80.
John, who is part of the R&D team at Digital World, has been a key player in formulating
new ideas and strategies. His contribution has resulted in more clients and higher
production rates. Of late, John has not been regularly attending team meetings and even if
he does, he leaves midway. John’s behavior is an example of ________.
A.
synergy
B.
groupthink
C.
conformity
D.
social loafing
Social loafing is the tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they work in
groups than when they work alone.
AACSB: Reflective Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Apply
Difficulty: 3 Hard
Learning Objective: 11-05 Describe how managers can motivate group members to achieve organizational goals and
reduce social loafing in groups and teams.
Topic: Group Norms
81.
A member of a task force does not do much work related to the goals of the task force.
This member is confident that the other members of the task force “will take up the slack.”
This group member is exhibiting ________.
A.
social facilitation
B.
social loafing
C.
groupthink
D.
self-serving bias
Social loafing is the tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they work in
groups than when they work alone.
AACSB: Reflective Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Apply
Difficulty: 3 Hard
Learning Objective: 11-05 Describe how managers can motivate group members to achieve organizational goals and
reduce social loafing in groups and teams.
Topic: Group Norms
82.
What can a manager do to discourage social loafing in a group?
A.
Create large groups
B.
Focus on recognizing the group’s performance as a whole
C.
Downplay individual contributions
D.
Assign specific tasks to group members and hold them accountable for their
performance
One way in which managers can effectively eliminate social loafing is by making individual
contributions to a group identifiable so that group members perceive that low and high
levels of effort will be noticed and individual contributions evaluated.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-05 Describe how managers can motivate group members to achieve organizational goals and
reduce social loafing in groups and teams.
Topic: Group Norms
83.
Sam is a student in Dr. Arthur’s Principles of Management course, in which team projects
are assigned. Sam likes courses with group projects because he knows he can team up
with good students who will work hard on the projects. He will undoubtedly miss some of
his group’s out-of-class meetings. What can Dr. Arthur do to help groups deal with
students in Sam’s situation?
A.
Assign groups randomly
B.
Require group members to discipline other members when they “loaf”
C.
Assign more members to groups
D.
Help groups identify the potentially valuable contributions of each member and assign
specific responsibilities
Managers can make individual contributions to a group identifiable when possible, or help
groups to do so, and emphasize the valuable contributions of individual members.
AACSB: Reflective Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Apply
Difficulty: 3 Hard
Learning Objective: 11-05 Describe how managers can motivate group members to achieve organizational goals and
reduce social loafing in groups and teams.
Topic: Group Norms
84.
As group size increases, ________.
A.
communication becomes more difficult
B.
identifying individual contributions becomes easier
C.
the chances of social loafing decrease
D.
group cohesiveness increases
Group cohesiveness decreases with increase in group size. Therefore, to promote
cohesiveness in groups, when feasible, managers should form groups that are small to
medium in size.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-05 Describe how managers can motivate group members to achieve organizational goals and
reduce social loafing in groups and teams.
Topic: Group Norms
11–63
85.
Members of virtual teams rely on information technology. Virtual team members
communicate and interact with one another in real time simultaneously using technology
such as videoconferencing, teleconferencing, and electronic meetings. This type of
technology is known as ________.
A.
asynchronous technology
B.
synchronous technology
C.
virtuality
D.
global-synchronous technology
Group cohesiveness decreases with increase in group size. Therefore, to promote
cohesiveness in groups, when feasible, managers should form groups that are small to
medium in size.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Accessibility: Keyboard Navigation
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 1 Easy
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
Topic: Virtual Team
Essay Questions
86.
All teams are groups, but not all groups are teams. Discuss the two characteristics that
distinguish “teams” from “groups.”
A group may be defined as two or more people who interact with each other to accomplish
certain goals or meet certain needs. A team is a group whose members work intensely
with one another to achieve a specific common goal or objective. As these definitions
imply, all teams are groups, but not all groups are teams.
The two characteristics that distinguish teams from groups are the intensity with which
team members work together and the inclusion of specific, overriding team goals or
objectives.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-01 Explain why groups and teams are key contributors to organizational effectiveness.
Topic: Group Roles
87.
Discuss how the use of groups and teams can help an organization to gain a competitive
advantage.
Groups and teams can help an organization gain a competitive advantage because they
can
• enhance its performance
• help it to become more responsive to customer needs
• increase innovation, and
• increase workers’ motivation and satisfaction with their jobs.
Learning Objective: 11-01 Explain why groups and teams are key contributors to organizational effectiveness.
Topic: Group Roles
88.
Discuss how groups and teams can be utilized as performer enhancers.
