1. Discuss the contingency factors that affect planning.

There are three contingency factors affect planning: organizational level, degree of environmental
uncertainty, and length of future commitments. Each contingency has a different effect:

- Organizational level: In general, lower-level managers do operational planning while higher level
management do strategic planning.

- Environmental uncertainty: When uncertainty is high, plans should be specific but flexible, require
managers to prepare contingency plans or modify plans when problems occur.

- Length of future commitments: Requires the plan to be extensive enough to meet the commitments
made at the beginning. Set up a plan for the too long or too short a time period will not bring efficiency.

2. Researchers are now saying that efforts to simplify work tasks actually have negative results for
both companies and their employees. Do you agree? Why or why not?

I do agree because in an era of development and fierce global competition, simplifying operations is a
step backwards:

- Decreasing employee performance and work ethic leads to a decrease in company income, profit and
output, thereby directly affecting each employee in terms of salary, output, and so on.

- Work becomes boring, making employees less motivated, in the long run, it will increase stress levels
leading to a less productive and unsatisfactory work environment.

3. Based on theories of leadership learnt in this course, identify the leadership styles used by Jim
Anderson.

- Because Jim “did not put many restrictions on attendance and participation’, “he went out of his way
to be friendly with the group”, his style is laissez-faire style

4. “Adjusting leadership styles to followers' needs is always crucial in contemporary society”. Discuss
your point of view.

In my opinion this is a correct opinion. Different followers will suit different leadership styles. In practice
we sometimes adopt a style that doesn't suit our followers, for example in the article when Jim applied a
laissez-faire style to middle-level managers but he let the leash go too far and let those managers take
advantage. And that's when he needed to change his leadership styles. Each employee has their own
personality and position, so using the same leadership style will not be suitable for all audiences.
Therefore, by dividing employees into sections and having a leadership style suitable for those
"sections", it is possible to lead all employees to bring the highest efficiency.