Exam 9: Problem Solving, Decision Making, and Creativity

The supervisor can benefit from the entire work group's creativity by:

Some brainstorming techniques that supervisors can use include choosing a different meeting location,asking people outside the group to identify problems,or asking employees to come prepared by individually listing problems to name at the meeting.

What are the pitfalls of brainstorming? How can these problems be forestalled?

A barrier to creativity is preparing contingency plans.

Probability theory is defined as a(n):

Colleagues in other organizations can be a good source of ideas.

The cure for stereotyping is to:

A salesperson tells his customers that he will give them some freebies if they purchase laptops from his store.However,he has neither asked the store manager if he can do so,nor checked if the shop has an adequate stock of freebies.As such,he is not able to deliver the freebies to his customers.Which decision-making trap is this an example of?

In group decision making,the group may simply provide input,leaving the supervisor to make the actual decision.

A supervisor's manager should be told about every minor decision the supervisor makes each day.

Which of the following refers to the tendency to most readily remember events that have just occurred?

In a crisis,the supervisor should begin implementing the solution and interpreting feedback to see whether it is working,instead of waiting to evaluate other alternatives.

Which of the following is a symptom of groupthink?

When people analyze alternatives,they tend to rely on their intuition and gut instincts instead of collecting impartial data.This is known as:

Andy,a supervisor at KMT Inc.,encourages his team members to come up with innovative suggestions.He reviews the suggestions with the employees,and if it results in monetary savings/profits,the employee who made the suggestion is awarded a $50 bonus.Andy has:

If an idea does fail,the supervisor should acknowledge the problem and:

In a decision-making process,being able to generate alternatives that are innovative or different from what has been used before is called:

Amber,who works part-time and goes to school full-time,has the ability to obtain straight As but is not motivated to work for them.She thinks she can justify her low grades since she works part-time,and is thus not able to put in the hours required to get straight As.Which human compromise is this an example of?

The desire to achieve higher quality is a source of problems for a supervisor to solve creatively.

Creative thinking is not always a conscious process.