Chişinău, 2013

Ministry of Education of the Republic of Moldova

Free International University of Moldova

Faculty of Economics

Business and Management, International Economic Relations and Tourism

EXAMS QUESTIONS

MANAGEMENT FUNDAMENTALS

Author: Galina LISA

Chişinău, 2013

1. Who are managers? An individual who is in charge of a certain group of tasks, or a certain subset of a company. A manager often has a staff of people who report to him or her. Managers are responsible for getting work done through others.

2. What does Management mean? The art of getting things done through the efforts of other people.

3. Planning involves… setting objectives and determining a course of action for achieving those objectives.

4. Organizing involves… developing an organizational structure and allocating human resources to ensure the accomplishment of objectives

5. Leading involves… the social and informal sources of influence that you use to inspire action taken by others

6. Controlling involves… ensuring that performance does not deviate from standards.

7. Leadership is… the art of understanding of who helps lead the organization forward and what the critical characteristics of good leadership might be.

8. Entrepreneurship is… identifying opportunities and solving problems—for any organization, entrepreneurship answers big questions about “what” an organization’s purpose might be.

9. Strategy is... aims to make sure that the right choices are made—specifically, that a good strategy is in place—to exploit those big opportunities.

10. What is performance? a function of its success in producing benefits for its owners in particular, through product innovation and the efficient use of resources.

11. What goals seem to dominate early management principles? productivity improvement and how to run an organization smoothly

12. What is virtual organization? an organization in which employees work remotely—sometimes within the same city, but more often across a country and across national borders

13. What is learning organization? an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights

14. Which of the trends depend on technology? Faster Pace of Innovation

15. What is Personality? the unique, relatively stable pattern of feelings, thoughts, and behavior that each individual displays

16. What Values consist of? a person’s life goals; they are similar to personality traits in that they are relatively stable over time.

17. Perception is defined as… how we make sense of our environment in response to environmental stimuli

18. Big Five Personality Traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and Neuroticism

19. Turnover refers to… an employee’s leaving an organization

20. Mission is… communicates the organization’s reason for being, and how it aims to serve its key stakeholders

21. Vision is… is a future-oriented declaration of the organization’s purpose and aspirations.

22. What is Creativity? the power or ability to invent

23. SCAMPER is… a checklist tool that helps you to think of changes you can make to an existing marketplace to create a new one - a new product, a new service, or both

24. Who are the Stakeholders? individuals or groups who have an interest in an organization’s ability to deliver intended results and maintain the viability of its products and services

25. Strategic Management reflects…the process by which a firm manages the formulation and implementation of its strategy; the coordinated means by which an organization achieves its goals and objectives; the pattern of resource allocation choices and organizational arrangements that result from managerial decision making

26. Defining SWOT Analysis. stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats

27. What is an intended strategy? as conceived by the top management team

28. What is a realized strategy? is what is actually put in place

29. What are Porter’s three generic strategies? overall cost leadership, differentiation, and focus on a particular market niche

30. What are the Treacy and Wiersema approaches? operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy

31. What is the objective of internal analysis? Core competencies

32. What are the six dimensions of the environment that are of broad concern when you conduct a PESTEL analysis? political, economic, social, technological, environmental, and legal spheres of an organization’s external environment

33. What is the strategy diamond? reduce the diversity or the overall size of the operations of the company.

34. Goals` definition. Outcome statements that define what an organization is trying to accomplish, both programmatically and organizationally. Goals are usually a collection of related programs, a reflection of major actions of the organization, and provide rallying points for managers.

35. Objectives` definition. Very precise, time-based, measurable actions that support the completion of a goal

36. What is Balanced Scorecard? Management practice that attempts to complement drivers of past performance (financial measures) with the drivers of future performance, such as customer satisfaction, development of human and intellectual capital, and learning. a tool that helps managers measure what matters to a company. helps managers define the performance categories that relate to the company’s strategy.

37. What does Organizational Structure refer to?.. to how individual and team work within an organization are coordinated.

38. What are boundaryless organization? an organization that eliminates traditional barriers between departments as well as barriers between the organization and the external environment.

