Exam 4: The External Environment

Explain how the international context of organizations is bringing the international sector more and more into the task environment of organizations today.

Which of the following laws required several types of corporate governance reforms, including better internal monitoring to reduce the risk of fraud, certification of financial results by top executives, and improved measures for internal auditing?

____ result in the creation of a new organization that is formally independent of the parents.

One outcome of high differentiation is that coordination between departments becomes more difficult until integrative devices are put in place.

Explain the differences between acquisitions, mergers, joint ventures, and partnerships.

Organizations in rapidly changing environments tend to have ____ management processes.

Describe both a mechanistic and an organic organization with which you are familiar (from reading or personal experience), explaining why you have classified them as such. Comment on how well this structure is suited to the environment of each organization.

Roger Ramon is a militant member of a faculty union at a medium-sized college. When the union's negotiating committee is reporting to a meeting of the faculty, he always finds fault with the work of that committee and strongly advocates striking. When a member of the negotiating committee resigns because of illness, the union's executive committee appoints Roger to take his place. This is an example of:

Every organization faces uncertainty globally but not domestically.

As environmental uncertainty increases, organizations tend to become more mechanistic.

Assessment of environmental uncertainty of an organization is based primarily on analysis of two dimensions which are:

The general environment includes sectors with which the organization interacts directly and which have a direct and regular impact on the organization's ability to achieve its goals.

In addition to establishing favorable linkages to obtain resources, organizations also may try to change the environment.

How do organizations use planning, forecasting, and responsiveness in stable and unstable environments?

The complex-stable dimension concerns environmental complexity, which refers to heterogeneity, or the number and dissimilarity of external elements relevant to an organization's operations.

Discuss differentiation. How is integration connected to differentiation?

Competitive intelligence refers to the high-tech analysis of large amounts of internal and external data to spot patterns and relationships that might be significant.

____ is the quality of collaboration among departments.

Planning guarantees successful coping with an unstable environment.