Exam 10: Creating Effective Organizational Designs

The strategy and structure of a firm change as the firm increases in size, diversifies into new product markets, and limits its geographic scope.

Organizations generally tend to become internally focused when faced with ______________ and _____________.

A firm that chooses to move into unrelated product areas, by acquiring existing businesses, is likely to find that the strategy requires relatively little integration across businesses and sharing of resources and therefore is would consider a using holding company structure.

Effective ambidextrous organizations have alignment, which means that

Modular companies can achieve rapid growth because they do not require large investments in fixed assets.

Generally speaking, discussions of the relationship between strategy and structure strongly imply that

Outsourcing in noncore functions of modular companies offers the advantage of decreased overall costs, but the company will be unable to focus on scarce resources in the areas where it holds competitive advantage.

One of the factors that explained the effectiveness of ambidextrous organizational designs in the O'Reilly and Tushman study was that the structure enabled cross-fertilization while avoiding cross contamination in terms of sharing resources.

The appropriateness of the type of organizational structure depends upon the ___________ and _______ of growth.

Which one of the following is not a primary types of organizational structures used to manage the international operations of a company?

In the ambidextrous firm, if managers direct their efforts primarily at _______, they are likely to miss out on promising business opportunities.

Managers trained in rigid hierarchies do not find it difficult to transition to participative style required for effective teamwork.

When an organization with a functional structure diversifies into related product-markets, it generally

One of the risks of outsourcing is a loss of cross-functional skills.

Because the modular form of organizing involves outsourcing vital functions, modular firms often forfeit full strategic control.

One of the factors that explained the effectiveness of ambidextrous organizational designs in the O'Reilly and Tushman study was the clear and compelling vision that the company senior management team communicated.

A matrix organizational structure is characterized by a combination of the ______________ and _____________.

The structure of a firm typically has almost no effect on its strategy.

As firms grow, owner managers often need to hire functional specialists to handle the increased information-processing burden.

A strategy of related diversification requires most firms to organize around geographical areas or product lines. This type of organizational growth leads to a(n) ______________ structure.