39. Why does People resist change? because change disrupts habits, conflicts with certain personality types, causes a fear of failure, can have potentially negative effects, can result in a potential for loss of power, and, when done too frequently, can exhaust employees.

40. Lewin’s Three-Stage Process of Change: unfreeze – change - refreeze

41. Defining Organizational Culture. a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that show people what is appropriate and inappropriate behavior.

42. Three Levels of Organizational Culture. Assumptions are taken for granted and reflect beliefs about human nature and reality. Values are shared principles, standards, and goals. Artifacts - visible, tangible aspects of organizational culture

43. Dimensions of Organizational Culture Profile: Innovative Cultures, Aggressive Cultures, Outcome-Oriented Cultures, Stable Cultures, People-Oriented Cultures, Team-Oriented Cultures, Detail-Oriented Cultures.

44. What is Outcome-Oriented Cultures? emphasize achievement, results, and action as important values

45. Onboarding refers to… process through which new employees learn the attitudes, knowledge, skills, and behaviors required to function effectively within an organization.

46. Who Is a Leader? Leaders give their followers direction. Leaders are key players in determining the success or failure of coordinated tasks and organizational initiatives.

47. Emotional intelligence is… the ability to control emotions and understand other people’s emotions, their internal motivation, empathy and their social skills.

48. What behaviors may leaders demonstrate? Task-oriented behaviors and people-oriented behaviors.

49. Authoritarian decision making style is... when leaders make the decision alone without necessarily involving employees in the decision-making process.

50. Expectancy theory of motivation suggests that … employees are motivated when they believe - or expect - that (1) their effort will lead to high performance, (2) their high performance will be rewarded, and (3) the rewards they will receive are valuable to them.

51. What are the four leaders` styles identified by Path-goal theory of leadership? Directive, Supportive, Participative, Achievement-oriented

52. What Contingency Approaches to Leadership describe? The contingency approaches to leadership describe the role the situation would play in choosing the most effective leadership style.

53. What does transactional leadership approach ensure?.. that employees demonstrate the right behaviors because the leader provides resources in exchange.

54. What are the 4 tools used by transformational leaders? Charisma, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration.

55. What does it mean to be a servant leader? Servant leadership approach defines the leader’s role as serving the needs of others. Servant leadership has a positive effect on employee commitment, employee citizenship behaviors toward the community and job performance.

56. Decision making refers to… making choices among alternative courses of action - which may also include inaction.

57. What is nonprogrammed decisions? Decisions that are unique and important require conscious thinking, information gathering, and careful consideration of alternatives

58. Intuitive Decisions refers to… arriving at decisions without conscious reasoning. It makes sense that they would not have the time to formally work through all the steps of the rational decision-making model

59. Overconfidence bias occurs when… when individuals overestimate their ability to predict future events.

60. Anchoring refers to… the tendency for individuals to rely too heavily on a single piece of information

61. What is groupthink? Groupthink is a group pressure phenomenon that increases the risk of the group making flawed decisions by leading to reduced mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment.

62. Delphi Technique is… a group process using written responses to a series of questionnaires instead of physically bringing individuals together to make a decision.

63. Decision trees are… diagrams in which answers to yes or no questions lead decision makers to address additional questions until they reach the end of the tree. Decision trees are helpful in avoiding errors such as framing bias.

64. Communication is… a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior.

65. What three main functions within an organization communication fulfills? (1) transmitting information, (2) coordinating effort, and (3) sharing emotions and feelings.

66. Active listening can be defined... as giving full attention to what other people are saying, taking time to understand the points being made, asking questions as appropriate, and not interrupting at inappropriate times. Active listening creates a real-time relationship between the Sender and the Receiver by acknowledging the content and receipt of a Message.

67. What does External communication channels include? PR/press releases, ads, Web pages, and customer communications (letters and catalogs)

68. What Types of Communication includes? (1) verbal communication, in which you listen to a person to understand their meaning; (2) written communication, in which you read their meaning; and (3) nonverbal communication, in which you observe a person and infer meaning.

69. What is a group? A group is a collection of individuals who interact with each other such that one person’s actions have an impact on the others.

