Exam 2: Strategy, Organization Design, and Effectiveness

The ____ approach to organizational effectiveness is concerned with the output side and whether the organization achieves its goals in terms of desired levels of output.

Goals and strategies are usually fixed and remain unchanged once top management agrees upon them.

Core competence refers to what sets the organization apart from others and provides it with a distinctive edge for meeting customer or client needs in the marketplace.

Name a company that you can imagine creating. List five operating goals that would be reasonable for your company to pursue.

The differentiation strategy:

The ____ strategy is concerned with stability or retrenchment.

The reactor strategy is a strategy because it responds to environmental threats and opportunities in a strategic fashion.

The low-cost leadership strategy is known for requiring skills based on strong marketing ability, creative flair, strong capability in basic research, and corporate reputation for technological leadership.

Before the mission is defined and goals are set, top management should assess its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.

Models for formulating organizational strategies include:

Explain strategic intent and the purpose of a mission in an organization.

When would you recommend that the resource-based approach be used to gauge organizational effectiveness?

The competing values model of effectiveness makes two contributions. First, it integrates diverse concepts of effectiveness into a single perspective. Second, the model calls attention to how effectiveness criteria are socially constructed from management values and shows how opposing values exist at the same time.

The extent to which goals are obtained is a traditional definition of the degree of ____ in the organization.

Organization ____ needs to support the firm's competitive approach.

Assume that in an area university, some people feel that athletics is overly emphasized, and others feel that it is under emphasized. How would you go about measuring the effectiveness of that university relative to its athletics program? Explain.

Assume that a non-profit organization is very successful at obtaining grants to support its activities. On the other hand, it is felt among employees that a hostile work environment (one type of sexual harassment) exists. You have heard that recipients of the organization's services run the range of satisfaction with services provided. If you came in as an outside evaluator to this situation, describe and defend the method would you use for assessing effectiveness.

What is the difference between a goal and a strategy? Give an illustration of each.

____ pertains to the training, promotion, safety, and growth of employees.

The choices top managers make about goals, strategies, and organizational design have a tremendous impact on organizational: