Principles and Practices of Management

ADL-01-Ver2
Assignment - A
Question 1. What were the Hawthorne studies? What effect did they have on the
Management practices?

Answer: The Hawthorne effect is a form of reactivity whereby subjects improve an aspect of
their behavior being experimentally measured simply in response to the fact that they are
being studied, not in response to any particular experimental manipulation.

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Question 2. What steps can an organisation take to increase the motivational force for
high levels of performance?

Question 3. Explain briefly various Management Functions. What is the basis for saying
that planning is the most crucial management function? Discuss.

Question 4. Explain the MBO Process.

Question 5. Elucidate the relationship between planning and control.

Assignment - B
Question 1. To whom do you think is performance appraisal more significant to the
organization or to the individual? Justify.

Question 2. Comment on the statement “Delegation of authority is the key to

organization”. Discuss the advantages of delegation in the light of this
statement.

Question 3. What are the challenges faced by the professional managers in the
contemporary Indian industrial set up?

Case Study
When play becomes work

Sheetal Banavali's daily routine as a Team Leader at UK 3 in anything but ordinary. Eight
straight hours of handling a team of executives servicing customers from halfway across the
world is bound to leave anyone exhausted. “I either go to Unwind, which plays great music,
or Cuisine, where the food is top of the world. Sometimes I even go to Finesse to get my
hairdo right,” she says. Unwind and Cuisine, by the way, are theme cafeterias, while Finesse
is a beauty salon. And yes, all three are located within the 3 office premises at Mindspace,
Malad. “We are setting the benchmark in HR practices,” says 3 Head (Recruitment and HR
Support) Akhil Sharma, who prefers describing the 5,000-employees strong 3 as a Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) company rather than a plain Jane BPO. “Our focus is the
employee and we believe in nurturing his or her talent.” With a Citibank ATM inside the
office, a full-fledged gaming arcade, a higher education programme - Gurukul - that has a tie-
up with institutions like Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies and the Institute of
Chartered Financial Analysts of India allowing employees to pursue an MBA or a CA, the
only thing missing is bed and breakfast. “By the way, we have three company guesthouses if
the staff wants to stay overnight,” says Sharma with a laugh, even market leaders joins the
game. If BPOs are upping the ante, the IT companies, small and big, aren't far behind.
Sudheesh Venkatesh, Vice-President, HR, of the India operations of Tesco, the world's
largest grocery home-shopping service in the world, puts the paradigm shift in perspective
calling it the ‘death of the personnel manager’ “The IT industry has effectively ensured that
the old personnel department is gone and done away with. Human resources today is
completely about talent management and retention,” he says. And walking the talk, Tesco
offers employees not only maternity and paternity leave, but also adoption leave. “We are an
equal opportunity employer and if any employee of ours wants to adopt a child, we will
support him or her in every possible ways,” he says. The Tesco campus at Whitefield in
Bangalore also houses a learning centre where employees can register themselves for a retail
certification course from no less than the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Bangalore.
“We have also done away with the probation period because we are in the business of
training people,” says Venkatesh. Gurgaon-based Eon Technologies, which handles offshore
projects across Europe, is a small company by Indian IT standards. “But we have practices
which are cutting edge,” says Prema Pillai, head of HR at the company. “Tele-commuting,
flexi-time and retreats focused on team building are our strong points.”

Question 1. What principles of motivation are being used here?

Question 2. What control tools would be most effective in this kind of work
environment?

Question 3. Can such efforts lead to a consistent behavior in organisations? Give

reasons.

Assignment - C
1. Decreasing the role of subordinates in decision-making is known as
a) Decentralisation
b) Stabilization
c) Centralization
d) Organization

2. Which of the following refers to the flow of information among people on the same or
similar organizational levels?
a) Diagonal
b) Upward
c) Horizontal
d) Downward
3. Which of the following is a question that needs to be answered in job analysis?
a) What physical and mental tasks does the worker accomplish?
b) What qualifications are needed to perform the job?
c) When is the job to be completed?
d) All of the above.

4. ________ refers to the ability of individuals or groups to induce or influence the beliefs or
actions of other individuals or groups.
a) Power
b) Responsibility
c) Delegation
d) Discipline

5. Which one management function helps maintain managerial effectiveness by establishing

guidelines for future activities?
a) Organizing
b) Planning
c) Staffing
d) Leading

6. Which is not a leadership theory?

a) Trait theory
b) ERG theory
c) Contingency theory
d) Transactional theory

7. Which is an esteem need?

a) Basic pay
b) Safety regulations
c) Prestigious office location
d) Training

8. What interview is comprehensive, and the interviewer encourages the applicant to do much
of the talking?
a) Unstructured
b) Structured
c) Stress
d) Directive

9. What are the typical products of job analysis?

a) Job descriptions and job specifications
b) Work standards
c) Work schedules
d) Desired financial incentives

10. In Basket Technique is used in

a) Production
b) Marketing
c) Training
d) Accounting
11. Key result areas are usually terms as
a) Objectives
b) Missions
c) Goals
d) KRAs

