OB Mid Sem

Chapters 9 and 10
Q. 1 Explain how organizations can create team players.
Answer:
(a) Selection
(b) Training
(c) Rewards
Q.2 (a) Discuss the effect of team size on effectiveness of teams.
(b) What is social loafing? How can the management undermine the tendency of social
loafing?
Q.3 The team effectiveness model identifies three categories of key components making up
effective teams. What are these three categories? Give examples of each category.
Q.4 What are some special challenges that virtual teams face? For virtual teams to be
effective, what should management ensure?
Q.5 Discuss the difference between a work group and a work team.
Q.6 Describe the nominal group technique.
Answer: The nominal group technique restricts discussion or interpersonal communication
during the decision-making process. Group members are all physically present, as in a
traditional committee meeting, but they operate independently. Specifically, a problem is
presented and then the group takes the following steps:

1. Members meet as a group, but before any discussion takes place, each independently
writes down ideas on the problem.
2. After this silent period, each member presents one idea to the group. No discussion takes
place until all ideas have been presented and recorded.
3. The group discusses the ideas for clarity and evaluates them.
4. Each group member silently and independently rank-orders the ideas. The idea with the
highest aggregate ranking determines the final decision.

Q.7 Discuss the impact of brainstorming on the possibility of groupthink.

Answer: Groupthink is related to norms. It represents a phenomena that occurs when the
norm for consensus overrides the realistic appraisal of alternative courses and the full
expression of deviant, minority, or unpopular views. Brainstorming can overcome the
pressures for conformity that dampen creativity by encouraging any and all alternatives while
withholding criticism. The norm for consensus is the cause of groupthink, while
brainstorming is focused on unhampered generation of ideas. Thus, brainstorming as a
technique for group decision making reduces the possibility of groupthink.

Q.8 Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of group decisions as compared to individual
decisions.

Q.9 Describe cohesiveness as a property of groups. How can a group be made more
cohesive?
Answer: Cohesiveness is the degree to which members are attracted to each other and
motivated to stay in the group. Some strategies to encourage cohesiveness are: (1) making the
group smaller, (2) encouraging agreement with group goals, (3) increasing the time members
spend together, (4) increasing the group's status and the perceived difficulty of attaining
membership, (5) stimulating competition with other groups, (6) giving rewards to the group
rather than to individual members, and (7) physically isolating the group.

Q.10 According to the status characteristics theory, what are the three sources of status?
Answer: According to status characteristics theory, status tends to derive from one of three
sources:
1. The power a person wields over others. Because they likely control the group's resources,
people who control the outcomes tend to be perceived as high status.
2. A person's ability to contribute to a group's goals. People whose contributions are critical
to the group's success tend to have high status.
3. An individual's personal characteristics. Someone whose personal characteristics are
positively valued by the group (good looks, intelligence, money, or a friendly personality)
typically has higher status than someone with fewer valued attributes.

Q.11 Describe the punctuated-equilibrium model.

Answer: Temporary groups with deadlines do not seem to follow the usual five-stage model.
An alternative model to explain the growth of temporary groups is the punctuated-
equilibrium model. The punctuated-equilibrium model characterizes groups as exhibiting
long periods of inertia interspersed with brief revolutionary changes triggered primarily by
members' awareness of time and deadlines. Under this model, group development occurs
along the following stages: (1) their first meeting sets the group's direction, (2) this first phase
of group activity is one of inertia, (3) a transition takes place exactly when the group has used
up half its allotted time, (4) this transition initiates major changes, (5) a second phase of
inertia follows the transition, and (6) the group's last meeting is characterized by markedly
accelerated activity.

Chapters 7 and 8

Q.1 Compare and contrast the benefits of intrinsic rewards, such as recognition, and extrinsic
rewards, such as pay, as forms of motivation.
Q.2 Differentiate between bonuses and gainsharing plans.
Answer: Bonuses represent a pay plan that rewards employees for recent performance rather
than historical performance. An annual bonus is a significant component of total
compensation for many jobs and many companies routinely reward production employees
with bonuses in the thousands of dollars when profits improve. However, when times are bad,
firms cut bonuses to reduce compensation costs. Thus, using bonuses as a variable pay
program makes employees' pay more vulnerable to cuts and this is even more problematic
when bonuses are a large percentage of total pay.

