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| 1 | |
Which one of the following is not something that shapes and helps define a company's culture? |
| | A) | The core values and business principles that executives espouse together with the operating practices and behaviors that define "how we do things around here" |
| | B) | The company's standards of what is ethically acceptable and what is not, along with the legends and stories that people repeat to illustrate and reinforce the company's core values, traditions, and business practices |
| | C) | A company's approach to people management and its style of operating |
| | D) | The strategy and business model that the company has adopted |
| | E) | The "chemistry" and "personality" that permeates its work environment |
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| 2 | |
Which one of the following is not something to look for in identifying a company's culture? |
| | A) | The company's approach to people management and the official policies, procedures, and operating practices that paint the white lines for the behavior of company personnel |
| | B) | The company's track record in meeting or beating its financial and strategic performance targets |
| | C) | How managers and employees interact and relate to each other |
| | D) | The spirit and character that pervades the work climate |
| | E) | The strength of peer pressures to do things in particular ways and conform to expected norms |
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| 3 | |
Once a company's culture becomes ingrained, then the culture can be perpetuated by |
| | A) | establishing a code of ethics and encouraging company personnel to practice the advocated ethical standards in conducting company operations. |
| | B) | deliberately avoiding diversification or acquisition so as not to upset the internal cultural balance or risk a cultural clash with a newly-acquired company. |
| | C) | continuing with the same organization structure. |
| | D) | continuity of long-term direction and top management leadership. |
| | E) | carefully screening and selecting new employees according to how well their values, attitudes, and personality fit the culture; systematic indoctrination of new members in the culture's fundamentals; frequent reiteration of core values by senior managers and group members; and regular ceremonies honoring members who display desired cultural behaviors. |
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| 4 | |
Companies with multinational operations or that have recently made new acquisitions typically have |
| | A) | unhealthy cultures. |
| | B) | multiple cultures or subcultures. |
| | C) | weak cultures. |
| | D) | adaptive cultures. |
| | E) | unstable cultures. |
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| 5 | |
The characteristics of a strong culture company include all but which one of the following? |
| | A) | Deeply rooted values and operating approaches that "regulate" the conduct of a company's business and the climate of its workplace |
| | B) | A strong managerial commitment to conducting the company's business according to established traditions |
| | C) | Top executives with high ethical standards and personal integrity |
| | D) | Using core values and ingrained business principles as guides in making decisions |
| | E) | Frequent and dedicated efforts on the part of management to communicating values and business principles to organization members and explaining how they relate to the company's business environment |
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| 6 | |
Which of the following statements about a strong-culture company is false? |
| | A) | Decisive leadership on the part of top executives, an industry-leading market share, and strict enforcement of long-standing company policies are all important traits of a strong culture company. |
| | B) | In strong culture companies, senior managers make a point of reiterating key principles and core values to organization members; more importantly, they make a conscious effort to display these principles and values in their own actions and behavior—they walk the talk. |
| | C) | Continuity of leadership, small group size, stable group membership, geographic concentration, and considerable organizational success all contribute to the emergence and sustainability of a strong culture. |
| | D) | In a strong-culture company, culturally-approved behaviors and ways of doing things are nurtured while culturally-disapproved behaviors and work practices get squashed. |
| | E) | Senior managers insist that company values and business principles be reflected in the decisions and actions taken by all company personnel; moreover, individuals encounter strong peer pressures from co-workers to observe culturally-approved norms and behaviors. |
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| 7 | |
The characteristics of a weak company culture include |
| | A) | deep hostility to change and to people who champion new ways of doing things. |
| | B) | no code of ethics or statement of core values, a highly centralized managerial hierarchy, and a big corporate bureaucracy. |
| | C) | a lack of values and principles that are consistently preached or widely shared, little co-worker peer pressure to do things in particular ways, and no strong employee allegiance to what the company stands for or to operating the business in well-defined ways. |
| | D) | no strong sense of empowerment among company members, little or no top management commitment to a clearly-defined competitive strategy, and a poor track record in producing good financial results. |
| | E) | All of the above are traits of a weak company culture. |
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| 8 | |
Which of the following is not one of the four types of unhealthy company cultures? |
| | A) | Bureaucratic cultures |
| | B) | Change-resistant cultures |
| | C) | Unethical and greed-driven cultures |
| | D) | Politicized cultures |
| | E) | Insular, inwardly-focused cultures |
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| 9 | |
Companies with insular, inwardly-focused cultures |
