Exam 13: Decision Rights: Bundling Tasks Into Jobs and Subunits

Alfred Chandler,the noted business historian,indicated that "the administrative load of the senior executives increased to such an extent that they were unable to handle their entrepreneurial responsibilities efficiently." He was speaking of the:

Dan Unowsky,director of remanufacturing for the Southern division of Enhanced Computers,finds that communication with marketing is very difficult.This is a ______ of separating marketing from production.

The initial companies in the United States in the 1800s failed after following the design of the railroad system because ______.

Starting from the 1990s there was a significant shift toward:

Dan Unowsky manages a production group in a PC repair shop.He has noticed that the speed of repair is based on each worker doing one task.However,if an employee is out sick,then the entire repair process slows down.This is an example of:

Network organizations depend upon:

You are a manager of a small coal mining operation.Your best way to design task would be:

Specialized task assignment's greatest cost is ignoring the foregone ______ across tasks.

Which of the following is not a cost of specialized task assignment?

A matrix organization is organized on the basis of:

In the BankInc case,the change in assignment for caseworkers was made practical by:

Which of the following is not a benefit of the M form of an organization?

Incentives are an important aspect to determine whether multiple tasks should be combined into one job or not.How can monetary incentives help and/or hinder the process of getting a job done,particularly if it is made up of several tasks?

A disadvantage associated with grouping jobs on the basis of functional specialty is that:

The choice between specialized and broad task assignments depends on:

Dan Unowsky assigns his computer repairers four tasks: customer service,replacement of broken parts,clean-up of equipment,and sale of used equipment to customers.If the company provides a 10% commission for all sales made by employees,then:

The BankInc case shows the potential of shifting from ______ tasks to ______ task assignments.

Defense,construction,and management consulting are usually set up as:

Industrial engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor was particularly rude in his recommendation that jobs be kept simple.He argued that the characteristics of lower-level workers were such that they should be assigned very limited decision rights and a narrow set of tasks.While certainly crude by today's standards,Taylor recognized that:

Two tasks are said to be ______ if performing more of one task increases the benefit or reduces the cost of performing another task.