Gainsharing is a formula-based group incentive plan that uses improvements in group

productivity from one period to another to determine the total amount of money allocated.
Gainsharing ties rewards to productivity gains rather than profits, so employees can receive
incentive awards even when the organization isn't profitable. Unlike bonuses, gainsharing
incentives do not vary with changes in company profits.
Q. 3 List and describe different variable-pay programs Pay for Performance programs.
Answer:
a) Piece-rate plans. In piece-rate pay plans, workers are paid a fixed sum for each unit of
production completed. When an employee gets no base salary and is paid only for what he or
she produces, this is a pure piece-rate plan.
b) Merit-based pay. Merit-based pay plans also pay for individual performance. However,
unlike piece-rate plans, which is pay based on objective output, merit-based pay plans are
based on performance appraisal ratings.
c) Profit-sharing. Profit-sharing plans are organization-wide programs that distribute
compensation based on some established formula designed around a company's profitability.
d) Bonuses. Bonuses can be paid exclusively to executives or to all employees. Many
companies now routinely reward production employees with bonuses in thousands of dollars
when company profits improve.
e) Skill-Based Pay. Skill-based pay (also called competency-based or knowledge-based pay)
sets pay levels on the basis of how many skills employees have or how many jobs they can
do.
f) ESOPs. Employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) are company-established benefit plans
in which employees acquire stock, often at below-market prices, as part of their benefits.
g) Gainsharing. Gainsharing is a formula-based group incentive plan. Improvements in group
productivity determine the total amount of money that is to be allocated. By focusing on
productivity gains rather than profits, gainsharing rewards specific behaviors that are less
influenced by external factors. Employees in a gainsharing plan can receive incentive awards
even when the organization isn't profitable.

Q.4 Nora is a newly appointed HR manager at Seven Oaks, a famous PR firm that is not
doing too well at present. As she assumed the post of the HR manager, everyone impressed
upon her the need to energize the employees and motivate them to give their best to the job.
After she met with the employees and managers, she felt that many employees were
demotivated because they had attained their maximum potential in the current job roles.
Additionally, she felt that though the management believed strongly in its employee-friendly
nature, this nature was not manifested in its actions. Those employees who were on the board
had begun to mimic the management's action of attributing the lack of any constructive
change to company policies. Describe any two changes that Nora should propose at the
meeting with a rationale for each.

Answer: The two changes that Nora could propose are job rotation or job enrichment and a
more participative management style.

Job rotation/ Job enrichment: Since the employees feel they have nothing more to learn in
their current jobs, the act of job rotation would help them learn something new which would
be motivating and beneficial to the company as well. For employees who cannot be moved to
another job, different strategies of job enrichment, like enhancing the job vertically or
combining their tasks into natural work units would be an option. These would directly
satisfy some dimensions of the job characteristics model.

Participative management: The employees at Seven Oaks are demotivated not only because
of the stagnant nature of their jobs, but also because the company is not truly employee-
friendly. The company has nominated some employees to its board of representatives but this
is only a symbolic act of employee involvement. Participative management, wherein
employee and managers engage in joint decision making, will go a long way in motivating
employees by giving them more autonomy and representation in the real sense.

Q.5 What is employee involvement and why is it important. What are the two major forms of
employee involvement?
Answer: Employee involvement is defined as a participative process that uses the entire
capacity of employees and is designed to encourage increased commitment to the
organization's success. The underlying logic is that by involving workers in those decisions
that affect them and by increasing their autonomy and control over their work lives,
employees will become more motivated, more committed to the organization, more
productive, and more satisfied with their jobs. The two major forms of employee involvement
are:

a) Participative management. Participative management programs use joint decision making.

Subordinates actually share a significant degree of decision-making power with their
immediate superiors.
b) Representative participation. Representative participation refers to worker representation
by a small group of employees who actually participate on the Board of Directors. The goal is
to redistribute power within an organization, putting labour/ workers on a more equal footing
with the interests of management and stockholders.

Q.6 Andrew is a software tester. He runs through the same types of programs day after day
looking for bugs and reporting them. He is taking night classes on programming. Often, he
knows the best solution to many of the bugs, but he is still learning to code. Describe two job
characteristics that Andrew is striving to improve, and explain two ways that Andrew's
manager can redesign his current job to help him reach his goals.

Answer: Andrew is striving to have greater task identity, which is the degree to which a job
requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work. He would like to not only look
for the programming bugs, but be able to fix them. He is also looking for skill variety, or the
degree to which a job requires a variety of different activities so the worker can use a number
of different skills and talent. It is clear that he is bored with only the testing aspect of his job.

Andrew's boss needs to redesign his job to include aspects of job enrichment, which refers to
the vertical expansion of jobs. Job enrichment increases the degree to which the worker
controls the planning, execution, and evaluation of his or her work. One way to enrich
Andrew's job would be to put him in contact with his internal clients, the programmers. They
could establish a set of bug recommendations that Andrew could fix, where he could begin to
learn the types of code required. His boss should also open the feedback channels so that the
programmers can tell Andrew when he is making proper adjustments and using his new skills
adequately.

Q.7 What are the three relationships in Vroom's expectancy theory?

