MAN 5245: Review Guide for Test #2: Key Topics and Concepts Part II – Chapters 6-10

The second test will cover the lectures and readings from Chapters 6-10 in the textbook. (The exam
does not cover the team research projects.)

The questions will be approximately equally weighted from all chapters in the text and lectures. Please
read each question carefully before constructing your answer.

Below are the key topics and concepts from the readings and lectures that are the ones you should be
the most familiar with for the test. If you have any questions as you are reviewing these items, please
feel free to email me at clarkel@ufl.edu, or call me at 202-421-5568, anytime, to discuss.

Chapter 6: Applied Performance Practices

Be able to define and apply these key concepts:

Empowerment-- is often mentioned in writing and conversations about Handelsbanken because,

unlike too many financial institutions, the Swedish bank’s employees really do experience the feeling
of being empowered. Empowerment is a psychological concept represented by four dimensions: self-
determination, meaning, competence, and impact of the individual’s role in the organization. If any
dimension weakens, the employee’s sense of empowerment will weaken.

• Self-determination . Empowered employees feel that they have freedom, independence,

and discretion over their work activities.

• Meaning . Employees who feel empowered care about their work and believe that what
they do is important.

• Competence . Empowered people are confident about their ability to perform the work well
and have a capacity to grow with new challenges.

• Impact. Empowered employees view themselves as active participants in the organization;

that is, their decisions and actions have an influence on the company’s success.

Job Characteristics Model (You can guarantee there will be at least one question on the exam about
this!)-- A job design model that relates the motivational properties of jobs to specific personal and
organizational consequences of those properties.

Job Design--The process of assigning tasks to a job, including the interdependency of those tasks with
other jobs

Job Enlargement-- adds tasks to an existing job. This might involve combining two or more complete
jobs into one or just adding one or two more tasks to an existing job. Either way, skill variety increases
because there are more tasks to perform. Video journalists represent a clear example of an enlarged
job. As Exhibit 6.3 illustrates, a traditional news team consists of a camera operator, a sound and
lighting specialist, and the journalist who writes and presents or narrates the story. One video
journalist performs all of these tasks. Job enlargement significantly improves work efficiency and
flexibility. However, research suggests that simply giving employees more tasks won’t affect
motivation, performance, or job satisfaction

Job Evaluation-- Systematically rating the worth of jobs within an organization by measuring their
required skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions

Job Rotation-- is the practice of moving employees from one job to another. “The whole idea of job
rotation makes a big difference,” says Chrysler’s vice president of manufacturing. “The job naturally
gets better, quality improves, throughput improves.”

Job Specialization--The result of division of labor in which work is subdivided into separate jobs
assigned to different people.

Motivator-Hygiene Theory (Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory)-- Herzberg’s theory stating that employees
are primarily motivated by growth and esteem needs, not by lower-level needs

Scientific Management--The practice of systematically partitioning work into its smallest elements and
standardizing tasks to achieve maximum efficiency.

Skill Variety-- The extent to which employees must use different skills and talents to perform tasks
within their jobs.

Task Identity- The degree to which a job requires completion of a whole or an identifiable piece of
work.

Task Significance-- The degree to which a job has a substantial impact on the organization and/or
larger society

Be able to understand and apply these key theories and ideas about OB:

The role of money as a motivational tool at work--Money relates to our needs, our emotions, and our
self-concept. It is a symbol of achievement and status, a reinforcer and motivator, and a source of
enhanced or reduced anxiety. 3 According to one source, “Money is probably the most emotionally
meaningful object in contemporary life: only food and sex are its close competitors as common
carriers of such strong and diverse feelings, significance, and strivings.”

