Exam 14: Managing Conflict, Power, and Politics

A subunit within an organization can increase its power by ________.

Discuss the costs and benefits of organizational politics.

The use of power to influence decision-making is most effective when power is based on specialized knowledge.

List the various sources of power.

A staff function is directly involved in the production of the organization's products.

Jane works for a manufacturing plant that has been under pressure to reduce pollution. Jane increased her knowledge of environmental laws in order to help the company follow waste disposal laws. Which of the following political tactics is being used by Jane?

According to Pondy, all organizational conflict arises because vertical and horizontal differentiation lead to the establishment of different organizational subunits with different goals and often different perceptions of how best to realize those goals.

The power possessed by a set of managers who form a "partnership" and use their combined power secretively to influence the decision-making process in ways that favor their interests is called ________ power.

In the ________ stage of Pondy's model, one subunit gets back at another subunit by attempting to thwart its goals.

Manager A supports Manager B on an issue of interest to B in return for B supporting A an issue of interest to A. These managers are ________.

"Felt conflict" is the fourth stage in Pondy's model of organizational conflict.

In an organization, people in line functions view themselves as the critical organizational resource and people in staff functions as secondary players. Acting on this belief, the line function constantly uses its supposedly lofty status as the producer of goods and services to justify putting its interests ahead of the other functions' interests. Based on this information, the organization is at which stage of Pondy's model of organizational conflict?

Which of the following is the third stage of Pondy's model of organizational conflict?

Attitudinal structuring is a process of restructuring an organization so as to remove the cause of conflict among subunits.

A production department in a company has been experiencing several production problems for the past few months. When production managers investigate, they discover that materials management always buys inputs from the lowest-cost sources of supply and makes no attempt to develop the kind of long-term relationships with suppliers that can raise the quality and reliability of inputs. At which stage of Pondy's model of organizational conflict is the company in?

A manager obtains an assignment that brings him into contact with many managers and many functions so that he can obtain information that can be used to make him and his function nonsubstitutable. Which of the following political tactics is being used by this manager?

Which of the following is most likely to occur once the conflict reaches the manifest stage?

"Gatekeepers" have power stemming from ________.

Which of the following is most likely to determine the kind of decisions that will be selected to resolve an organizational conflict?

Decentralizing authority to a subordinate does not necessarily reduce a manager's authority.