One of the main advantages of using groups is the opportunity to obtain a type of synergy:
People working in a group can produce more or higher-quality outputs than would have
been produced if each person had worked separately and all their individual efforts were
later combined. The essence of synergy is captured in the saying “the whole is more than
the sum of its parts.” To take advantage of the potential for synergy in groups, managers
need to make sure that groups are composed of members who have complementary skills
and knowledge relevant to the group’s work.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-01 Explain why groups and teams are key contributors to organizational effectiveness.
Topic: Group Roles
89.
Discuss how groups and teams relate to responsiveness to customers.
Being responsive to customers is not always easy. In service organizations such as health
maintenance organizations, being responsive to patients’ needs and desires for prompt,
high-quality medical care and treatment has to be balanced against meeting physicians’
needs and desires and keeping health care costs under control. Being responsive to
customers often requires the wide variety of skills and expertise found in different
departments and at different levels in an organization’s hierarchy. Sometimes, employees
at lower levels in an organization’s hierarchy are closest to its customers and the most
attuned to their needs. In a cross-functional team, the expertise and knowledge in
different organizational departments are brought together in the skills and knowledge of
the team members. Managers of high-performing organizations are careful to determine
which types of expertise and knowledge are required for teams to be responsive to
customers, and they use this information in forming teams.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-01 Explain why groups and teams are key contributors to organizational effectiveness.
Topic: Group Roles
90.
Discuss how teams and groups contribute to increasing innovation.
Innovation, the implementation of creative ideas for new products, new technologies, new
services, or even new organizational structures, is essential for organizational
effectiveness. Often an individual working alone does not possess the extensive and
diverse skills, knowledge, and expertise required for successful innovation. Managers can
better encourage innovation by creating teams of diverse individuals who together have
the knowledge relevant to a particular type of innovation. To further promote innovation,
managers can empower teams and make their members fully responsible and accountable
for the innovation process. The manager’s role is to provide guidance, assistance,
coaching, and the resources team members need and not to closely direct or supervise
their activities.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-01 Explain why groups and teams are key contributors to organizational effectiveness.
Topic: Group Roles
91.
Distinguish between formal and informal groups.
To achieve their goals of high performance, responsiveness to customers, innovation, and
employee motivation, managers can form various types of groups and teams. Formal
groups are those managers establish to achieve organizational goals. The formal work
groups are cross-functional teams composed of members from different departments.
Sometimes organizational members, managers or nonmanagers, form groups because they
feel that groups will help them achieve their own goals or meet their own needs. Groups
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
Topic: Group Roles
92.
What does “top management” refer to? Write a note on the importance of top
management.
Top management is a group composed of the CEO, the president, and the heads of the
important departments. A central concern of the CEO and president of a company is to
form a top management team to help the organization achieve its mission and goals. Top
management teams are responsible for developing the strategies that result in an
organization’s competitive advantage; most have between five and seven members. In
forming their top management teams, CEOs are well advised to stress diversity in
expertise, skills, knowledge, and experience. Thus many top management teams are also
cross-functional teams: They are composed of members from different departments, such
as finance, marketing, production, and engineering. Diversity helps ensure that the top
management team will have all the background and resources it needs to make good
decisions. Diversity also helps guard against groupthink—faulty group decision making
that results when group members strive for agreement at the expense of an accurate
assessment of the situation.
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
Topic: Group Roles
93.
Write a note on command groups and self-managed work teams.
Subordinates who report to the same supervisor compose a command group. When top
managers design an organization’s structure and establish reporting relationships and a
chain of command, they are essentially creating command groups. Command groups, often
called departments or units, perform a significant amount of the work in many
organizations. In order to have command groups that help an organization gain a
competitive advantage, managers not only need to motivate group members to perform at
a high level but also need to be effective leaders.
Self-managed work teams are teams in which members are empowered and have the
responsibility and autonomy to complete identifiable pieces of work. On a day–to-day
basis, team members decide what the team will do, how it will do it, and which members
will perform which specific tasks. Managers assign self–managed work teams’ overall
goals but let team members decide how to meet those goals. Managers usually form self–
managed work teams to improve quality, increase motivation and satisfaction, and lower
costs.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
94.
Self-managed work teams can improve the effectiveness and the efficiency of the
organization. Discuss the positive outcomes that can occur with these types of teams.
Self-managed teams can improve the quality of the work performed by the members of
the team and the quality of their output, can reduce costs for the organization and can
increase the motivation of team members and their satisfaction with their jobs and the
organization. They can make the team as a whole responsible for the collection of tasks
that only individual workers had been responsible for previously.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Understand
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
Topic: Self-Designing Teams
Topic: Self-Managed Teams
95.