Answer: Expectancy theory argues that the strength of a tendency to act in a certain way
depends on the strength of an expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome
and on the attractiveness of that outcome to the individual. The theory focuses on three
relationships:
a) The effort-performance relationship is the probability perceived by the individual that
exerting a given amount of effort will lead to performance.
b)The performance-reward relationship is the degree to which the individual believes that
performing at a particular level will lead to the attainment of a desired outcome.
c) The rewards-personal goals relationship is the degree to which organizational rewards
satisfy an individual's personal goals or needs and the attractiveness of those potential
rewards for the individual.

Q.8 Discuss distributive justice, procedural justice, and interactional justice.

Answer: Distributive justice indicates the employee's perceived fairness of the amount and
allocation of rewards among individuals. Procedural justice indicates the perceived fairness
of the process used to determine the distribution of rewards. Interactional justice indicates an
individual's perception of the degree to which she is treated with dignity, concern, and
respect.

Of these three forms of justice, distributive justice is most strongly related to organizational
commitment and satisfaction with outcomes such as pay. Procedural justice relates most
strongly to job satisfaction, employee trust, withdrawal from the organization, job
performance, and citizenship behaviours.
Q.9 According to the equity theory, what are the choices made by employees who perceive
inequity?
Answer: Based on equity theory, employees who perceive inequity will make one of six
choices:
1. Change inputs (exert less effort if underpaid, or more if overpaid)
2. Change outcomes (individuals paid on a piece-rate basis can increase their pay by
producing a higher quantity of units of lower quality)
3. Distort perceptions of self ("I used to think I worked at a moderate pace, but now I realize I
work a lot harder than everyone else.")
4. Distort perceptions of others ("Mike's job isn't as desirable as I thought.")
5. Choose a different referent ("I may not make as much as my brother-in-law, but I'm doing
a lot better than my father did when he was my age.")
6. Leave the field (quit the job)

Q.10 In the context of social learning, explain the four processes that determine a model's
influence on an individual.
Answer:
1. Attentional processes: People learn from a model only when they recognize and pay
attention to its critical features. We tend to be most influenced by models that are attractive,
repeatedly available, important to us, or similar to us in our estimation.
2. Retention processes: A model's influence depends on how well the individual remembers
the model's action after the model is no longer readily available.
3. Motor reproduction processes: After a person has seen a new behavior by observing the
model, watching must be converted to doing. This process demonstrates that the individual
can perform the modeled activities.
4. Reinforcement processes: Individuals are motivated to exhibit the modeled behavior if
positive incentives or rewards are provided. Positively reinforced behaviors are given more
attention, learned better, and performed more often.

Q.11 What are the four ways of increasing self-efficacy, as proposed by Albert Bandura?
Answer: The researcher who developed self-efficacy theory, Albert Bandura, proposes four
ways self-efficacy can be increased:

1. Enactive mastery
2. Vicarious modeling
3. Verbal persuasion
4. Arousal

Q.12 Explain what is an MBO program and discuss the common elements of MBO programs
and goal-setting theory.
Answer: Management by objectives (MBO) is a program that encompasses specific goals,
participatively set, for an explicit time period, with feedback on goal progress. The
organization's overall objectives are translated into specific objectives for each level
(divisional, departmental, individual). But because lower-unit managers jointly participate in
setting their own goals, MBO works from the bottom up as well as from the top down. The
result is a hierarchy that links objectives at one level to those at the next. And for the
individual employee, MBO provides specific personal performance objectives.

Four ingredients are common to MBO programs: goal specificity, participation in decision
making (including the setting of goals or objectives), an explicit time period, and
performance feedback. Many elements in MBO programs match propositions of goal-setting
theory. For example, having an explicit time period to accomplish objectives matches goal-
setting theory's emphasis on goal specificity. Similarly, feedback about goal progress is a
critical element of goal-setting theory. The only area of possible disagreement between MBO
and goal-setting theory is participation: MBO strongly advocates it, whereas goal-setting
theory demonstrates that managers' assigned goals are usually just as effective.

Q.13 Explain how a manager motivates employees with reference to Herzberg's two-factor
theory.
Answer: According to Herzberg, the factors that lead to job satisfaction are separate and
distinct from those that lead to job dissatisfaction. Therefore, managers who seek to eliminate
factors that can create job dissatisfaction may bring about peace, but not necessarily
motivation. They will be placating rather than motivating their workers. As a result, Herzberg
characterized conditions such as quality of supervision, pay, company policies, physical
working conditions, relationships with others, and job security as hygiene factors. When
they're adequate, people will not be dissatisfied; neither will they be satisfied. If we want to
motivate people on their jobs, Herzberg suggested emphasizing factors associated with the
work itself or with outcomes directly derived from it, such as promotional opportunities,
personal growth opportunities, recognition, responsibility, and achievement. These are the
characteristics people find intrinsically rewarding.

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