Exam 6: Applied Performance Practices

According to the survey reported in the text, what percentage of Americans say their pay is "variable, such that a portion is dependent upon your individual performance/productivity" targets?

Before meeting a new client, a salesperson visualizes the experience of meeting the person and effectively answering some of the challenging questions the client might ask.This activity is an example of:

The chief executive officer of a mid-sized manufacturing company has hired you to design the work site and to make any other changes necessary for employees to feel more empowered.Briefly define empowerment and describe three important conditions you would ensure to improve empowerment among the employees.

Gainsharing plans tend to:

The largest portion of most paychecks is based on a person's membership and seniority in an organization.

Scientific management is the process of systematically dividing work into its smallest possible elements and standardizing work activities to achieve maximum efficiency.

Empowerment flourishes in organizations with a learning orientation.

Positive self-talk motivates employees by increasing their effort-to-performance expectancy.

Which of the following is an advantage of using competency based financial rewards?

Mental imagery excludes visualizing completion of a task.

Team rewards increase employee preferences for team-based work arrangements.

Employees at CyberTech perform repetitive jobs that have resulted in boredom as well as repetitive strain injury.Technology makes it difficult to combine existing jobs, but the company wants employees to have more skills.Which of the following would best help CyberTech to improve this situation?

Longer work cycles give employees more frequent practice with the task, so jobs are mastered more quickly.

Money is the only thing that motivates people to join an organization and perform effectively.

Explain the three critical psychological states that affect employee motivation and satisfaction in the context of the job characteristics model.

People with a high power distance tend to have a high respect and priority for money.

A cable TV company redesigned jobs so that one employee interacts directly with customers, connects and disconnects their cable service, installs their special services and collects overdue accounts in an assigned area.They also decided to do away with scripted customer interaction manuals and allow each employee to determine how best to interact with each customer.Previously, each task was performed by a different person and the customer interacted only with someone at the head office.This change is an example of:

Very large rewards (relative to an employee's regular income) can result in lower, rather than higher, performance.