Deck 11: Designing Organizational Architecture

Question 1

Competitive advantage cannot be derived from information

Answer 1

False
Information is key to attaining competitive advantage, whether about customers, competitors or the remote environment

Question 2

Economies of scale facilitate speed of response and flexibility

Answer 2

False
As scale increases, responses are likely to be slower and less flexible

Question 3

Integrating mechanisms are necessarily mutually exclusive

Answer 3

False
A variety of integrating mechanisms can work together, ideally cohesively

Question 4

Structure, processes and human resources are all part of organizational architecture

Question 5

Differentiation creates a need for integration

Question 6

Organisation structures are the result of careful analysis and planning

Question 7

Firms may become unmanageable due to size and complexity

Question 8

Contingency theory suggests there is a best way to organize

Question 9

Organizational structure is influenced by the style of the centre

Question 10

Migrating functional structures towards business units should produce greater flexibility

Question 11

Global firms are generally spatially undifferentiated

Question 12

A business unit structure may well produce cost and control problems

Question 13

A group structure never fosters empire-building by executives

Question 14

Networks and alliances are decreasing in frequency

Question 15

Interests of alliance and joint venture partners often diverge over time

Question 16

Successful process re-engineering requires a sophisticated understanding of an organization

Question 17

The Internet has revolutionized supply chain management

Question 18

Installation of Enterprise Resource Planning systems is quite straightforward

Question 19

Knowledge management is an important and challenging issue for many firms

Question 20

Multi-business firms offer significantly better developmental opportunities for managers

Question 21

Senior managers should always be thinking about succession planning