How does the job characteristics model motivate individuals?
> Xerox Corporation (Xerox), once a star in the technology sector of the economy, found itself engulfed in an accounting scandal alleging that it was too aggressive in recognizing equipment revenue.1 The complaint filed by the Securities and Exchange Commi
> Waste Management, Inc.’s Form 10-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on March 28, 1997 described the company at that time as a leading international provider of waste management services. According to disclosures i
> One can only imagine the high expectations of investors when the boards of directors of CUC International, Inc. (CUC) and HFS, Inc. (HFS) agreed to merge in May 1997 to form Cendant Corporation. The $14 billion stock merger of HFS and CUC, considered a m
> Enron Corporation entered 2001 as the seventh largest public company in the United States, only to later exit the year as the largest company to ever declare bankruptcy to that point in U.S. history. Investors who lost millions and lawmakers seeking to p
> Don’t ever tell yourself, “that won’t happen to me.” Just ask Cynthia Cooper, former Vice President of Internal Audit at WorldCom. Cynthia Cooper was a typical accounting student as an undergrad at Mississippi State University. Raised in Clinton, Mississ
> The accounting firm of Barnes and Fischer, LLP, is a medium-sized, national CPA firm. The partnership, formed in 1954, now has over 4,000 professionals on the payroll. The firm mainly provides auditing and tax services, but it has recently had success bu
> In what ways can leaders create ethical organizations?
> How do the contemporary theories of leadership relate to earlier foundational theories?
> What are the contingency theories of leadership?
> What are the causes and consequences of abuse of power?
> What power or influence tactics and their contingencies are identified most often?
> How is leadership different from power?
> The authors who suggested that membership in a team makes us smarter found that teams were more rational and quicker at finding solutions to difficult probability problems and reasoning tasks than were individuals. After participation in the study, team
> On the highly functioning teams in which you’ve been a member, what other characteristics might have contributed to success?
> From your experiences in teams, do you agree with the researchers’ findings on the characteristics of smart teams? Why or why not?
> Imagine you are a manager at a national corporation. You have been asked to select employees for a virtual problem-solving team. What types of employees would you include and why?
> Can you think of strategies that can help build trust among virtual team members?
> Recall a time when you felt like you could not trust members on your team. Why did you feel that way? How did that affect the team’s performance?
> What are the relevant points of intellectual and physical abilities to organizational behavior?
> In the cases discussed above, where do you think you would perform better, and why? Justify your answer by taking into account efficiency factors, reward systems, the context, and your individual perceptions.
> What type of group or team are cyclists working for a supervisor for Deliveroo? Justify your answer.
> How should the criterion of “legitimacy” be determined? Explain.
> Is there ever a case in which illegitimate tasks should be tolerated or “rightfully” given? Explain your answer.
> When is work performed by individuals preferred over work performed by teams?
> What are the major job attitudes?
> How do you think employees should respond when given illegitimate tasks? How can an organization monitor the tasks it assigns to employees and ensure that the tasks are legitimate? Explain your answer.
> Do you think it is possible for a reward program to start out rewarding the appropriate behavior at its inception but then begin to reward the wrong thing over time? Why or why not?
> Assuming you could become better at detecting the real emotions of others from facial expressions, do you think it would help your career? Why or why not?
> What are the ethical implications of reading faces for emotional content in the workplace?
> How do you overcome the potential problems of cross-cultural communication?
> What do you think are the best workplace applications for emotion reading technology?
> What type of decision-making framework would you advise the warehouse manager to adopt in order to help him reach an optimal decision? How will your suggestion help?
> Identify the stakeholders who will be influenced by the decision to accept or refuse the frozen meat shipment.
> Does the decision to accept or refuse the frozen meat shipment call for ethical or legal considerations? Why?
> How would you have acted had you been in a similar situation?
> How can organizations create team players?
> In what way could the mine management have provided support to him prior to his wrongful act?
> Does behavior always follow from attitudes?
> What should Sipho have done differently?
> Many organizations already use electronic monitoring of employees, including sifting through website visits and e-mail correspondence, often without the employees’ direct knowledge. In what ways might drone monitoring be better or worse for employees tha
> What is the difference between automatic and controlled processing of persuasive messages?
