interpersonal conflict management skills

1. ( T or F ) The number one mistake made by managers who were derailed from their fast track up the managerial ranks was that they didn’t develop or possess the necessarytechnical skills.
2. (T or F ) A management study discovered that companies that invest in their people will create long-term competitive advantages difficult for other companies toduplicate.
3. (T or F) While strong interpersonal conflict management skills are important for first-line managers, it is not a very important skill for team leaders.
4. Volkswagen Bernd Pischetsrieder, chief executive of Volkswagen, announced restructuring plans for the company. VW is Europe’s largest carmaker and needed to make itselfprofitable once again. To do so, VW cut thousands of jobs in the ensuing years through natural attrition, early retirement, and buying workers out of their contracts. The carmakeralso considered whether its component parts factories in Brunswick, Kassel, and Wolfsburg were helping VW accomplish its organizational goal. Pischetsrieder blamed much ofthe company’s problems on restructuring that was done in 1993. He insisted that the company is missing a whole generation of managers because its former CEO eliminated awhole layer of management. Now, 45 percent of managers were expected to go into retirement in the following three or four years.
VW is examining the ______ of its component parts factories.
A. efficiency B. synergy C. effectiveness D. autonomy E. reliability

5. (T or F ) The Hawthorne Studies proved that financial incentives were not necessarily the most important motivator for workers.
6. (T or F ) The contingency approach to management holds that there is not one best way to manage an organization.
7. Which of the following is NOT part of the principles of scientific management?
A. Use group dynamics to ensure organizational goals are met.
B. Give employees rest breaks throughout the day.
C. Find the one best way for doing each task.
D. Divide the work and the responsibility equally between management and workers.
E. Scientifically select, train, teach, and develop workers to help them reach their potential.

8. Which of the following statements describes an advantage of the systems approach to management?
A. It forces managers to be aware of how the environment affects specific parts of the organization.
B. It makes managers acutely aware that good internal management of the organization may not be enough to ensure survival.
C. It encourages managers to focus on better communication and cooperation within the organization.
D. It forces managers to view their organization as part of a whole.
E. All of these describe advantages of the systems approach to management.

9. According to a book by a Harvard Business School professor, some organizational cultures simply cannot meet the challenges posed by innovation and must respond to threats from new technologies by building outside ventures. Digital Equipment is described as having one of those organizational cultures. The company squandered the opportunities presented by the PC revolution even though it was well equipped to build cheap PCs. The company did not have .
A. adaptability B. synergy C. a formula for success laddering
D. knowledge management E. comprehension

10. The Edmonton Oilers ice hockey team develops a sense of history for its current players by raising banners showing its success – five championships – and the retired numbers of great players from the past in its stadium and locker room. What tactics for maintaining organizational culture are the Edmonton Oilers using?
A. organizational complexity and consistency B. organizational benchmarking
C. cultural laddering D. organizational stories and organizational heroes
E. behavioral addition and behavioral substitution

11. 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.
A. responsiveness B. adaptability C. involvement
D. consistency E. validity
12. Which of the following statements about social responsibility is true?
A. Companies are viewed as having social responsibilities only in economic, legal, and ethical areas.
B. The relative importance of economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary responsibilities is fixed and unchanging over time.
C. Economic and legal responsibilities play a larger role in a company’s social responsibility than do ethical and discretionary responsibilities.
D. Companies will be considered unethical if they do not perform their discretionary responsibilities.
E. Economic responsibilities are often referred to as fiscal responsibilities.

13.When media in India informed the public that Coca-Cola products bottled in India contained a high level of certain cancer-causing pesticides, Coke responded by saying that all of India’s water was contaminated and that it was not doing anything wrong by using the local water supply. What kind of a strategy did Coke use to respond to its social responsibility problems?
A. reactive strategy B. prospective strategy C. defensive strategy
D. accommodative strategy E. proactive strategy

14. (T or F) Encouraging worker participation in goal setting, making goals public, and getting top management’s support are all recommended ways to increase goal commitment in a company.
15. (T or F) An organization’s purpose must regularly change to adapt to changes in the environment over time.
16. (T or F) Groupthink is more likely to occur in a highly cohesive group that is insulated from others and has no established procedure for systematically defining problems and exploring alternatives.
17. (T or F) A competitive advantage becomes a sustainable competitive advantage when other companies have found it very expensive to duplicate the what the firm is providing to customers.
18. (T or F) Companies that succeed are often constantly re-examining strategies or competitive practices that have been successful in the past in order to ascertain their probable future success.
19. NTL is the largest cable company in the United Kingdom. The company has recently declared bankruptcy and needs to engage in restructuring in order to give it more flexibility and allow it to raise capital. Since it has identified the need for strategic change, what would be the organization’s next step in this strategy-making process?
A. finding the optimal strategic solution B. brainstorming
C. conducting focus groups D. assessing the need for strategic change
E. conducting a situation analysis
20. Tom Valerio was the point man on a major push to reinvent CIGNA Property & Casualty. His vision for CIGNA was to become a top-quartile, specialist property and casualty company. It was a radical proposition. During the organizational change, having this vision was especially important during the __stage.
A. change intervention B. the change prototype C. unfreezing
D. refreezing E. change mobilization

21. According to John Kotter, which of the following actions will adversely influence refreezing efforts?
A. the absence of a vision B. not removing obstacles to the company’s new vision
C. not creating a powerful enough guiding coalition
D. declaring victory too soon E. all of these

22. Which of the following statements describes an advantage of the results-driven change approach to managing change?
A. It supplants the sole emphasis on activity with a focus on quickly measuring and improving results.
B. Managers actually test to see if changes make a difference.
C. Quick, visible improvements motivate employees to continue to make additional changes.
D. Managers introduce changes in policies, procedures, rules, and regulations only when they will improve measured performance.
E. All of these were cited as advantages of the results-driven change approach.

23. (T or F) Multinational companies typically have no difficulty determining the correct balance between global consistency and local adaptation.
24. (T or F) When conducting global business, companies should attempt to identify the two types of political risk, which are political uncertainty and economic uncertainty.

25. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) …
A. decreases both tariffs and nontariff barriers
B. puts stricter limits on government subsidies
C. eliminates tariffs in ten specific industries
D. protects intellectual property, such as trademarks, patents, and copyright
E. does all of these