70. Stages of the Group Development Model: Forming-Storming-Norming-Performing-Adjourning

71. Social loafing refers to... the tendency of individuals to put in less effort when working in a group context. When the number of people pulling increase, the group’s total pulling force is less than the sum of individual efforts was when measured alone.

72. What is a team? A team is a small number of people with complementary skills who are committed to a common purpose, performance goals, and approach for which they are mutually accountable

73. The completer role is… where ideas are transformed into action. Behaviors associated with this role include following up on tasks such as gathering needed background information or summarizing the team’s ideas into reports.

74. What is a virtual team? Virtual teams are teams in which members are not located in the same physical place. Virtual teams are formed to take advantage of distributed expertise or time—the needed experts may be living in different cities.

75. Barriers to effective teams include… the challenges of knowing where to begin, dominating team members, the poor performance of team members, and poorly managed team conflict.

76. Motivation is defined as… the intention of achieving a goal, leading to goal-directed behavior

77. Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Physiological, safety, social, esteem, self-actualization.

78. What are motivators factors? that are intrinsic to the job: achievement, recognition, interesting work, increased responsibilities, advancement, and growth opportunities

79. What expectancy theory states for? Employees are motivated when they believe that their effort will lead to high performance (expectancy), that their performance will lead to outcomes (instrumentality), and that the outcomes following performance are desirable (valence)

80. What does Reinforcement theory argue?.. that behavior is a function of its consequences. By properly tying rewards to positive behaviors, eliminating rewards following negative behaviors and punishing negative behaviors, leaders can increase the frequency of desired behaviors.

81. Goal-setting theory involves… that goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely).

82. Steps of Organizational control involves: (1) establish standards, (2) measure performance, (3) compare performance to standards, and then (4) take corrective action as needed.

83. What is strategic control concerned with? Tracking the strategy as it is being implemented, detecting any problem areas or potential problem areas suggesting that the strategy is incorrect, and making any necessary adjustments. Strategic controls allow you to step back and look at the big picture and make sure all the pieces of the picture are correctly aligned.

84. What is operational control concerned?.. with executing the strategy.

85. Feedforward control addresses to… what can we do ahead of time to help our plan succeed. The essence of feedforward control is to see the problems coming in time to do something about them.

86. Financial control involves... the management of a firm’s costs and expenses to control them in relation to budgeted amounts.

87. What are nonfinancial controls? Nonfinancial controls monitors intangibles like customer satisfaction and employee morale.

88. The balance sheet is… a snapshot of the business’s financial position at a certain point in time.

89. What are the elements of Human Resources? Selection and Placement, Job design, Compensation and reward, Diversity Management

90. What is a Situational interview? Interviewing technique that places an applicant in a conflict or problematic situation where he or she has to make assessments and decisions to resolve it; can focus on past experience or future situations.

91. What is pay for performance?.. the pay that is tied directly to an individual’s performance in meeting specific business goals or objectives

92. What is an Incentive pay? A bonus paid when specified performance objectives are met. May inspire employees to set and achieve a higher performance level and is an excellent motivator to accomplish goals.

93. What are the Parallel teams? Parallel teams are teams that exist alongside (parallel to) an individual’s daily job.

94. Job design refers to… the process of putting together various elements to form a job, bearing in mind organizational and individual worker requirements, as well as considerations of health, safety, and ergonomics

95. HPWS is… a set of management practices that attempt to create an environment within an organization where the employee has greater involvement and responsibility (high-performance work system)

96. Succession planning is… a process whereby an organization ensures that employees are recruited and developed to fill each key role within the company

97. “A” positions are... those job categories most vital to the company’s success

98. Workforce Scorecard... identifies and measures the behaviors, skills, mind-sets, and results required for the workforce to contribute to the company’s success. the idea behind the HR scorecard is that if developmental attention is given to each area, then the organization will be more likely to be successful

99. A company’s human capital asset is... the collective sum of the attributes, life experience, knowledge, inventiveness, energy and enthusiasm that its people choose to invest in their work.

100. Lagging indicators are... those that tell the company what it has accomplished. Leading indicators are forecasts that help an organization see where it is headed. Leading indicators include employee learning and growth indices.

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