Question

You are a Senior Leader of a Fortune 500 Company. You are asked by your CEO what you can do to create a more ethical culture within your organization. Your plan needs to include at least 5 steps. Explain the steps you would take and how you would present this to your CEO.

What is employee involvement and why is it important? What are the two major forms of employee involvement?

Discuss the impact of brainstorming on the possibility of groupthink.

Describe the relationship between trust and leadership.

What is the relationship between task conflicts and reflexivity among team members?

Compare and contrast the three common organizational designs: simple structure, bureaucracy, and matrix structure.

Explain the primary methods of maintaining an organization's culture.

Answer 1

Answer 2:-

Employee Involvement– A participative process that uses employees’ input to increase their commitment to organizational success. 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. It’s important to involve 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.

There are three major forms of employee involvement:

Participative management:- a process in which subordinates share a significant degree of decision-making power with their immediate superiors.

Representative participation: -a system in which workers participate in organizational decision making through a small group of representative employees. The two most common forms of representative participation takes are works councils and board representatives.

Quality circles a work group of employees who meet regularly to discuss their quality problems, investigate causes, recommend solutions and take corrective actions.

Answer 3:- Groupthink is related to norms. It represents a phenomenon 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 the unhampered generation of ideas. Thus, brainstorming as a technique for group decision making reduces the possibility of groupthink

Answer 4:- When teams are performing nonroutine activities, disagreements about task content can stimulate discussion, promote critical assessment of problems and options, and can lead to better team decisions. Such conflicts are defined as task conflicts. Research has shown that moderate levels of task conflict during the initial phases of team performance were positively related to team creativity, but bothvery low and very high levels of task conflict were negatively related to team performance.

Effective teams also show reflexivity, meaning they reflect on and adjust their master plan when necessary. A team has to have a good plan, but it also has to be willing and able to adapt when conditions call for it. Research evidence does suggest that teams high in reflexivity are better able to adapt to conflicting plans and goals among team members.

Both these concepts come under the process dimension of key variables of effective teams. Reflexivity may be understood as one way to solve task conflicts by adapting the predetermined plan to current changes

Answer 5:- a) The simple structure is said to be characterized most by what it is not rather than what it is. The simple structure is not elaborate. It has a low degree of departmentalization, wide spans of control, authority centralized in a single person, and little formalization. The simple structure is a "flat" organization; it usually has only two or three vertical levels, a loose body of employees, and one individual in whom the decision-making authority is centralized.

b) Standardization is the key concept that underlies the bureaucracy. It is characterized by highly routine operating tasks achieved through specialization, very formalized rules and regulations, tasks that are grouped into functional departments, centralized authority, narrow spans of control, and decision making that follows the chain of command.

c) The matrix combines two forms of departmentalization: functional and product. It breaks the unity-of-command concept. Employees in the matrix have two bosses —their functional department managers and their product managers. Therefore, the matrix has a dual chain of command

Answer 6:- Organizational cultures are maintained by a combination of many forces, especially (a) the selection and retention of employees, (b) the allocation of rewards and status, (c) the reactions of leaders, (d) the rites and ceremonies, (e) the stories and symbols, and (f) the reactions to crises