1

Communication in Organizations

Dr. Holly Kruse

Final Exam Study Guide

Fall 2016

Key Things to Know for Final Exam

From the first part of the course

  • What is a theory?
  • What are classical approaches to management? What are the features of organizational bureaucracy? What is the human relations approach? What is the human resources approach? What is the systems approach to the study of organizations?

Cultural Approaches

  • What is culture? Organizational culture? Why is it important to study the cultures of organizations? What characterizes a strong organizational culture?
  • What are the elements of organizational culture? What were some examples of these elements that we saw in the clip from the television show “The Office” about the Dundie awards?
  • What changes in the global competitive business environment have led to greater interest in organizational culture? What is “Theory Z”?
  • What was the “interpretive turn” in studying organizations? What were some reasons that it emerged when it did? What is ethnography, and what are some of its benefits in study organizations? What are differences between interpretive and scientific approaches to studying organizations?
  • What are the different stages of organizational socialization? What are highly reliable organizations and what’s distinctive about their forms of socialization? How have information and communication technologies affected socialization?

Critical Approaches

  • What is critical organizational theory? What did we learn about ideological assumptions from the in-class exercise about gender and the workplace?
  • What were Marx’s key ideas about workers and the industrial society: What is the proletariat? The bourgeoisie? Alienation? Commodification
  • What is ideology? What are some examples of ideology at work in our culture today?
  • What are the five kinds of power we can understand as features of particular social relationships?
  • What ideological role do myths, metaphors, and stories play in organizations? What is the manufacture of consent? Concertive control? Discourse? The panopticon? How do modern panopticons function?
  • What kind of surveillance takes place at Amazon, according to the New York Times article “Inside Amazon” in the “Culture” on the course website? How is control exercised? What are some elements of the workplace culture?

Identity and Difference in Organizations

  • How did scholars used to think of identity? How do we think of it today? What does it mean to say identity is a process? What role do social network sites play in our identities?
  • What are the ways in which organizations attempt to regulate and control their members’ identities?Does this have anything to do with issues of power and ideology?

Collaboration

  • What is the pragmatic paradox that organizational members face in terms of participation?
  • What does Stanley Deetz’s concept of workplace democracy entail? What processes happen in organizations that keep stakeholders from having agency in organizations? What is real democracy in organizations, and what steps can be taken to create it?
  • What are team-based organizations? What are project teams? Work teams? What are the advantages of each? What individual roles might team members play?
  • What are the advantages of team decision-making? What are some of the problems with group/team decision-making? What are strategies for dealing with team conflict? Why might teams fail? How can organizations help teams succeed?
  • What is a communication network? What’s a small-group communication network? An emergent communication network? A low-density vs. high-density communication network? The roles people have in communication networks?
  • What are interorganizational communication networks, and why are they important? How might different kinds of linkages be formed between organizations?

Leadership

  • What did early scholars of leadership (including Blake and Mouton) think about traits and leadership? What are the key variables in the managerial grid that describes different managerial styles(and what are those managerial styles)?
  • What are habits of mind, habits of character, and habits of authentic communicative performance, and how do they play a role in leadership?
  • What is situational leadership? Transformational leadership?
  • What are the keys to effective communication with employees? What are examples of each of these four qualities?
  • What kinds of bullying can happen in organizations, and why? What kinds of sexual harassment occur, and how can one counter sexual harassment, according to the textbook? What are the possible risks of doing so?

Strategic Alignment

  • What is strategic thinking? What is strategic positioning?What is a competitive strategy, and what role does communication play in it? What is lowest cost strategy? Differentiation?
  • What is strategic alignment, and why is it important? Why is it difficult? How, according to the textbook, is it best approached?
  • What is progressive human resources management, and what are its key components?
  • What are computer-assisted communication technologies? Computer-assisted decision-aiding technologies? What are some of the different views of effects new communication technologies could have on the workplace? What issues of privacy do they raise?
  • What is synchronicity? Media richness? Mediated communication? Distributed workers?

Films

  • Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room –
  • What was Enron’s business?
  • What were key elements of Enron’s organizational culture? How was the culture described in the film, and what individuals embodied this culture? How did upper management attempt to shape the organizational culture, and using what communication technologies/media?
  • What phrases/quotations/value statements about Enron made by those in power at Enron turned out to be the opposite of the Enron philosophy/culture?
  • In what kinds leadership behaviors did Lay, Skilling, and others engage that went against the approaches to leadership discussed in the book? (In communication with employees, stockholders, and analysts, for instance.)
  • The Corporation
  • What, overall, are the film’s conclusions about the modern corporation?
  • As an example, the film looks at how Nike makes shirts in the developing world: what kind of an approach to management from Chapter 3 of the textbook does this example represent, and why?
  • How does the leadership approach of Ray Anderson of Insight Carpet seem to differ from that of Enron’s leaders?
  • What is “branding,” and what is the Disney “brand-driver”? What is undercover marketing?