Exam 3: Section 1: Organizational Environments and Cultures

The manager of a company that produces a soy-based sausage wants to conduct a competitive analysis. During this competitive analysis, he should look at____________ .

Advocacy groups use a variety of tactics to convince businesses to comply with the group's stand on issues. Which of the following advocacy group tactics would be most likely to cause a business to fail?

Dofasco, Inc. is a different kind of steel company. Tiny by industry standards, the Canadian-based company has just 8,500 employees and a market cap of $2.3 billion. Dofasco operates with a close eye on the triple bottom line. In addition to tracking financial metrics, Dofasco also monitors its impact on society and the environment. As a result, the company has outperformed many of its biggest competitors. Despite a recent slump in the automobile industry, which accounted for 50 percent of its business, Dofasco ran at 100 percent capacity and finished as one of the only integrated steelmakers in all of North America to make a profit one year. Dofasco is also one of the only companies in the steel industry without a union, and its employees like it that way. Employee turnover at the company's main operation is less than one percent annually. Part of its low turnover rate is due to the company's concern about protecting its external environment. As the CEO of the company said, "One way to get happy employees is not to wreck their community in which they live." -Refer to Dofasco. The fact that Ford purchased less steel from Dofasco during the auto industry's slump would be part of Dofasco's__________ environment because Ford Motor Company is one of its customers.

Because external environments can be dynamic, confusing, and complex, managers use a three-step process to make sense of the changes in their external environments. Those steps are (1) environmental scanning, (2) interpreting environmental factors, and (3) acting on threats and opportunities.

Business confidence indices are a viable alternative to economic statistics for management decision making.

Dofasco, Inc. is a different kind of steel company. Tiny by industry standards, the Canadian-based company has just 8,500 employees and a market cap of $2.3 billion. Dofasco operates with a close eye on the triple bottom line. In addition to tracking financial metrics, Dofasco also monitors its impact on society and the environment. As a result, the company has outperformed many of its biggest competitors. Despite a recent slump in the automobile industry, which accounted for 50 percent of its business, Dofasco ran at 100 percent capacity and finished as one of the only integrated steelmakers in all of North America to make a profit one year. Dofasco is also one of the only companies in the steel industry without a union, and its employees like it that way. Employee turnover at the company's main operation is less than one percent annually. Part of its low turnover rate is due to the company's concern about protecting its external environment. As the CEO of the company said, "One way to get happy employees is not to wreck their community in which they live." -Refer to Dofasco. The company's commitment to triple the bottom line and to keeping its employees happy is indicative of Dofasco's _____________.

When using _____________techniques to change organizational culture, the key to success is to choose behaviors that are central to and symbolic of the old culture that is changing and the new culture you want to create.

The two kinds of external organizational environments are the general environment and the specific environment.

Identify and provide examples of the two important ways in which socio-cultural changes and trends influence organizations.

The specific segment of an organization's external environment is unique to its region of the country.

In order to change an organizational culture, top management can persuade other managers and employees to perform a new behavior in place of an older one. This technique is called __________.

Which of the following is the LEAST aggressive approach likely to be used by an advocacy group?

According to its rate of environmental change, an organization's environment can be either stable or dynamic, but not both.

Define advocacy groups. List the three approaches to influencing businesses that advocacy groups are likely to use. Specify which one of these three is most likely to impact company sales and profits.

Which of the following companies is most likely operating in a dynamic environment?

Which of the following would be an example of a visible artifact for an organization that is merging with a large international firm?

One of the difficulties encountered in recent mergers has been the inability of employees in the two existing organizational cultures to operate harmoniously. In other words, merging organizational cultures often lack the____________ that would increase the likelihood of a merger's success.

In terms of external organizational environments, the________ environment is unique to each company.

A high degree of buyer or seller dependence can lead to ____________in which one party benefits at the expense of the other.

The creation of Ingram Distribution allows booksellers to streamline the ordering and return procedures of their books. Ingram made all the books bookstore owners wanted available in one centralized warehouse. Many new bookstore owners would be unwilling and/or unable to return to the method of ordering books from the individual publishers. This is an example of the creation of______________ .