Pros and cons of

membership-based, and seniority-based rewards (sometimes called “pay for pulse”) represent the
largest part of most paychecks. Some employee benefits, such as free or discounted meals in the
company cafeteria, remain the same for everyone, whereas others increase with seniority

job-status, based rewards try to improve feelings of fairness by assigning higher pay to people working
in jobs with higher value to the organization. These rewards also motivate employees to compete for
promotions. However, at a time when companies are trying to be more cost-efficient and responsive
to the external environment, job status— based rewards potentially do the opposite by encouraging a
bureaucratic hierarchy.

competency-based, rewards motivate employees to learn new skills. 17 This tends to improve
organizational effectiveness by creating a more flexible workforce; more employees are multiskilled
for performing a variety of jobs, and they are more adaptive to embracing new practices in a dynamic
environment. Product or service quality also tends to improve because employees with multiple skills
are more likely to understand the work process and know how to improve it. However, competency-
based pay plans have not always worked out as well as promised by their advocates. They are often
overdesigned, making it difficult to communicate these plans to employees.

performance-based, rewards have existed since Babylonian days 4,000 years ago, but their popularity
has increased dramatically over the past couple of decades. 19 Here is an overview of some of the
most popular individual, team, and organizational performancebased rewards.

team-based rewards, . “[The team incentive] is set up so that either everyone gets the incentive, or no
one gets it,” explains Forrest General Hospital’s director of revenue cycle.

Know the five ways to improve reward effectiveness (i.e. link to work performance, rewards are aligned
with performance within the employee’s control, team rewards are used where jobs are
interdependent, rewards are valued by employees, and rewards have no unintended consequences).

The job characteristics model identifies five core job characteristics. Under the right conditions,
employees are more motivated and satisfied when jobs have higher levels of these characteristics:

• Skill variety . Skill variety refers to the use of different skills and talents to complete a variety
of work activities. For example, sales clerks who normally only serve customers might be assigned the
additional duties of stocking inventory and changing storefront displays.

• Task identity. Task identity is the degree to which a job requires completion of a whole or
identifiable piece of work, such as assembling an entire broadband modem rather than just soldering
in the circuitry.

• Task significance . Task significance is the degree to which the job affects the organization
and/or larger society. For instance, many employees at Medtronic, the Minneapolis-based maker of
pacemakers and other medical equipment, have high job specialization, yet 86 percent say their work
has special meaning and 94 percent feel pride in what they accomplish. The reason for their high task
significance is that they attend seminars that show how the products they manufacture save lives.
“We have patients who come in who would be dead if it wasn’t for us,” says a Medtronic production
supervisor.

• Autonomy . Jobs with high levels of autonomy provide freedom, independence, and
discretion in scheduling the work and determining the procedures to be used to complete the work. In
autonomous jobs, employees make their own decisions rather than relying on detailed instructions
from supervisors or procedure manuals.

• Job feedback . Job feedback is the degree to which employees can tell how well they are
doing on the basis of direct sensory information from the job itself. Airline pilots can tell how well
they land their aircraft, and road crews can see how well they have prepared the roadbed and laid the
asphalt.

Know advantages and disadvantages of job specialization.

Know the job characteristics model – core job dimensions, psychological states, and individual
differences - and be able to describe three ways to improve employee motivation through job design.

Strategies that support empowerment-- . At the individual level, employees must possess the
necessary competencies to be able to perform the work as well as handle the additional decision-
making requirements. 66 Job characteristics clearly influence the degree to which people feel
empowered. 67 Employees are much more likely to experience self-determination when working in
jobs with a high degree of autonomy and minimal bureaucratic control. They experience more
meaningfulness when working in jobs with high levels of task identity and task significance. They
experience more self-confidence when working in jobs that allow them to receive feedback about
their performance and accomplishments.

Know the elements of self-leadership and personal & environmental influences on it. Is the process of
influencing oneself to establish the selfdirection and self-motivation needed to perform a task. 73 This
concept includes a toolkit of behavioral activities borrowed from social learning theory and goal
setting. It also includes constructive thought processes that have been extensively studied in sports
psychology. Overall, self-leadership takes the view that individuals mostly regulate their own actions
through these behavioral and cognitive (thought) activities. Self-Leadership Strategies Although self-
leadership consists of several processes, the five main activities are identified in Exhibit 6.4 . These
elements, which generally follow each other in a sequence, are personal goal setting, constructive
thought patterns, designing natural rewards, self-monitoring, and self-reinforcement. 74

Chapter 7: Decision Making and Creativity

Be able to define and apply these key concepts:

Anchoring and Adjustment Heuristic-- A natural tendency for people to be influenced by an initial
anchor point such that they do not sufficiently move away from that point as new information is
provided.

