Chapter 10 Organizational Change and Innovation: Lifelong Challenges
for the Exceptional Manager Answer Key
True / False Questions
1.
Forces for change may consist of forces inside the organization such as demographic
characteristics, technological advancements, shareholder, customer and market changes, and
social and political pressures.
2.
People are generally uncomfortable about change even in apparently minor matters.
3.
Jim Collins, researcher of enduring great companies, found that there are five stages of
institutional decline which are largely self-inflicted.
4.
The marketplace is becoming less homogeneous and moving toward more niche products.
5.
Demassification refers to a trend of customer groups becoming segmented into mass markets
and resulting mass communication, mass behavior, and mass values.
6.
One of the strengths of Virgin Group Ltd. is its ability to enter new businesses quickly; that is,
for fast speed to market.
7.
Supertrend is a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications
at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing
established competitors.
8.
Technology is any machine or process that enables an organization to gain a competitive
advantage in changing materials used to produce a finished product.
9.
Two supertrends include offshore suppliers changing the way we work; and knowledge, not
information, becoming the new competitive advantage.
10.
Internal forces for change include demographic characteristics among U.S. workers, social
and political pressures, and technological advancements.
11.
Answer:
12.
Reactive change involves making carefully thought-out changes in anticipation of possible or
expected problems or opportunities.
13.
BP handled the 2010 oil spill crisis in the Gulf of Mexico in a reactive manner.
14.
Walt Disney Company’s investing $1 billion into a wearable technology that it hopes will
revolutionize the way visitors spend money at Walt Disney World, featuring a website (“My
Disney Experience”) and data-collecting wristbands (“MagicBands”) that interact with scanners
throughout the 40-square-mile theme park, is an example of proactive change.
15.
Resistance to change is an emotional/behavioral response to real or imagined threats to an
established work routine as subtle as passive resignation and as overt as deliberate
sabotage.
16.
Resistance to change can be considered to be the interaction of causes such as employee or
change-agent characteristics.
17.
Employee problems and manager behaviors are internal forces for change in the
organization.
18.
Lots of people don’t like change due to a predisposition toward change, surprise and fear of
the unknown, loss of status or job security, and poor timing.
19.
An example of an inside force for organizational change is secondhand shops suffering from a
recession-induced decline in thrift store donations, even as consumer demand for used goods
went through the roof.
20.
Employees may resist change to its disruption of cultural traditions or group relationships,
personality conflicts, lack of tact or poor timing and nonreinforcing reward systems.
21.
Job dissatisfaction within an organization is not a valid indicator that change is needed.
22.
During annual inventory week, a department store may ask its employees to work 12 hours a
day instead of the usual 8. During tax-preparation time, the store’s accounting department may
imitate this same change in work hours. Although accounting employees are in a different
department from stockroom and sales employees, it’s expected they wouldn’t be terribly upset
by the temporary change in hours since they’ve seen it in effect elsewhere in the store. This is
an example of innovative change.
23.
For most organizations, change is hard, and the tools for survival are time and money.
24.
An example of innovative change is a department store deciding to adopt a new practice used
by competitors by staying open 24 hours a day, requiring employees to work flexible
schedules, which may be felt as moderately threatening.
25.
In the unfreezing stage, managers try to instill in employees the motivation to change,
encouraging them to let go of attitudes and behaviors that are resistant to innovation. For this
“unfreezing” to take place, employees need to become dissatisfied with the old way of doing
things. Managers also need to reduce the barriers to change during this stage.
26.
In the freezing stage, employees need to be helped to integrate the changed attitudes and
behavior into their normal ways of doing things.
27.
A passive resignation can be a form of resistance to change in the workplace.
28.
Trust between change agents and employees can reduce resistance to change.
29.
Adaptive change is the least threatening type of change and is therefore least likely to create
resistance.
30.
Because radically innovative change will be felt as extremely threatening to managers’
confidence and employees’ job security, it may well tear at the fabric of the organization.
31.
Adaptive change is the introduction of a practice that is new to the organization.
32.
The most complex, costly, and uncertain kind of change is known as adaptive change.
33.
Corporate restructurings threaten to eliminate jobs and generally trigger strong resistance.
34.
When radically different changes are introduced without warning, without any official
announcements, the office rumor mill will go into high gear, and affected employees will
become fearful of the implications of the changes.
35.
According to Lewin, for refreezing to take place, people need to become dissatisfied with the
old way of doing things.
36.
In the changing stage of change of Lewin’s change model, employees need to be given new
information, perspectives, and models for behavior.
37.
Benchmarking is a technique that must be used in the unfreezing stage of Lewin’s change
model.
38.
During the changing stage of Lewin’s change model, managers should model the change
themselves, as well as coach employees and reinforce the desired behaviors.
39.
Kotter’s change step of anchoring new approaches in the culture corresponds to unfreezing in
Lewin’s model.
40.
Conflict is inherent in most organizations.
41.
OD focuses specifically on people in the change process.
42.
Organizational development (OD) is a set of techniques for implementing planned change to
make people and organizations more effective.
43.
OD has three steps: diagnosis, intervention, and conflict.
44.
The OD process includes three steps: diagnosis, intervention, and evaluation, followed by
feedback to further refine the diagnosis.
45.
To carry out the diagnosis, OD consultants or managers use some combination of
questionnaires, surveys, interviews, meetings, records, and direct observation to ascertain
people’s attitudes and to identify problem areas.
46.
The third step of the OD process is evaluation, which uses employee surveys, interviews, and
observation to ascertain initial attitudes and problem areas.
47.
Feedback is used to refine the diagnosis after the evaluation step in the OD process.
48.
Evaluation, step 2. What Shall We Do about It?, is the treatment step of OD in which problems
are corrected.
49.
Hard data about absenteeism, turnover, and profitability are used in the evaluation, or step 3,
of the OD process.
50.
An OD intervention that works in one country should not be blindly applied to a similar
situation in another country.
51.
In OD, single interventions have been found to work better than multiple interventions.
52.
An OD intervention that worked in the United States may not work well in another country.
53.
Innovation is the activity of creating new ideas and converting them into useful applications,
which is different from invention and creativity.
54.
Innovation is mostly the product of hard work and dedication rather than a “eureka” moment of
epiphany.
55.
A process innovation is a change in the appearance or the performance of a product or a
service or the creation of a new one.
56.
Blaming, reluctance to experiment, and a self-serving bias can lessen an employee’s ability to
learn from failure.
57.
Wealth and money is one of six seeds of innovation according to Scott Berkun, author of The
Myths of Innovation.
58.
Process innovation is a change in the way a product or service is conceived, manufactured, or
disseminated.
59.
An example of a core innovation is when Procter & Gamble modified a liquid detergent to
make it available as a concentrated powder in a pouch.
60.
An example of transformational innovation is when Keurig created a new category of
coffee/tea preparation by offering cup-at-a-time pod-style brewing.
61.
An organizational culture that doesn’t just allow but celebrates failure is vital toward fostering
innovation.
62.
To make innovation happen, you need to recognize problems and opportunities, gain allies,
overcome employee resistance, and execute well.
63.
Companies are likely to innovate even if the culture and climate do not support it.