Study Questions for the
Final Exam

The final exam is cumulative -- it includes material that was already covered in the midterm. However, the emphasis will be on the new material. The format will be very similar to the midterm: mostly multiple choice, with some short answers.  The content will be a little bit more conceptual and less detail-oriented than the midterm. Pretty much everything that was discussed in class will be on the final. The textbook (Jones, Organizational Theory) will not be emphasized. There will be several questions about Deborah Tannen's book Talking 9 to 5.

The following study questions only cover the material after the midterm, but the exam itself is cumulative.

 

Decision-Making

  1. What cognitive biases and heuristics affect how people make decisions? (see perception handout)
  2. What is GroupThink?
  3. Explain "bounded rationality".
  4. Explain the notion of stakeholders and how it relates to corporate decision making.
  5. What went wrong with decision-making in the Challenger case?

Negotiation / Dependency / Power

  1. What is negotiation?
  2. What is power?
  3. What is dependency based on?
  4. What are balancing operations?
  5. What are cost reduction operations?

Teams

  1. What are the stages that teams typically go through?
  2. What can be done to improve the performance of teams?
  3. How do you reward individuals for work done in teams? In other words, if most of your organization's work is done in teams, how do you work out salary increases and bonuses at the end of the year?

Diversity

  1. What kind of diversity do we find in organizations today? (sex, race, national culture, personality, age, etc.)
  2. Discuss the dimensions along which national cultures differ.
  3. What kinds of problems can we expect when people of different national cultures work together?
  4. What kinds of problems do organizations encounter as a result of the increased gender diversity in the workforce?
  5. In what ways do people's personalities differ? (MBTI, and see also the text, starting page 73)
  6. What kinds of problems can we expect when different specific personality types interact? E.g., a perceiver and a judger working on the same team.
  7. What are the pros and cons of adopting flexible employee contracts (telecommuting, mommy tracks, part time work, flexible hours, multiple compensation systems, making jobs available for spouses, domestic partner benefits, etc.)

Organizational Trends

  1. What are the key trends affecting organizational structures today?
  2. What are the pros and cons of the new organizational forms?
  3. What the causes of consequences of the key trends?

Cultural Differences

  1. What are the dimensions along which human cultures vary (e.g., high/low context, power distance, mono/poly chronicity, perceptions of time, etc.)

Cognition

  1. What kinds of heuristics do humans use to think through complex problems?
  2. What are attribution, halo effects, projection, and stereotyping?
  3. What is bounded rationality?