Exam 6: Organizational Structure and Design

What is a product structure? What are its advantages and disadvantages?

A ________ is a person who is either formally or informally designated to coordinate the activities across units or even sometimes across organizations.The role of this person is to build effective relationships between the groups involved.

The degree to which an organization's new product-development team relies on the market research team for product ideas to investigate is termed as ________.

A company is likely to use a "local approach" to doing business abroad if the benefits from location-specific differentiation and adaptation are significant and economies of scale are small.

What can be said about decision making in centralized organizations and decentralized organizations? How do centralization and decentralization relate to formalization?

A major principle in the relationship between organizational strategy and structure is that the structure should complement and leverage the strategy.

Formal organizations often widen a supervisor's span of control.

What is an organizational chart?

Japanese companies accomplish much of their decision making,communication,and control through informal,face-to-face meetings between people who do not have formal reporting relationships.This process is referred to as ________.

When designing an organizational structure for an international environment,management must choose between a ________,which integrates activities on a coordinated worldwide basis,and a ________,which differentiates activities in each country served.

In conditions of high task uncertainty and interdependence,values are a better integrating mechanism than goals.

ABC Corp.produces widgets.Timely delivery to XYZ Corp.is critical since the widgets are essential to the production of XYZ Corp.'s gadgets.This is an example of ________.

Which of the following is true about functional structures?

Organizational design is defined as the sum of the ways a firm divides its labor into distinct tasks and then coordinates them.

Japanese multinational firms tend to operate as ________,announcing decisions from home offices to subsidiaries.European multinational operations tend to operate as ________,pushing decision-making authority to the lowest possible level.

The ________ consists of the unofficial but influential means of communication,decision making,and control that are part of the habitual way things get done in an organization.

A construction company orders windows from one division of a manufacturing company and roofing from another division of the same company.To meet this customer's overall needs,the manufacturing company should exercise ________ interdependence.

A bank organizes itself around the basic services it provides: personal banking,corporate and business banking,and rural banking.Each service group has its own finance,marketing,operations,and human resource management departments.The bank is using a ________.

If a domestic organization opens an international division,then the products sold by this division typically have broad appeal and there are relatively few customer differences across countries.

The appropriateness of a tall or flat organization is affected more by the internal environment than the external environment.