| | A) | are typically opposed to performance-based incentive compensation and employee empowerment. |
| | B) | are prone to be preoccupied with avoiding risks, are unlikely to pursue bold actions to capture emerging opportunities, are frequently lax when it comes to product innovation and continuous improvement in performing value chain activities, and prefer following rather than leading market change. |
| | C) | are typically gung-ho about adapting to changing market conditions so as to protect the company's culture from shareholder criticism. |
| | D) | tend to resist recruiting people who can offer fresh thinking and outside perspectives and typically refrain from looking outside the company for best practices, new managerial approaches, and innovative ideas. |
| | E) | are typically run by empire-building managers who jealously guard their decision-making prerogatives; they have their own agendas and operate the work units under their supervision as autonomous "fiefdoms," and the positions they take on issues is usually aimed at protecting or expanding their turf. |
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| 10 | |
The hallmarks of a high performance corporate culture include |
| | A) | a shared willingness to adapt core values and ethical standards to fit the changing requirements of an evolving strategy, use of a balanced scorecard approach to tracking company performance, and a gung-ho approach to discovering best practices. |
| | B) | considerable political infighting that typically consumes a great deal of organizational energy, often with the result that what's best for the company takes a backseat to political maneuvering. |
| | C) | a "can-do" spirit, pride in doing things right, no-excuses accountability, and a pervasive results-oriented work climate where people go the extra mile to meet or beat stretch objectives. |
| | D) | charismatic managerial leadership, a lean management bureaucracy, and a must-be-invented-here mindset. |
| | E) | strong inclinations to adopt a wait-and-see posture, carefully analyze several alternative responses, learn from the missteps of early movers, and then move forward cautiously and conservatively with initiatives that are deemed safe. |
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| 11 | |
Adaptive cultures are characterized by such traits as |
| | A) | willingness on the part of organizational members to accept change and take on the challenge of introducing and executing new strategies—company personnel share a feeling of confidence that the organization can deal with whatever threats and opportunities come down the pike; they are receptive to risk taking, experimentation, innovation, and changing strategies and practices. |
| | B) | orchestrating organizational changes in a manner that (1) demonstrates genuine care for the well-being of all key constituencies (customers, employees, shareowners, suppliers, and the communities where the company operates) and (2) tries to satisfy all their legitimate interests simultaneously. |
| | C) | a proactive approach to identifying issues, evaluating the implications and options, and quickly moving ahead with workable solutions. |
| | D) | a willingness to change operating practices and behaviors to adapt to new market and competitive conditions so long as the changes do not compromise core values and long-standing business principles |
| | E) | All of these. |
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| 12 | |
A work environment where the culture is well-matched to the conditions and behaviors requisite for good strategy execution |
| | A) | is a powerful ally in managerial efforts to execute the chosen strategy because it provides company personnel with clear guidance regarding "how we do things around here" and produces significant peer pressures from co-workers to conform to culturally acceptable norms—as a consequence, culturally-approved behavior thrives and culturally-disapproved behavior gets squashed and even penalized. |
| | B) | signals the presence of a strongly embedded high-performance culture. |
| | C) | is nearly always a high-performance culture because a tight strategy-culture fit promotes dedicated employee efforts to identify and adopt the best possible work practices. |
| | D) | is an adaptive culture with strategy-supportive policies and procedures. |
| | E) | is generally a culture in which employees are empowered and there is considerable emphasis on teamwork. |
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| 13 | |
A tight culture-strategy match-up furthers a company's strategy execution effort in all but which one of the following ways? |
| | A) | A tight culture-strategy fit steers company personnel into displaying behaviors and adopting operating practices that promote good strategy execution. |
| | B) | A tight strategy-culture alignment produces a high-performing, adaptive work environment conducive to fast achievement of stretch performance targets. |
| | C) | A culture that encourages actions, behaviors, and work practices supportive of good strategy execution not only provides company personnel with clear guidance regarding "how we do things around here" but also produces significant peer pressure from co-workers to conform to culturally acceptable norms. |
| | D) | A deeply embedded culture tightly matched to the strategy aids the cause of competent strategy execution by making it far simpler to root out operating practices that are a misfit. |
| | E) | A culture imbedded with values and behaviors that facilitate strategy execution promotes strong employee identification with and commitment to the company's vision, performance targets, and strategy—as a consequence, employees feel genuinely better about their jobs and greater numbers of company personnel exhibit some passion about their work and exert their best efforts to execute the strategy and achieve performance targets. |
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| 14 | |
Which one of the following is not accurate as concerns changing a company's culture and aligning it with the requirements for strategic success? |