Availability Heuristic-- A natural tendency to assign higher probabilities to objects or events that are
easier to recall from memory, even though ease of recall is also affected by nonprobability factors
(e.g., emotional response, recent events).
Bounded Rationality-- The view that people are bounded in their decision-making capabilities,
including access to limited information, limited information processing, and tendency toward
satisficing rather than maximizing when making choices.

Divergent Thinking-- Reframing a problem in a unique way and generating different approaches to the
issue.

Employee Involvement-- The degree to which employees influence how their work is organized and
carried out.

Escalation of Commitment-- The tendency to repeat an apparently bad decision or allocate more
resources to a failing course of action.

Prospect Theory Effect-- A natural tendency to feel more dissatisfaction from losing a particular
amount than satisfaction from gaining an equal amount.

Rational Choice Paradigm

Representativeness Heuristic-- A natural tendency to evaluate probabilities of events or objects by the

degree to which they resemble (are representative of) other events or objects rather than on
objective probability information.

Satisficing-- Selecting an alternative that is satisfactory or “good enough,” rather than the alternative
with the highest value (maximization).

Subjective Expected Utility--

Be able to understand and apply these key theories and ideas about OB:

The rational choice paradigm and why people refrain from using it.

What are the roles of emotions and intuition in decision-making?

What characteristics, conditions and activities help to support creativity?

Regarding employee involvement, what are the four contingencies that can affect the optimal levels of
involvement?

Chapter 8: Team Dynamics

Be able to define and apply these key concepts:

Constructive Conflict
Groupthink

Norms

Role

Self-Directed Teams

Social Loafing

Task Interdependence

Team Cohesion

Teams

Virtual Teams

Be able to understand and apply these key theories and ideas about OB:

What are the pros and cons of teams, why are people members of informal groups as well as formal
ones?

Know the team effectiveness model and its design elements (task characteristics, team size, and team
composition). Know how the four team processes (team development, norms, cohesion, and trust)
influence effectiveness.

What are the success factors for self-directed and virtual teams?

What are the key constraints on team decision making (time constraints, evaluation apprehension,
conformity to peer pressure and groupthink/overconfidence), and how can we improve the process
using various structures (constructive conflict, brainstorming, electronic brainstorming, and nominal
group techniques).

Chapter 9: Communicating in Teams and Organizations

Be able to define and apply these key concepts:

Communication

Emotional Contagion

Grapevine

Information Overload
Management by Walking Around (MBWA)

Media Richness

Persuasion

Wikis

Be able to understand and apply these key theories and ideas about OB:

Know the four influences on effective communication encoding and decoding

Pros and cons of various types of communication such as email, verbal and non-verbal means; how
social acceptance and media richness can influence the preferred communication channel. What are the
barriers to communication (noise) – including cross-cultural and gender-based differences.

Know what it means to engage in active listening – what are the key elements? (postponing evaluation,
avoiding interruptions, maintaining interest, empathizing, organizing information, showing interest, and
clarifying the message).

Chapter 10: Power and Influence in the Workplace

Be able to define and apply these key concepts:

Charisma

Coalition

Impression Management

Influence

Legitimate Power

Norm of Reciprocity

Organizational Politics

Persuasion

Power

Referent Power

Social Capital
Upward Appeal

Be able to understand and apply these key theories and ideas about OB:

The dependence model and five sources of power in organizations (legitimate, coercive, reward, expert,
and referent).

Know the four contingencies of power – non-substitutability, centrality, discretion, and visibility.

Understand how people gain power through their social networks (and be able to give/recognize
examples).

Know the eight types of influence tactics, the three contingencies to consider, and the consequences of
influencing others.

What are organizational politics and how can organizational conditions and personal characteristics
support or minimize these? (I.e. perceived self-serving behaviors at the expense of others and
sometimes contrary to the interests of the organization – affected by high need for personal power and
strong Machiavellian values, also ambiguous allocation decisions are made about scarce resources
and/or the organization tolerates or rewards political behavior).