Chapter 8 Summary

Teams are groups of two or more people who interact and influence each other, are mutually
accountable for achieving common objectives, and perceive themselves as a social entity within an
organization. All teams are groups because they consist of people with a unifying relationship,
some groups to not have purposive interaction.
A team-based organization relies on self-directed work teams rather than functional departments
as the core work units. Traditional departments may be teams when employees are encouraged to
directly interact and coordinate work activities with each other. However, unlike traditional
departments, team-based organizations tend to rely on cross-functional, autonomous teams with
less need for supervisors as a communication or coordination role.
Virtual teams operate across space, time, and organizational boundaries with members who
communicate mainly through information technologies. They are becoming more common due to
advances in computer networks, the shift from physical labor to knowledge-based work, corporate
globalization, and the need for greater knowledge sharing.
Team effectiveness includes the groups ability to survive, achieve its system-based objectives, and
fulfill the needs of its members. The model of team effectiveness considers the team and
organizational environment, team design, and team processes. The team or organizational
environment influence team effectiveness directly, as well as through team design and team
processes. Six elements in the organizational and team environment that influence team
effectiveness are reward systems, communication systems, physical space, organizational
environment, organizational structure, and organizational leadership.
Three team design elements are task characteristics, team size, and team composition. Teams
work best when tasks are clear, easy to implement, and require a high degree of interdependence.
Teams should be large enough to perform the work, yet small enough for efficient coordination and
meaningful involvement. Effective teams are composed of people with the competencies and
motivation to perform tasks in a team environment. Heterogeneous teams operate best on
complex projects and problems requiring innovative solutions.
Teams develop through the stages of forming, storming, norming, performing, and eventually
adjourning. However, some teams remain in a particular stage longer than others, and team
development is a continuous process. Teams develop norms to regulate and guide member
behavior. These norms may be influenced by critical events, explicit statements, initial
experiences, and members pregroup experiences. Team members also have roles -- a set of
behaviors they are expected to perform because they hold certain positions in a team and
organization.
Cohesiveness is the degree of attraction people feel toward the team and their motivation to
remain members. Cohesiveness increases with member similarity, smaller team size, higher
degree of interaction, somewhat difficult entry, team success, and external challenges. Teams need
some level of cohesiveness to survive, but high cohesive units have higher task performance only
when their norms do not conflict with organizational objectives.
Teams are not always beneficial or necessary. Moreover, they have hidden costs, known as process
losses, and require particular environments to flourish. Teams often fail because they are not set
up in supportive environments. Social loafing is another potential problem with teams. This is
tendency for individuals to perform at a lower level when working in groups than when alone.
Social loafing can be minimized by making each members performance more visible and
increasing each members motivation to perform his or her tasks within the group.
Team building is any formal activity intended to improve the development and functioning of a
work team. Four team-building strategies are role definition, goal setting, problem solving, and

interpersonal processes. Some team building events succeed, but companies often fail to consider
the contingencies of team building.

Chapter 9 Summary
Decision making is a conscious process of making choices among one or more alternatives with the
intention of moving toward some desired state of affairs. This involves identifying problems and
opportunities, choosing the best decision style, developing alternative solutions, choosing the best
solution, implementing the selected alternative, and evaluating decision outcomes.
Perceptual biases and poor diagnostic skills make it difficult to identify problems and opportunities.
We can minimize these challenges by being aware of the human limitations, discussing the
situation with colleagues, creating early warning systems, and using data mining to systematically
identify trends.
Choosing the best solution is often challenging because organizational goals are ambiguous or in
conflict, human information processing is incomplete and subjective, and people tend to satisfice
rather than maximize. Solutions can be chosen more effectively by systematically identifying and
weighting the factors used to evaluate alternatives, using decision support systems to guide the
decision process, conducting scenario planning, and using intuition where we possess enough tacit
knowledge on the issue.
Postdecisional justification and escalation of commitment make it difficult to accurately evaluate
decision outcomes. Escalation is mainly caused by self-justification, the gamblers fallacy,
perceptual blinders, and closing costs. These problems are minimized by separating decision
choosers from decision evaluators, establishing a preset level at which the decision is abandoned
or re-evaluated, relying on more systematic and clear feedback about the projects success, and
involving several people in decision making.
Employee involvement (or participation) refers to the degree that employees share information,
knowledge, rewards, and power throughout the organization. It may be formal or informal, direct
or indirect, and voluntary or statutory. The level of participation may range from an employee
providing specific information to management without knowing the problem or issue, to complete
involvement in all phases of the decision process.
Gainsharing programs and open book management represent moderate levels of employee
involvement. Open book management involves sharing financial information with employees and
encouraging them recommend ideas that improve those financial results.
Self-directed work teams (SDWTs) complete an entire piece of work requiring several
interdependent tasks and have substantial autonomy over the execution of these tasks. They
assign tasks to team members; control most work inputs, flow, and output; are responsible for
correcting problems; and receive team-level feedback and rewards.
Self-directed work teams are more effective when they following the guidance of sociotechnical
systems (STS) theory. According to STS, teams should be primary work units that involve
completion of an entire product or service. They must be sufficiently independent to can control
the main "variances" in the system. STS calls for a balance between the social and technological
systems in the work process, but it can be difficult to find this optimum balance.
Employee involvement may lead to higher decision quality, decision commitment, employee
satisfaction and empowerment, and employee development in decision-making skills. The VroomJago decision tree guides decision makers through a series of questions to determine the optimal