| | A) | Changing a company's culture and trying to align it with the requirements for strategic success are among the toughest management tasks and requires visible actions, both symbolic and substantive, to modify the culture. |
| | B) | Changing a company's culture and aligning it with the requirements for strategic success entails diagnosing which facets of the present culture are strategy-supportive and which are not. |
| | C) | Changing a company's culture and aligning it with the requirements for strategic success involves open and candid communication among all concerned about those aspects of the culture that have to be changed. |
| | D) | Changing a company's culture and trying to align it with the requirements for strategic success generally requires instituting a new values statement, adopting most of the traits of an adaptive culture, and retraining managers in the ways and means of convincing employees to adopt new behaviors. |
| | E) | Changing a company's culture and trying to align it with the requirements for strategic success nearly always requires that senior executives personally lead the culture-changing effort and may require replacing old-culture traditionalist managers with "new breed" managers. |
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| 15 | |
Which one of the following is not a substantive culture-changing action that a company's managers can undertake to alter a problem culture? |
| | A) | Managements commitment to lead by example and attend company events to praise good deeds and expound on the merits of the new culture |
| | B) | Promoting individuals who are known to possess the desired cultural traits, who have stepped forward to advocate the shift to a different culture, and who can serve as role models for the desired cultural behavior |
| | C) | Appointing outsiders with the desired cultural attributes to high-profile positions |
| | D) | Screening all candidates for new positions carefully, hiring only those who appear to fit in with the new culture |
| | E) | Designing compensation incentives that boost the pay of teams and individuals who display the desired cultural behaviors and hit change-resisters in the pocketbook |
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| 16 | |
A company's culture is typically grounded in and shaped by |
| | A) | the depth of its commitment to identifying and adopting best practices. |
| | B) | its strategic vision and mission statement. |
| | C) | whether top management is trying to ingrain cultural norms by means of mostly substantive actions or mostly symbolic actions. |
| | D) | its strategy and business model. |
| | E) | its dedication to displaying certain core values and the bar it sets for ethical standards. |
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| 17 | |
Based on Table 12.1, which of the following topics would least likely be a topic or element of a company's statement of its core values? |
| | A) | A dedication to superior customer service, top-notch quality, product innovation, and/or technological leadership |
| | B) | An expectation that company personnel will display creativity, exercise initiative, and accept responsibility |
| | C) | Prohibiting giving or accepting bribes, kickbacks, or gifts |
| | D) | A commitment to exhibiting such qualities as integrity, fairness, trustworthiness, pride of workmanship, Golden Rule behavior, respect for co-workers, and ethical behavior |
| | E) | A commitment to making the company a great place to work |
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| 18 | |
Establishing a workable strategy-cultural fit in multinational and global companies |
| | A) | requires the development of extensive training programs for new employees working in non-host country markets. |
| | B) | can be accomplished by grounding the company's strategy in values and operating practices that travel well across country borders and that strike a chord with managers and workers in many different areas of the world, despite varying local customs and traditions. |
| | C) | requires using a Think-Local, Act-Local strategy so that the company's culture and ethical standards in each country can be matched to its strategy in that country. |
| | D) | first requires having cross-cultural employee committees work out a set of core values, ethical principles, and operating practices that can win the support of employees worldwide; then it is up to top management to ingrain the consensus core values, ethical principles, and operating practices. |
| | E) | entails making it clear to employees that there is no alternative to having a consistent culture across all countries where the company operates. |
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| 19 | |
Which of the following is not one of the leadership roles that senior managers have to play in pushing for good strategy execution and operating excellence? |
| | A) | Learning the obstacles in the path of good execution and clearing the way for progress |
| | B) | Weeding out managers who are consistently in the ranks of the lowest performers (the bottom 10%) and who are not enthusiastic about the strategy or how it is being executed |
| | C) | Being out in the field, seeing how well operations are going. |
| | D) | Being out front personally leading the execution process and driving the pace of progress. |
| | E) | Delegating authority to middle and lower-level managers and creating a sense of empowerment among employees to move the implementation process forward. |
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| 20 | |
The task of top executives in making corrective adjustments includes |
| | A) | deciding when adjustments are needed and what adjustments to make. |
| | B) | knowing when to continue with the present corporate culture and when to shift to a different and better corporate culture. |
| | C) | being good at figuring out whether to arrive at decisions quickly or slowly in choosing among the various alternative adjustments. |
| | D) | deciding whether to try to fix the problems of poor strategy execution or simply shift to a strategy that is easier to execute correctly. |
| | E) | deciding how to identify the problems that need fixing. |
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