Explain what is meant by a task force and a virtual team.
A task force is a committee of managers or nonmanagerial employees from various
departments or divisions who form a group to solve a specific, mutual problem.
Virtual teams are teams whose members rarely or never meet face–to-face but, rather,
interact by using various forms of information technology such as e-mail, text messaging,
computer networks, telephone, fax, and videoconferences. As organizations become
increasingly global, and as the need for specialized knowledge increases due to advances
in technology, managers can create virtual teams to solve problems or explore
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-02 Identify the different types of groups and teams that help managers and organizations achieve
their goals.
Topic: Virtual Team
96.
“Groups function and, ultimately, their effectiveness hinge on group characteristics and
processes known collectively as group dynamics.” With reference to this statement,
explain the importance of group size.
Managers need to take group size and group roles into account as they create and
maintain high-performing groups and teams. The number of members in a group can be an
important determinant of members’ motivation and commitment and group performance.
There are several advantages to keeping a group relatively small—between two and nine
members. Compared with members of large groups, members of small groups tend to
• interact more with each other and find it easier to coordinate their efforts;
• be more motivated, satisfied, and committed;
• find it easier to share information; and
• be better able to see the importance of their personal contributions for group success.
A disadvantage of small rather than large groups is that members of small groups have
fewer resources available to accomplish their goals.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
97.
Explain the five stages of group development.
Although every group’s development over time is unique, researchers have identified five
stages of group development that many groups seem to pass through. In the first stage,
forming, members try to get to know one another and reach a common understanding of
what the group is trying to accomplish and how group members should behave. During
this stage, managers should strive to make each member feel that he/she is a valued part
of the group.
In the second stage, storming, group members experience conflict and disagreements
because some members do not wish to submit to the demands of other group members.
Disputes may arise over who should lead the group. Self-managed work teams can be
particularly vulnerable during the storming stage. Managers need to keep an eye on
groups at this stage to make sure conflict does not get out of hand. During the third stage,
norming, close ties between group members develop, and feelings of friendship and
camaraderie emerge. Group members arrive at a consensus about what goals they should
seek to achieve and how group members should behave toward one another. In the fourth
stage, performing, the real work of the group gets accomplished. The last stage,
adjourning, applies only to groups that eventually are disbanded. During adjourning a
98.
Explain the effects of cohesiveness on group participation.
As group cohesiveness increases, the extent of group members’ participation within the
group increases. Participation contributes to group effectiveness because group members
are actively involved in the group, ensure that group tasks get accomplished, readily share
information with each other, and have frequent and open communication. A moderate
level of group cohesiveness helps ensure that group members actively participate in the
group and communicate effectively with one another. The reason why managers may not
want to encourage high levels of cohesiveness is illustrated by the example of two cross–
functional teams responsible for developing new toys.
AACSB: Analytical Thinking
Blooms: Remember
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-04 Explain why it is important for groups and teams to have a balance of conformity and deviance
and a moderate level of cohesiveness.
Topic: Cohesiveness
99.
Explain the reasons why group members need to conform to norms.
Group members conform to norms for three reasons:
(1) They want to obtain rewards and avoid punishments.
(2) They want to imitate group members whom they like and admire.
(3) They have internalized the norm and believe it is the right and proper way to behave.
Failure to conform, or deviance, occurs when a member of a group violates a group norm.
Deviance signals that a group is not controlling one of its members’ behaviors.
Difficulty: 2 Medium
Learning Objective: 11-04 Explain why it is important for groups and teams to have a balance of conformity and deviance
and a moderate level of cohesiveness.
Topic: Group Norms
100.
Social loafing can be a very detrimental practice to the effectiveness of an organization.
Explain what is meant by this concept and discuss three specific steps that managers can
take to reduce or to eliminate this undesirable work behavior.
Social loafing is the tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they work in
groups than when they work alone. It can be reduced by the following:
• Making individual’s contributions to the group identifiable. One way that managers can
effectively eliminate social loafing is by making individual contributions to a group
identifiable so group members perceive that low and high levels of effort will be noticed
and individual contributions evaluated. Managers can accomplish this by assigning
specific tasks to group members and holding them accountable for their completion.
• Emphasizing the valuable contributions of group members. Clearly communicating to
group members why each person’s contributions are valuable to the group is an effective
means by which managers and group members themselves can reduce or eliminate social
loafing.
• Keeping group size at an appropriate level. Managers should form groups with no more
members than are needed to accomplish group goals and perform at a high level.