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Exam 9: Designing Adaptive Organizations

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Question 21

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In recent years, the Air Force Weather Agency (AFWA) has undergone a radical change in how it determines and shares local weather conditions with pilots. Before the local base weather station was responsible for warnings. The quality of this information varied. Now AFWA provides the same high standard of weather information to all pilots. This is an example of ____?

A) customization
B) micro-adaptation
C) sequential independence
D) reengineering
E) customer empowerment

F) A) and B)
G) B) and E)

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Question 22

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Disadvantages of ____ departmentalization include slower decision making, the development of managers and workers with narrow experience and expertise, and makes it more difficult for cross-departmental coordination.

A) product
B) customer
C) geographic
D) functional
E) hierarchical

F) D) and E)
G) All of the above

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Question 23

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A(n) ____ is a form of matrix departmentalization in which managers in different parts of the matrix negotiate conflicts and resources directly.

Identify the five traditional approaches to organizational structure. Which one is best for a company to use? Explain your answer.

Job specialization can result in ____.

The coordination of departmental activities tends to be more difficult with the geographic approach to departmentalization than with the other approaches.

The term task description refers to the number, kind, and variety of tasks that individual workers perform in doing their jobs.

All organizations can be categorized clearly as either completely mechanistic or completely organic.

Yahoo! Welcome to Yahoo! where you'll find a $100 million loss, plummeting advertising sales, a stock price that has fallen from an all-time high of $237 to less than $10 per share, and layoffs that cost 800 people-including the previous CEO-their jobs. At this once-phenomenally-successful company, so many basic things have gone wrong that the question is: Where do you start to fix it? One key problem is the organizational structure: with just 3,200 employees, Yahoo! has forty-four different business units! Even General Electric, with 300,000 employees, has only 13. You think to yourself, "This is unmanageable. Too many people and no focus." Amazingly, despite having 44 business units, Yahoo! doesn't have a direct sales unit. No one, it turns out, is responsible for cultivating customers. Why not? Well, during the "go-go" days, customers were literally throwing themselves and their advertising dollars at the company. As one Yahoo! manager said, "The fish were jumping into the boat." Consequently, most orders took place via email. Yahoo! didn't have to establish relationships with customers because customers came to it. Unfortunately, this led to arrogance. Jeff Bell, a vice president at one of Yahoo!'s potential customers, DaimlerChrysler, said the message was, "Buy our stuff [meaning Yahoo!'s advertising], and shut up." Jeff Mallett, Yahoo!'s former president, said, "We ran Yahoo! to optimize market share. I make no apologies for that. If there was a company that didn't get it [Internet advertising], we moved on very quickly." Another problem was the overly creative, freewheeling, spontaneous company culture in which everyone, including the CEO, worked in cubicles. The problem wasn't so much the cubicles, but what they came to represent: an overly informal culture with no controls. At Yahoo!, employees played soccer in a large open space outside the company boardroom, even while the board was meeting. Furthermore, no one had an overall perspective of what was best for the entire company. Consequently, said one Yahoo! vice president, "[Unit] managers would beg, borrow, and steal from the network [meaning the overall company] to help their own properties." Plus, if you had an idea, you pursued it without having to get anyone's feedback or approval. Yahoo!'s chief operating officer said, "Yahoo!'s original mission was to grow as fast as you can and put things out there and see what works." The more serious problem, he said, was that "nobody knew what would work." The most amazing aspect of this culture was that, as one manager explained, "There was a fair amount of resistance toward the strategy of monetizing our businesses." In other words, the culture at Yahoo! was so informal, so unfocused, and so freewheeling that no one really worried about whether the company could charge for the services it provided and make a profit. "There was a fear," said this manager, "that if all of our efforts were put into profit making, we'd starve research and development and lose our innovation." -Refer to Yahoo!. What is one of the advantages of Yahoo's new organizational structure?

Which of the following statements about mechanistic organizations is true?

____ is characterized by simple, easy-to-learn steps; low variety; and high repetition.

The composition of a ____ organization is always changing.

As a result of their structures, matrix organizations automatically violate the principle of ____.

While ____ emphasizes jobs and their authority relationships, ____ emphasizes the activities through which work gets done in the organization.

____ departmentalization is defined as organizing work and workers into separate units responsible for particular business functions or areas of expertise.

A(n) ____ function is an activity that contributes directly to creating or selling the company's products.

One of the advantages of a virtual organization is the fact that it allows member companies to share costs.

The two disadvantages associated with product departmentalization are costly duplication and difficulties with cross-departmental coordination.

How do the mechanistic and organic approaches to organizational design differ? Under what circumstances is each appropriate for use by a company?

As a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and its emphasis on specialization, institutions providing higher education developed strict departments that contained specialized functions. This organizational structure was perceived as a way to enhance the accumulation and dissemination of knowledge. Institutions providing higher education have traditionally used ____.