level of involvement. The model mainly considers four contingencies: decision quality, decision
commitment, decision conflict, and programmed decision.
Employee involvement is often resisted by management, employees, and labor unions, although
this can often be resolved through education, training, and trust-building. Employees with high
individualism and power distance are also less comfortable with some forms of employee
involvement.

Chapter 12 Summary
Power is the capacity to influence others. It exists when one party perceives that he or she is
dependent on the other for something of value. However, the dependent person must also
have counterpower some power over the dominant party -- to maintain the relationship.
There are five power bases. Legitimate power is anagreement among organizational members
that people in certain roles can request certain behaviors of others. Reward power is derived
from the ability to control the allocation of rewards valued by others and to remove negative
sanctions.Coercive poweris the ability to apply punishment. Expert power is the capacity to
influence others by possessing knowledge or skills that they want. People havereferent power
when others identify with them, like them, or otherwise respect them.
Information plays an important role in organizational power. Employees gain power by
controlling the flow of information that others need, and by being able to cope with
uncertainties related to important organizational goals.
Four contingencies determine whether these power bases translate into real power.
Individuals and work units are more powerful when they are nonsubstitutable, that is, there is
a lack of alternatives. Employees, work units, and organizations reduce substitutability by
controlling tasks, knowledge, and labor, and by differentiating themselves from competitors. A
second contingency is centrality. People have more power when they have high centrality, that
is, the number of people affected and how quickly others are affected by their actions.
Discretion, the third contingency of power, refers to the freedom to exercise judgment. Power
increases when people have freedom to use their power. The fourth contingency, visibility,
refers to the idea that power increases to the extent that a persons or work units
competencies are known to others. People gain visibility by taking people-oriented jobs,
working on important tasks, engaging in face time, using public symbols of their power, and
relying on mentors.
Power is applied to influence others, but the type of influence depends on the power source.
Coercive power tends to produce resistance; reward and legitimate power result in
compliance; expert and referent power produce commitment. People with a high need for
power feel more satisfied and committed to their jobs when they have power, but many
people tend to abuse their power when given too much of it.
Sexual harassment is a serious abuse of power. It is most obvious where the harasser
threatens the employees job security or personal safety through coercive or legitimate power.
Sexual harassment may be minimized by making people aware of their actions.
Organizational power also complicates workplace romances. Coworkers tend to believe that
employees in a sexual relationship will abuse their power. If the relationship ends, power
imbalances between the two employees may lead to sexual harassment. Some organizations
try to prohibit romantic relationships at work, but experts recommend that employees
disclose their relationship and remove themselves from a position of power over their partner.
Organizational politics attempts to influence others using discretionary behaviors that
promote personal objectives. People tend to have an unfavorable view of organizational
politics, but some political activities benefit the organization. Still, we must always consider
the ethical implications of political behaviors, including whether the action provides the
greatest good for the greatest number of people, violates anyone's legal or moral rights, and
treats all parties fairly.
There are many types of organizational politics. The most common tactics include attacking or
blaming others, controlling information, forming coalitions, cultivating networks, creating
obligations, and managing impressions.
Organizational politics is more prevalent when scarce resources are allocated using complex
and ambiguous decisions, and when the organization tolerates or rewards political behavior.
Individuals with a high need for personal power, an internal locus of control, and strong
Machiavellian values have a higher propensity to use political tactics. Men tend to engage in
explicit impression management (taking credit for successes) and blaming tactics. Women
tend to use fewer political strategies.
Dysfunctional organizational politics may be controlled by providing sufficient resources,
providing clear rules for resource allocation, establish a free flow of information, use
education and involvement during organizational change, design norms that discourage
dysfunctional politics, select people who are less likely to use dysfunctional politics, try to
resolve conflicts before people use political tactics against the other party, and have
employees actively discourage coworkers from using dysfunctional politics.