> How will your organization deal with sabotage or misuse of the drones? The value of an R2D2 drone is $2,500.
> Who should get the drones initially? How can you justify your decision ethically? What restrictions for use should these people be given, and how do you think employees, both those who get drones and those who don’t, will react to this change?
> How might the R2D2 drones influence employee behavior? Do you think they will cause people to act more or less ethically? Why?
> Would you consider the Deliveroo and Uber Eats model a work-group or a work-team environment? Justify your answer based on the characteristics of groups and teams.
> What are the motivational benefits of the specific alternative work arrangements?
> What are the major ways that jobs can be redesigned?
> How do other differentiating characteristics factor into OB?
> What are the physiological, psychological, and behavioral symptoms of stress at work?
> How do employees respond to job satisfaction?
> What are the communication differences between downward, upward, and lateral communication sent through small-group networks and the grapevine?
> What are the potential environmental, organizational, and personal sources of stress at work and the role of individual and cultural differences?
> How can managers create a culture for change?
> How can resistance to change be overcome?
> What are the differences between the forces for change and planned change?
> What are the various roles of HR in the leadership of organizations?
> What are the methods of performance evaluation?
> What are the methods of initial selection?
> What conditions or context factors determine whether teams are effective?
> What is the value of various recruitment methods?
> How does national culture affect what happens when an organizational culture is transported to another country?
> What are the functions and process of communication?
> What are the similarities and differences in creating an ethical culture, a positive culture, and a spiritual culture?
> How does workplace discrimination undermine organizational effectiveness?
> How are mechanistic and organic structural models similar and different?
> How might downsizing affect organizational structures and employees?
> What are the characteristics of the virtual structure, the team structure, and the circular structure?
> What are the characteristics of the functional, bureaucracy, and matrix structures?
> What seven key elements define an organization’s structure?
> What are the challenges to our understanding of leadership?
> What are the five types of team arrangements?
> How can leaders have a positive impact on their organizations through building trust and mentoring?
> How do politics work in organizations?
> What is the difference between a group and a team?
> How do you explain the growing popularity of teams in organizations?
> How can cohesiveness and diversity support group effectiveness?
> How do status and size differences affect group performance?
> How do role requirements change in different situations?
> What are the key components of the punctuated-equilibrium model?
> What are the motivational benefits of intrinsic rewards?
> How can flexible benefits motivate employees?
> How does systematic study contribute to our understanding of OB?
> How can the different types of variable-pay programs increase employee motivation?
> How can employee involvement measures motivate employees?
> Most Chinese 15-year-olds spurn television, social media, and console gaming. On the other hand, many of the students do not excel in creative thinking or problem- solving. To what extent might this be an issue compared to other societies that might focu
> Social loafing is exposed in performance appraisals and other methods of assessing productivity and output. How should it be handled when it is exposed?
> Why does social loafing cause ethical dilemmas? What is it about social loafing that makes it difficult to cope with on a one-to-one basis if one of your colleagues does it?
> How do the contemporary theories of motivation compare to one another?
> Why is employee job engagement important to managers?
> What are some of the different types of organizational justice and what are their outcomes?
> What are the key principles of self-efficacy theory, reinforcement theory, and expectancy theory?
> What are the similarities and differences between self-determination theory and goal- setting theory?
> What is the definition of organizational behavior (OB)?
> How is the rational model of decision making different from bounded rationality and intuition?
> What are the factors that influence our perception?
> How do Hofstede’s five value dimensions and the GLOBE framework differ?
> Now that you’ve read the chapter and Case Incident 2, do you think organizations should work harder to retain and hire older workers? Why or why not?
> In relation to this chapter’s Ethical Dilemma, one recent study found that employees may go out of their way to behave in a morally appropriate fashion after they have done something wrong (or have been accused of doing something wrong). For example, an
> Based on what you’ve discovered about your personality traits on the Big Five Model through your organizational behavior studies in Chapter 4, in which organizational structures might you work best?
> After reading Case Incident 2, do you think it is possible for organizations to merge more than one type of organizational structure and retain elements of each type? Is it possible for United Airlines to have both a bureaucratic and a more flexible stru
