in the fast food industry? (This is an external look.)
- Social Trends: Healthy eating?
- Consumer food preferences
- General economy and how much money people have to spend
- Availability of labor willing to work for minimum wage
What does an organization analysis look at? (This is an internal look.)
- How many employees have the skills to perform the job well
- How many managers quit annually creating vacancies in store management
- How resistant managers are to organizational change
What is in McDonald’s “plan to win” (5 P’s)?
People, Products, Place, Price, Promotion
What is in In-N-Out’s “plan to win” (2 pillars)?
- Fresh, best-tasting products
* Loyal, highly-effective management and staff
What structure would you need to successfully run an ice cream company? (7)
- Stores
- Ice cream making
- Ice cream distribution
- Securing supplies to make the ice cream
- Hiring and managing the people
- Getting customers into the stores
- Keeping track of the money
What is the chain of command?
Who reports to whom, graphically depicted as an organization chart
What does specialization tell you?
How narrowly you want to focus a person’s job
When you want an employee to have a high focus on particular things, you narrow the number of tasks you ask this person to perform. Is this high specialization or low specialization?
High specialization
When you want an employee to have a broad focus on a wide range of things, you increase the number of tasks you ask this person to perform. Is this high specialization or low specialization?
Low specialization
What kind of specialization do you see in start-ups?
Very little
What kind of specialization do you see in mature companies?
Highly
What kind of specialization do you sometimes see in lower-level employees?
Overspecialization
How do you balance specialization?
You have to decide how much specialization you can afford (how many people you can hire to focus on a small number of things) and at what breadth of focus (narrow vs. broad) best executes your strategy.
What is departmentalization?
How jobs are grouped into logical units. Units are supervised by the same leader/manager.
What is the advantage and disadvantage of departmentalization?
Advantage: Grouping jobs together creates internal coordination and facilitates communication.
Disadvantage: Separating jobs increases communication and coordination problems because of a “silo” mentality.
What is silo mentality?
People only think about issues and concerns that are most relevant to their own group and ignore or dismiss issues and concerns of people outside their group.
How should you departmentalize?
You departmentalize depending on what aspect of your business you want to maximize. You group together jobs that need to communicate and coordinate effectively in order to get the results you desire.
Structure follows…
strategy!
Given a business strategy, you should structure the organization in a way that enables strategy execution to be most successful.
Ben & Jerry’s is a great example of an effective organization because of its ___, and most importantly, its ___.
people, continuous change in company structure to match changes it makes in business strategy
What is important to remember about the evolution of Ben and Jerry’s from a small ice cream start-up in an abandoned gas station to a global distribution and sales company?
The company is more than an ice cream company now. It actively promotes social change and conservation through its packaging and messaging to the public. It also has a philanthropic division (the Foundation) where it can make direct grants to people to do projects that promote social change and conservation.
Ben and Jerry’s got to this point with one structural change after another and one leader pushing change after another. en and Jerry made decisions carefully and chose leaders and staff that put the right people in the right places doing the right things.
Former President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security by combining over 60 federal agencies related to national security and intelligence. What was this action meant to do?
Prevent terror attacks by sharing critical information across agencies within the DHS (which they failed to do prior to 9/11) and by coordinating action across agencies to respond more quickly and effectively to national threats.
Former President Bush created the Department of Homeland Security by combining over 60 federal agencies related to national security and intelligence. What were the problems that this action posed? (3)
- The different agencies had never worked together previously on anything so they didn’t know how to. In fact, for decades they were discouraged and even prevented from talking and working with each other.
- Under the DHS they were focused on fighting terrorism, not all threats including natural disasters.
- Leaders of these agencies did not necessarily have the background and experience to run their agencies effectively—they were political appointees and didn’t have the training to know how to build effective responses to threats.
Political appointees who didn’t have adequate training to confront Hurricane Katrina included…
- Secretary of DHS, Michael Chertoff
2. Director or FEMA, Michael Brown.
What does the DHS look like now?
There are some major organizational changes. A few agencies and parts of other agencies were pulled out of DHS and are operating independently. This simplified the number of agencies directed by DHS, but the Department is still very large, and members of DHS are still learning how to work together under the same leadership of the Secretary of DHS.
Despite these improvements, we still saw problems with emergency response from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (part of DHS). Two hurricanes this year brought deaths and misery for residents of Houston and other parts of Texas, and for residents of Puerto Rico, a U.S. Territory. The FEMA response was slow to Houston, and it was monumentally deficient for Puerto Rico.
What does decision-making question?
Who has authority and how tightly controlled should work activities be?
What is centralized decision-making?
Concentrated authority among a small number of people, usually located at the top of the organization
What is decentralized decision-making?
Authority distributed down the organizational hierarchy and out into the field.
When a company can afford or wants to customize products and services locally, what kind of decision-making is a good idea?
Decentralized
What is an advantage of centralized decision-making?
Ensures that everyone in the organization follows the same policies, procedures, and processes. This is critical for companies that need standardization throughout the organization for purposes of production quality, business execution and legal compliance.
A tall organization is one that has…
many layers of authority.
What is the relationship between tall organizations and change?
Tall organizations impede change.
What is the relationship between flat organizations and change?
Flat organizations can change relatively quickly because of the absence of management layers.
What are flat organizations good for?
Companies that have to change with a rapidly changing marketplace.
What are tall organizations good for?
Companies that emphasize quality, speed of service, and standardization.
What is important for leadership to keep in mind?
What is important here is leadership’s understanding of their role in creating a vision and setting the direction for the company. Perhaps more important is leadership’s understanding of their role in identifying when the company needs to change – maybe something in the market or environment has changed which impedes their success.
So many things affect employee motivation such as whether someone feels intellectually challenged, whether he/she feels underpaid, or sometimes it’s just the weather. The point is, motivation ___.
changes
Job performance is a function of…
Hint: the performance equation
Ability times Motivation
What does the performance equation indicate?
Both ability and motivation must be high in order to get high performance.
What is turnover?
Employees quit.
What is absenteeism?
Employees stop coming to work.
If job satisfaction is low, what decreases and increases?
Decrease: Job performance
Increase: Turnover and absenteeism
Increasing job satisfaction does not increase ___ ___.
Job performance
What is the secret behind motivating high performance?
Employees will work harder in order to receive satisfaction. But increasing job satisfaction will not increase job performance.
Employees will work hard in order to receive ___.
Satisfaction