12. Which one is not a stage of Group process?

a) Forming
b) Norming
c) Welcoming
d) Performing

13. MBO was first suggested by

a) F.W. Taylor
b) Henri Fayol
c) Peter F. Drucker
d) Watson

14. Which managerial function gives attention to influencing and motivating employees to
improve performance and achieve corporate objectives?
a) Leading
b) Organizing
c) Staffing
d) Controlling

15. Job Evaluation is a technique which aims at:

a) Establishing fair and equitable pay structure
b) Analyzing of requirement of updating technology
c) Assessing safety requirement of jobs
d) Improving productivity

16. Which is an advantage of decentralization?

a) Encourages decision-making
b) Easy to have uniform policy
c) Greater Control
d) Decreases complexity of coordination

17. Performance review is done to

a) Reward work done
b) Focus on areas requiring improvement
c) Giving appropriate feed back to individuals
d) All of the above

18. The general conclusion of the ‘Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments’ was that
employees would work better if the management were concerned about their welfare and
superiors paid special attention to them. This phenomenon was subsequently labeled as the
_________
a) Relay effect
b) Hawthorne effect
 c) Behavioral effect
d) Human effect

19. Which is not a way to overcome the initial resistance to change in organizations?
a) Education and Communication
b) Group inertia
c) Participation and involvement
d) Negotiation and agreement

20. Management of change refers to

a) Help people to adopt to the change
b) Changing people
c) Change the organization structure
d) Change the top management

21. Requisites of effective supervision are

a) Technical knowledge of the work
b) Managerial knowledge
c) Knowledge of rules & regulations
d) All of the above

22. According to Herzberg and his associates ______ are job content factors which lead to
job satisfaction?
a) Motivators
b) Hygiene factor
c) Context factors
d) Physiological factors

23. The establishment of a distinct area, unit of subsystem of an organization over which a
manager has authority for the performance of specialized activities and results is
termed_______
a) Centralization
b) Departmentation
c) Decentralization
d) Functionalization

24. Democratic leadership is also know as _________ leadership.

a) Autocratic
b) Participative
c) Bureaucratic
d) Laissez-faire

25. A/an ________ is a vital tool for providing information about organizational
relationships.
a) Organizational chart
b) Functional chart
c) Organizational model
d) Functional model
26. Which control principles suggests that managers should be informed about a problem
only when the data shows a significant deviation from established standards?
a) Management by waling around
b) Management by objectives
c) Management by goals
d) Management by exception

27. Line Managers are:

a) Supervisors
b) Staff authorities
c) Managers with authority to direct operations in their spheres of activity
d) Production & Marketing Managers

28. When an employee asks a question or reports a problem to his or her supervisor, this is an
example of which direction of communication?
a) Grapevine
b) Lateral
c) Downward
d) Upward

29. You have decided to send a message to your supervisor requesting vacation time. You
brainstorm some basic concepts and now must decide how to phrase this information for your
supervisor. You are at which of the following steps in the communication process?
a) Sending
b) Receiving
c) Encoding
d) Decoding

30. Group decision-making has certain advantages over individual decision-making. Which
of the following statements is not true with regard to group decision-making?
a) It allows pooling of knowledge and information
b) It's a source of personnel development
c) It discourages risk taking
d) It's time consuming and costly

31. The idea that workers look for meaning in their work and will actively seek out new
responsibility is most consistent with which of these needs identified by Maslow?
a) Safety
b) Social
c) Self-actualization
d) Physiological

32. A manager's posture during a communication with a colleague is an example of which

aspect of the communications process?
a) Decoding
b) Non-verbal behavior
c) Informal channel
d) The grapevine
33. The organization chart is a way of showing
a) How the tasks of an organization are divided and co-ordinated
b) The informal patterns of communication
c) The stakeholders who have an interest in the company
d) The physical layout of the buildings on a site

34. When a manager secures the agreement of a colleague to work on a project in return for
the promise of providing the colleague with some extra remuneration, what type of power is
he or she exercising?
a) Expert power
b) Coercive power
c) Referent power
d) Reward power

35. ______ spans of management create ____________ structures with many levels of
management.
a) Wide ; tall
b) Narrow ; tall
c) Wide ; unpredictable
d) Narrow ; flat

36. Which of the following is not one of the steps identified as part of the controlling
process?
a) Setting performance standards or goals
b) Measuring performance
c) Writing the reports
d) Taking corrective action

37. According to Herzberg, which of the following can be classified as a motivator?

a) Working conditions
b) Pay
c) Supervision
d) Recognition

38. Which of the following refers to changing a task to make it inherently more rewarding,
motivating and satisfying?
a) Enlargement
b) Rotation
c) Enhancement
d) Enrichment

39. The tendency to place the primary responsibility for one's success or failure either within
oneself or on outside forces is referred to as
a) Authoritarianism
b) Emotional stability
c) Locus of control
d) Extroversion

40. ______ is a process whereby companies find out how others do something better than
they do and then try to imitate or improve on it.
a) TQM
b) Continuous improvement
c) Benchmarking
d) Empowerment