Exam 9: Structuring Organizations for Todays Challenges

Trendly Bank is the second largest bank in a large Canadian city.Trendly has many layers of management.Because of concerns about fraud,theft,and embezzlement,front-line employees such as cashiers,tellers,and loan officers are closely supervised and are required to follow strict rules when they deal with customers.These arrangements suggest that Trendly Bank is an inverted organization.

Most businesses adopted a bureaucratic organization in order to speed up their decision making process.

Self-managed teams defy the trend towards customer-driven organizations.

Julio is a manager with Celebration.com,an Internet based retailer of party supplies.As sales have increased,the organization has experienced excessively long lines of communication,failure to quickly respond to change,and lack of advice from specialists.Apparently Celebration.com utilizes the line and staff organizational structure.

The process of setting up individual departments to do specialized tasks is called:

Joe,a production engineer at Freestone Tires,has recently been assigned to a team of specialists from other areas,such as marketing and finance.His semi-permanent assignment to this team has produced several new products.Joe enjoys this work environment,in part because Freestone's management has given the team the freedom and flexibility to make decisions.An interesting development has been the inclusion of "outsiders" from Freestone's major distributors and suppliers on the team.It appears that Joe's team is a(n):

Fayol's principle of the division of labour says that functions should be divided into areas of specialization such as production,marketing,and finance.

The________ consists of the relationships that develop spontaneously as employees meet and form power centres.

Correctly structuring a business organization allows managers to avoid delegating responsibility and authority to employees.

HipHop Music Company assigns workers to departments based on similar skills and has created a marketing department,a production department,a finance department,and a personnel department.This suggests that HipHop departmentalizes by:

________refers to the process of dividing organizational functions into separate units.

The matrix organizational structure was created as a response to changes in the railroad industry.

Recent changes in the organizational structure of businesses are intended to facilitate management.

If a particular function is one of a firm's core competencies,it should perform this function itself rather than outsource it to another organization.

The informal organization of a business is probably best suited to:

Organizational culture can produce either a positive or negative impact on an organization.

Centralized authority provides for the delegation of authority to employees who are then better able to respond to customers' needs.

In Weber's views of a bureaucratic organization,the role of top management was to:

An advantage of a line and staff organization is that it provides people to advise and assist line managers as they perform their jobs.

Compared to the decentralized management structure,which of the following is a disadvantage of the centralized management structure?