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Chapter 11 Strategic Leadership: Creating a Learning Organization and
an Ethical Organization Answer Key
True / False Questions
1.
Three key interdependent strategic leadership activities are: designing the organization,
determining its direction, and nurturing a culture dedicated to excellence and ethical behavior.
2.
Setting a direction is the leadership activity that involves developing a strategic vision of what
the organization could become.
3.
Designing the organization is the leadership activity that involves building structures, teams,
systems, and processes that facilitate the implementation of leader vision.
4.
Leaders play an important role in sustaining organization culture, but they are powerless to
change it.
5.
Leaders are not expected to accept personal responsibility for ethical behavior in an
organization, because ethics is a matter of individual choice.
6.
Leadership is the process of transforming organizations from what they are to what the leader
would have them become. This implies that there will be a lot of satisfaction with the status
quo.
7.
Hypercompetition suggests that sustainable competitive advantages are no longer possible
because all of the dimensions of competition are compressed in time and heightened in
complexity.
8.
Leaders may find it difficult to implement their vision and strategies because they have
inadequate or inappropriate budgeting and control systems.
9.
A strategic vision provides a clear future direction for the firm, a framework for its mission and
goals, and enhanced employee communication, participation, and commitment.
10.
In order for a firm to become highly ethical, it needs corporate credos and codes of conduct.
11.
The tendency of many individuals to throw good money at bad decisions despite negative
performance feedback is referred to as escalation.
12.
Systemic barriers to change refer to elements of organization design, structure, and reporting
relationships that impede the flow of information.
13.
Behavioral barriers to change occur because of conflicts between departments, conflicts
arising from power relationships, and refusal to share information.
14.
According to the Gresham law of planning, operational decisions do not drive out the time
necessary for strategic thinking and reflection.
15.
Political barriers to change can be overcome by promoting collaboration throughout the
organization, as seen in the case study on Natura Cosmeticos of Brazil, in which CEO
Carlucci implemented a comprehensive engagement process across the organization.
16.
Leaders must draw on a range of personal skills as well as organizational mechanisms to
move their organizations forward in the face of barriers to change.
17.
The two broad bases of leader power are organizational and hierarchical.
18.
Referent power refers to manager identification with his or her employees.
19.
Coercive power is the power exercised by use of fear of punishment for errors of either
omission or commission by employees.
20.
When Peter Loscher took over as CEO at Siemens in 2007, he lacked internal connections.
He used formal bases of power to bring about organizational change and increase a customer
orientation.
21.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is one of the components of a high intelligence quotient (IQ).
22.
Emotional intelligence (EI) is generally a better predictor of life success than intelligence
quotient (IQ).
23.
Empathy, one of the components of emotional intelligence (EI), refers to personal proficiency
in managing relationships and building networks.
24.
People with strong self-awareness are overly critical and unrealistically optimistic and are well
suited to run organizations, because they will make good judgment calls.
25.
Self-regulated people are unable to create an environment of trust and fairness, where political
behavior and infighting are sharply reduced and productivity tends to be high.
26.
Socially skilled people tend to have a wide circle of acquaintances as well as a knack for
finding common ground and building support. This means that they are less likely to be
effective in leading change or in having expertise in building and leading teams.
27.
The three broad sets of capabilities into which leadership traits can be organized include
technical skills, cognitive abilities, and intellectual abilities.
28.
People with strong self-awareness are neither overly critical nor unrealistically optimistic.
29.
Our emotions are driven by biological impulses which we cannot eliminate, but we can make
efforts to manage them.
30.
Successful leaders are driven by a deeply embedded desire to achieve for the sake of
achievement.
31.
Organizational learning works best when an organization leader gathers information and
teaches it to employees who are like their students.
32.
Successful learning organizations have a proactive, creative approach to the unknown.
33.
A key function of the leaders in a learning organization is to generate an organization-wide
commitment to the status quo.
34.
Inspiring and motivating people with a mission or purpose is a necessary and sufficient
condition for developing a learning organization.
35.
To successfully empower employees to achieve organizational goals, leaders must perform
the tasks of resource allocation and power brokering.
36.
Internal benchmarking is discouraged in most organizations, because it creates competition
and internal rivalries that are counterproductive.
37.
In order to gather information from informal sources, successful executives must be good
listeners.
38.
Competitive benchmarking is a method of seeking the best examples of practices or
processes that have essentially the same function regardless of industry.
39.
Establishing a culture of dissent can be an effective means of questioning the status quo.
40.
Although many organizations encourage creativity and risk taking, few successful companies
tolerate failure.
41.
Leaders who fail to institute proper systems and controls that facilitate ethical conduct share
responsibility with those who conceive, execute, and knowingly benefit from corporate
misdeeds.
42.
Ethics is a question of personal scruples, a confidential matter between employees and their
consciences and therefore for a leader it is acceptable to assume the company should not
bear any responsibility for individual misdeeds.
43.
Ethical crises are bad for organization reputation, but they rarely have any financial
consequences.
44.
There are many advantages of an ethical organization, but it generally has little to do with
employee commitment and motivation to excel.
45.
Research supports that there are many potential benefits of an ethical organization, including
that there is a strong and consistent relationship between ethical performance and measures
of financial performance.
46.
According to Strategy Spotlight 11.6, the example of Alliant Energy of Iowa developed a
successful green-energy program called Second Nature that demonstrates how companies
can capitalize on consumer desire to be socially responsible.
47.
Greenwashing is a type of fraud in which companies make unsubstantiated claims about how
environmentally friendly their products or services really are.
48.
The ethical orientation of a leader greatly affects the ethical orientation of the organization.
49.
Ethics has everything to do with leadership. The character flaw of a lone actor always
completely explains corporate misconduct.
50.
An ethical organization is characterized by its concept of ethical values and integrity that is
used to unify the organization across different functions, lines of business, and employee
groups.
51.
A compliance-based approach to ethics management combines a concern for law with an
emphasis on managerial responsibility for ethical behavior.
52.
There can be a high-integrity organization, without high-integrity individuals.
53.
In integrity-based ethics programs, organizational ethics is seen as the responsibility of the
employees.
54.
In an integrity-based approach to ethics management, ethos is concerned with conformity with
externally imposed standards.
55.
In a compliance-based approach to ethics management, the objective is to enable responsible
conduct.
56.
Methods used for ethics management in a compliance-based approach include education,
reduced discretion, auditing and controls, and penalties.
57.
In the integrity-based approach to ethics management, behavioral assumptions include that
social beings are guided by material self-interest, values, ideals, and peers.
58.
Organizational ethics is the responsibility of top management only.
59.
There is little difference between the compliance-based and integrity-based ethics program.
60.
In the integrity-based approach to ethics management, social actors are guided by a
combination of self-interest, ideals, values, and social expectations.
61.
If leaders do not believe in the ethical standards that they are trying to inspire, they will not be
effective as good role models.
62.
The example of Dennis Bakke, CEO of AES, in which he and his team took responsibility for
employees who lied to the EPA about water quality at the plant, suggests that for an ethical
organization, it is not necessary to do more than just take strong punitive action against those
who act contrary to the company-established expected behavior.
63.
Corporate codes of conduct provide norms and expectations to impede employees from
committing unethical acts.
64.
Codes of conduct help employees from diverse backgrounds to work more effectively across
cultural backgrounds.