Chapter 14 Summary
Leadership is a complex concept that is defined as the process of influencing people and providing
an environment for them to achieve team or organizational objectives. Leaders use power and
persuasion to motivate followers, and arrange the work environment so that they do the job more
effectively. Leaders exist throughout the organization, not just in the executive suite.
The competency perspective tries to identify the characteristics of effective leaders. Recent writing
suggests that leaders have drive, leadership motivation, integrity, self-confidence, above-average
intelligence, knowledge of the business, and high emotional intelligence.
The behavioral perspective of leadership identified two clusters of leader behavior, people-oriented
and task-oriented. People-oriented behaviors include showing mutual trust and respect for
subordinates, demonstrating a genuine concern for their needs, and having a desire to look out for
their welfare. Task-oriented behaviors include assigning employees to specific tasks, clarify their
work duties and procedures, ensure that they follow company rules, and push them to reach their
performance capacity. This perspective hypothesizes that the most effective leaders exhibit high
levels of both types of behaviors, but this falsely assumes that one leadership style is best in all
circumstances.
The contingency perspective of leadership takes the view that effective leaders diagnose the
situation and adapt their style to fit that situation. The path-goal model is the prominent
contingency theory that identifies four leadership styles directive, supportive, participative, and
achievement-oriented -- and several contingencies relating to the characteristics of the employee
and of the situation. A recent extension of path-goal theory adds more leader styles and moves
the model from a dyadic to a team and organizational level.
Two other contingency leadership theories include the situational leadership model and Fiedlers
contingency theory. Research support is quite weak for both theories. However, a lasting element
of Fiedlers theory is the idea that leaders have natural styles and ,consequently, companies need
to change the leaders environment to suit their style. Leadership substitutes identifies
contingencies that either limit the leaders ability to influence subordinates or make that particular
leadership style unnecessary. This idea will become more important as organizations remove
supervisors and shift toward team-based structures.
Transformational leaders create a strategic vision, communicate that vision through framing and
use of metaphors, model the vision by walking the talk and acting consistently, and build
commitment toward the vision. This contrasts with transactional leadership, which involves linking
job performance to valued rewards and ensuring that employees have the resources needed to get
the job done. The contingency and behavioral perspectives adopt the transactional view of
leadership.
According to the romance perspective, people inflate the importance of leadership through
attribution, stereotyping, and fundamental needs for human control.
Women generally do not differ from men in the degree of people-oriented or task-oriented
leadership. However, female leaders more often adopt a participative style. Research also suggests
that people evaluate female leaders based on gender stereotypes, which may result in higher or
lower ratings.

Organizational Structure and Design

Chapter 17 Summary
Organizational structure refers to the division of labor as well as the patterns of coordination,
communication, work flow, and formal power that direct organizational activities. All
organizational structures divide labor into distinct tasks and coordinate that labor to accomplish
common goals. The primary means of coordination are informal communication, formal hierarchy,
and standardization.
The four basic elements of organizational structure include span of control, centralization,
formalization, and departmentalization. At one time, scholars suggested that firms should have a
tall hierarchy with a narrow span of control. Today, most organizations have the opposite because
they rely on informal communication and standardization, rather than direct supervision, to
coordinate work processes.
Centralization means that formal decision authority is held by a small group of people, typically
senior executives. Many companies decentralize as they become larger and more complex
because senior executives lack the necessary time and expertise to process all the decisions that
significantly influence the business. Companies also tend to become more formalized over time
because work activities become routinized. Formalization increases in larger firms because
standardization works more efficiently than informal communications and direct supervision.
A functional structure organizes employees around specific knowledge or other resources. This
fosters greater specialization and improves direct supervision, but makes it more difficult for
people to see the organizations larger picture or to coordinate across departments. A divisional
structure groups employees around geographic areas, clients, or outputs. This structure
accommodates growth and focuses employee attention on products or customers rather than
tasks. However, this structure creates silos of knowledge and duplication of resources.
The matrix structure combines two structures to leverage the benefits of both types of structure.
However, this approach requires more coordination than functional or pure divisional structures,
may dilute accountability, and increases conflict
One emerging form of departmentalization is the team-based structure. This structure is very flat
with low formalization that organizes self-directed teams around work processes rather than
functional specialties.
A network structure is an alliance of several organizations for the purpose of creating a product or
serving a client. Virtual corporations are network structures that can quickly reorganize
themselves to suit the client's requirements.
The best organizational structure depends on the firms size, technology, and environment.
Generally, larger organizations are decentralized and more formalized, with greater job
specialization and elaborate coordinating mechanisms. The work unit's technology---including
variety of work and analyzability of problems---influences whether to adopt an organic or
mechanistic structure. We need to consider whether the external environment is dynamic,
complex, diverse, and hostile.
Although size, technology, and environment influence the optimal organizational structure, these
contingencies do not necessarily determine structure. Rather, organizational leaders formulate
and implement strategies to define and manipulate their environments. These strategies, rather
than the other contingencies, directly shape the organization's structure.

Chapter Summary