UCF MAN Exam 2 (Chapters 6-9) Questions And Answers

Job specialization - is the degree to which the overall task of the organization is broken down and divided into smaller component parts. For example, when Walt Disney started his company, he did everything himself—wrote cartoons, drew them, added the character voices, and then marketed them to theaters. As the business grew, though, he eventually hired others to perform many of these same functions. Job rotation - involves systematically moving employees from one job to another. A worker in a warehouse might unload trucks on Monday, carry incoming inventory to storage on Tuesday, verify invoices on Wednesday, pull outgoing inventory from storage on Thursday, and load trucks on Friday. Thus, the jobs do not change, but instead workers move from job to job. Unfortunately, for this very reason, job rotation has not been especially successful in enhancing employee motivation or satisfaction. Job enlargement - was developed to increase the total number of tasks workers perform. As a result, all workers perform a wide variety of tasks, which presumably reduces the level of job dissatisfaction. At Maytag, for example, the assembly line for producing washing machine water pumps was systematically changed so that work that had originally been performed by six workers, who passed the work sequentially from one person to another, was performed by four workers, each of whom assembled a complete pump Job enrichment - assumes that increasing the range and variety of tasks is not sufficient by itself to improve employee motivation To implement job enrichment, managers remove some controls from the job, delegate more authority to employees, and structure the work in complete, natural units. These changes increase subordinates' sense of responsibility.Job characteristics approach - is an alternative to job specialization that does take into account the work system and employee preferences 1. Skill variety, the number of things a person does in a job 2. Task identity, the extent to which the worker does a complete or identifiable portion of the total job 3. Task significance, the perceived importance of the task 4. Autonomy, the degree of control the worker has over how the work is performed 5. Feedback, the extent to which the worker knows how well the job is being performed Functional departmentalization - groups together those jobs involving the same or similar activities. (The word function is used here to mean organizational functions such as finance and production, rather than the basic managerial functions, such as planning or controlling.) Product departmentalization - a second common approach, involves grouping and arranging activities around products or product groups. Most larger businesses adopt this form of departmentalization for grouping activities at the business or corporate level. Product departmentalization has three major advantages. Customer departmentalization - the organization structures its activities to respond to and interact with specific customers or customer groups. The lending activities in most banks, for example, are usually tailored to meet the needs of different kinds of customers (business, consumer, mortgage, and agricultural loans, for instance). Location departmentalization - groups jobs on the basis of defined geographic sites or areas. The defined sites or areas may range in size from a hemisphere to only a few blocks of a large city. The chain of command has two components - Unity of command and scalar principleUnity of command - suggests that each person within an organization must have a clear reporting relationship to one and only one boss (as we see later, newer models of organization design routinely— and successfully—violate this premise). The scalar principle - suggests that there must be a clear and unbroken line of authority that extends from the lowest to the highest position in the organization. Span of management (sometimes called the span of control). - Managers and researchers tried for years to find the optimal span of management Today we recognize that the span of management is a crucial factor in structuring organizations but that there are no universal, cut-and-dried prescriptions for an ideal or optimal span. Decentralization - the process of systematically delegating power and authority throughout the organization to middle- and lower-level managers. It is important to remember that decentralization is actually one end of a continuum anchored at the other end by centralization, the process of systematically retaining power and authority in the hands of higher-level managers. Hence, a decentralized organization is one in which decision-making power and authority are delegated as far down the chain of command as possible. Conversely, in a centralized organization, decision-making power and authority are retained at higher levels in the organization. Coordination - the process of linking the activities of the various departments of the organization. Authority - power that has been legitimized by the organization