Exam 12: Decision Making, Learning, Knowledge Management, and Information Technology

When an organization uses a ________ approach to knowledge management, it ensures that knowledge is carefully collected, analyzed, and stored in databases where it can be retrieved easily by users who input organization-specific commands and keywords.

The garbage-can approach to organizational decision-making is clearly the opposite of the approach described by the ________ model.

Programmed decision-making allows an organization to increase its efficiency and reduce the costs of making goods and services.

In a circle configuration of a top-management team, organizational learning is decreased because managers from the different functions report separately to the CEO.

When managers have an illusion of control bias, they often ________.

Which of the following terms refers to the conformity that emerges when like-minded people reinforce one another's tendencies to interpret events and information in similar ways?

The Carnegie model assumes that managers' ability is restricted by bounded rationality.

Programmed decisions are creative, novel, and unstructured.

Which of the following organizational learning strategies, proposed by James March, involves organizational members searching for and experimenting with new kinds or forms of organizational activities and procedures to increase effectiveness?

The rational model of decision-making ignores the ambiguity, uncertainty, and chaos that is typically involved in decision-making.

Senge has argued that for organizational learning to occur, each of its members needs to develop a sense of personal mastery, by which he means that organizations should ________.

Inert cultures encourage risk taking by middle and lower-level managers.

Which of the following statements is true regarding the incrementalist model?

Dialectic inquiry involves ________.

Cognitive dissonance is the state of discomfort or anxiety that a person feels when there is an inconsistency between his or her beliefs and actions.

When an organization uses a personalization approach to knowledge management, information systems are designed to show employees who in the organization might possess the knowledge they might need or who might have confronted a similar problem in the past.

By developing a knowledge management system, managers want to provide employees with a step by step procedure on how to solve problems. They want to do this because most of their problems are recurring events, and standard procedures work well. This information indicates that the organization is planning to implement a ________ approach to knowledge management.

Which of the following statements is true regarding an adaptive culture?

A top-management team in an organization is feeling threatened by a deteriorating economic situation and doubt their ability to manage it. Feeling threatened and powerless, the team accuses other lower-level managers of being unable to control the situation or of lacking the ability or desire to do so. Which of the following biases is being experienced by the top-management team?

As compared to organizations with mechanistic and inert cultures, organizations with organic and adaptive cultures are more likely to actively seek out new ways to manage linkages with other organizations.