Assignment – A
Question 1. What were the Hawthorne studies? What effect did they have on the Management practices?
Question 2. What steps can an organisation take to increase the motivational force for high levels of performance?
Question 3. Explain briefly various Management Functions. What is the basis for saying that planning is the most crucial management function? Discuss.
Question 4. Explain the MBO Process.
Question 5. Elucidate the relationship between planning and control.
Assignment – B
Question 1. To whom do you think is performance appraisal more significant to the organization or to the individual? Justify.
Question 2. Comment on the statement “Delegation of authority is the key to organization”. Discuss the advantages of delegation in the light of this statement.
Question 3. What are the challenges faced by the professional managers in the contemporary Indian industrial set up?
Case Study
When play becomes work
Sheetal Banavali’s daily routine as a Team Leader at UK 3 in anything but ordinary. Eight straight hours of handling a team of executives servicing customers from halfway across the world is bound to leave anyone exhausted. “I either go to Unwind, which plays great music, or Cuisine, where the food is top of the world. Sometimes I even go to Finesse to get my hairdo right,” she says. Unwind and Cuisine, by the way, are theme cafeterias, while Finesse is a beauty salon. And yes, all three are located within the 3 office premises at Mindspace, Malad. “We are setting the benchmark in HR practices,” says 3 Head (Recruitment and HR Support) Akhil Sharma, who prefers describing the 5,000-employees strong 3 as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company rather than a plain Jane BPO. “Our focus is the employee and we believe in nurturing his or her talent.” With a Citibank ATM inside the office, a full-fledged gaming arcade, a higher education programme – Gurukul – that has a tie-up with institutions like Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies and the Institute of Chartered Financial Analysts of India allowing employees to pursue an MBA or a CA, the only thing missing is bed and breakfast. “By the way, we have three company guesthouses if the staff wants to stay overnight,” says Sharma with a laugh, even market leaders joins the game. If BPOs are upping the ante, the IT companies, small and big, aren’t far behind. Sudheesh Venkatesh, Vice-President, HR, of the India operations of Tesco, the world’s largest grocery home-shopping service in the world, puts the paradigm shift in perspective calling it the ‘death of the personnel manager’ “The IT industry has effectively ensured that the old personnel department is gone and done away with. Human resources today is completely about talent management and retention,” he says. And walking the talk, Tesco offers employees not only maternity and paternity leave, but also adoption leave. “We are an equal opportunity employer and if any employee of ours wants to adopt a child, we will support him or her in every possible ways,” he says. The Tesco campus at Whitefield in Bangalore also houses a learning centre where employees can register themselves for a retail certification course from no less than the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore. “We have also done away with the probation period because we are in the business of training people,” says Venkatesh. Gurgaon-based Eon Technologies, which handles offshore projects across Europe, is a small company by Indian IT standards. “But we have practices which are cutting edge,” says Prema Pillai, head of HR at the company. “Tele-commuting, flexi-time and retreats focused on team building are our strong points.”
Question 1. What principles of motivation are being used here?
Question 2. What control tools would be most effective in this kind of work environment?
Question 3. Can such efforts lead to a consistent behavior in organisations? Give reasons.
Assignment – C
1. Decreasing the role of subordinates in decision-making is known as
(a) Decentralisation
(b) Stabilization
(c) Centralization
(d) Organization
2. Which of the following refers to the flow of information among people on the same or similar organizational levels?
(a) Diagonal
(b) Upward
(c) Horizontal
(d) Downward
3. Which of the following is a question that needs to be answered in job analysis?
(a) What physical and mental tasks does the worker accomplish?
(b) What qualifications are needed to perform the job?
(c) When is the job to be completed?
(d) All of the above.
4. ________ refers to the ability of individuals or groups to induce or influence the beliefs or actions of other individuals or groups.
(a) Power
(b) Responsibility
(c) Delegation
(d) Discipline
5. Which one management function helps maintain managerial effectiveness by establishing guidelines for future activities?
(a) Organizing
(b) Planning
(c) Staffing
(d) Leading
6. Which is not a leadership theory?
(a) Trait theory
(b) ERG theory
(c) Contingency theory
(d) Transactional theory
7. Which is an esteem need?
(a) Basic pay
(b) Safety regulations
(c) Prestigious office location
(d) Training
8. What interview is comprehensive, and the interviewer encourages the applicant to do much of the talking?
(a) Unstructured
(b) Structured
(c) Stress
(d) Directive
9. What are the typical products of job analysis?
(a) Job descriptions and job specifications
(b) Work standards
(c) Work schedules
(d) Desired financial incentives
10. In Basket Technique is used in
(a) Production
(b) Marketing
(c) Training
(d) Accounting
11. Key result areas are usually terms as
(a) Objectives
(b) Missions
(c) Goals
(d) KRAs
12. Which one is not a stage of Group process?
(a) Forming
(b) Norming
(c) Welcoming
(d) Performing
13. MBO was first suggested by
(a) F.W. Taylor
(b) Henri Fayol
(c) Peter F. Drucker
(d) Watson
14. Which managerial function gives attention to influencing and motivating employees to improve performance and achieve corporate objectives?
(a) Leading
(b) Organizing
(c) Staffing
(d) Controlling
15. Job Evaluation is a technique which aims at:
(a) Establishing fair and equitable pay structure
(b) Analyzing of requirement of updating technology
(c) Assessing safety requirement of jobs
(d) Improving productivity
16. Which is an advantage of decentralization?
(a) Encourages decision-making
(b) Easy to have uniform policy
(c) Greater Control
(d) Decreases complexity of coordination
17. Performance review is done to
(a) Reward work done
(b) Focus on areas requiring improvement
(c) Giving appropriate feed back to individuals
(d) All of the above
18. The general conclusion of the ‘Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments’ was that employees would work better if the management were concerned about their welfare and superiors paid special attention to them. This phenomenon was subsequently labeled as the _________
(a) Relay effect
(b) Hawthorne effect
(c) Behavioral effect
(d) Human effect
19. Which is not a way to overcome the initial resistance to change in organizations?
(a) Education and Communication
(b) Group inertia
(c) Participation and involvement
(d) Negotiation and agreement
20. Management of change refers to
(a) Help people to adopt to the change
(b) Changing people
(c) Change the organization structure
(d) Change the top management
21. Requisites of effective supervision are
(a) Technical knowledge of the work
(b) Managerial knowledge
(c) Knowledge of rules & regulations
(d) All of the above
22. According to Herzberg and his associates ______ are job content factors which lead to job satisfaction?
(a) Motivators
(b) Hygiene factor
(c) Context factors
(d) Physiological factors
23. The establishment of a distinct area, unit of subsystem of an organization over which a manager has authority for the performance of specialized activities and results is termed_______
(a) Centralization
(b) Departmentation
(c) Decentralization
(d) Functionalization
24. Democratic leadership is also know as _________ leadership.
(a) Autocratic
(b) Participative
(c) Bureaucratic
(d) Laissez-faire
25. A/an ________ is a vital tool for providing information about organizational relationships.
(a) Organizational chart
(b) Functional chart
(c) Organizational model
(d) Functional model
26. Which control principles suggests that managers should be informed about a problem only when the data shows a significant deviation from established standards?
(a) Management by waling around
(b) Management by objectives
(c) Management by goals
(d) Management by exception
27. Line Managers are:
(a) Supervisors
(b) Staff authorities
(c) Managers with authority to direct operations in their spheres of activity
(d) Production & Marketing Managers
28. When an employee asks a question or reports a problem to his or her supervisor, this is an example of which direction of communication?
(a) Grapevine
(b) Lateral
(c) Downward
(d) Upward
29. You have decided to send a message to your supervisor requesting vacation time. You brainstorm some basic concepts and now must decide how to phrase this information for your supervisor. You are at which of the following steps in the communication process?
(a) Sending
(b) Receiving
(c) Encoding
(d) Decoding
30. Group decision-making has certain advantages over individual decision-making. Which of the following statements is not true with regard to group decision-making?
(a) It allows pooling of knowledge and information
(b) It’s a source of personnel development
(c) It discourages risk taking
(d) It’s time consuming and costly
31. The idea that workers look for meaning in their work and will actively seek out new responsibility is most consistent with which of these needs identified by Maslow?
(a) Safety
(b) Social
(c) Self-actualization
(d) Physiological
32. A manager’s posture during a communication with a colleague is an example of which aspect of the communications process?
(a) Decoding
(b) Non-verbal behavior
(c) Informal channel
(d) The grapevine
33. The organization chart is a way of showing
(a) How the tasks of an organization are divided and co-ordinated
(b) The informal patterns of communication
(c) The stakeholders who have an interest in the company
(d) The physical layout of the buildings on a site
34. When a manager secures the agreement of a colleague to work on a project in return for the promise of providing the colleague with some extra remuneration, what type of power is he or she exercising?
(a) Expert power
(b) Coercive power
(c) Referent power
(d) Reward power
35. ______ spans of management create ____________ structures with many levels of management.
(a) Wide ; tall
(b) Narrow ; tall
(c) Wide ; unpredictable
(d) Narrow ; flat
36. Which of the following is not one of the steps identified as part of the controlling process?
(a) Setting performance standards or goals
(b) Measuring performance
(c) Writing the reports
(d) Taking corrective action
37. According to Herzberg, which of the following can be classified as a motivator?
(a) Working conditions
(b) Pay
(c) Supervision
(d) Recognition
38. Which of the following refers to changing a task to make it inherently more rewarding, motivating and satisfying?
(a) Enlargement
(b) Rotation
(c) Enhancement
(d) Enrichment
39. The tendency to place the primary responsibility for one’s success or failure either within oneself or on outside forces is referred to as
(a) Authoritarianism
(b) Emotional stability
(c) Locus of control
(d) Extroversion
40. ______ is a process whereby companies find out how others do something better than they do and then try to imitate or improve on it.
(a) TQM
(b) Continuous improvement
(c) Benchmarking
(d) Empowerment
