Exam 7: Organization Structure and Management Systems: the Fundamentals of Strategy Implementation

Firms primarily exist because larger organisations utilising specialisation and division of labour can be much more efficient in producing goods and services.

Some of the main bases for grouping employees within an organization are tasks, products, geography, and process because these make natural sense in terms of the need for employees to interact.

Tasks, products geography, and processes are:

The multidivisional and the divisional structures are the same

The agency problem refers to:

The shift to shared service organizations, the use of alliances and partnerships, and the delayering of hierarchies were aimed at improving:

How can we define an organizational structure?

Human resources management systems are used to incentivize and monitor employees so that they are aligned with and capable of achieving the firm's goals.

To chose a coordination mechanism, managers must look at:

According to Burns and Stalker's two organizational forms, mechanistic and organic, their relative merits:

Apple and General Motors have both shifted:

The Standard Oil (US), Mitsui, and the British South Africa companies were organized under a:

Most strategists agree that strategy implementation and management can be even more important than strategy formulation

For firms organized around functional structure, the real problems arise when:

Are financial incentives always positive for a firm?

Corporate culture

Strategic planning systems are in fact embedded in top managers' minds because of the complexity and the confidentiality of the topic

Adaptability, as one advantage of hierarchy, requires:

At the "reciprocal" level of interdependence:

Organizational design is about: