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Seat No.: Enrolment
GUJARAT TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY
MBA SEMESTER 01- • EXAMINATION SUMMER 2017
Subject Code: 2810004 Date: 10/05/2017
Subject Name: Organizational Behaviour
Time: 10:30 am 1:30 pm Total Marks: 70
Instructions:
1. Attempt all questions.
2. Make suitable assumptions wherever necessary.
3. Figures to the right indicate full marks.
Q.1(a)
Select an appropriate option for the given questions: Mark for Each)
06
1.
Rokeach studied instrumental values and:
A.
Terminal values
B.
Ethical decision making
C.
Attitudes
D.
Speed of decision making
2.
Personality is:
A.
Always stable
B.
An aggregate whole
C.
A part of a person
D.
Comprised of traits that cannot be measured
3.
Internally caused behaviors are:
A.
Resulting from personality traits
B.
Those that are believed to be under the personal control of the individual
C.
Resulting from outside causes
D.
Forced upon a person by the situation
4.
Which of the following is not a reason people join groups?
A.
Security
B.
Equity
C.
Status
D.
Power
5.
Which of the following occurs before the others?
A.
Transmitting
B.
Encoding
C.
Decoding
D.
Understanding
6.
According to the Ohio State studies, the extent to which a leader's behavior is
directed toward getting the job done is called:
A.
Consideration
B.
Employee-oriented
C.
Initiating structure
D.
Contingency theory
Q.1(b)
Explain the following terminologies with proper example. mark for each)
04
1.
2.
3.
4.
Motivation Factors
Behavioral Attitude
Instrumental Value
Change Agents
Q.1(c)
Explain Maslow's need of hierarchy theory.
04
Q.2(a)
Explain MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) framework for personality.
07
Q.2(b)
"It is necessary to study the attitude of an employee in an organization"- Do you agree? Justify your answer.
07
OR
Q.2(b)
List and describe the determinants of personality.
07
Q.3(a)
Explain perception and discuss various factors affecting perception of an individual.
07
Q.3(b)
Why do people join the group?
07
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OR
Q.3(a)
Explain different stages of forming the group.
07
Q.3(b)
Explain and differentiate work groups and work teams.
07
Q.4(a)
Define Power. Explain various bases for powers?
07
Q.4(b)
What do you mean by political behavior? Explain different factors affecting political behavior.
07
OR
Q.4(a)
Define Conflict. What are the different conflict resolution techniques?
07
Q.4(b)
Explain meaning of stress and potential sources of stress.
07
Q.5
Read the following case and answer the given questions.
By any objective measure, Jack Welch's 20-year reign as CEO of General Electric would have to be called an overwhelming success. When Welch took over the head job at GE, the company had a market value of $13 billion. When he retired in 2001, the company was worth $400 billion. Its profits in 2000 of $12.7 billion were more than eight times the $1.5 billion it earned in 1980. Welch's performance paid off for stockholders. Including dividends, the value of GE shares raised an average of 21.3 percent a year since he took over. This is compared with about 14.3 percent for the S&P 500 during the same period.
How did Welch achieve such success? On a strategic level, he redefined GE's objectives for every business in which it operated. He said GE would either be No. 1 or No. 2 in all businesses or get out of them. He dropped those with low growth prospects, like small appliances and TVs, while expanding fast-growth businesses
Such as financial services and broadcasting. During his tenure as CEO, Welch oversaw 933 acquisitions and the sale of 408 businesses. He was obsessed with improving efficiency, cutting costs, and improving performance. To achieve these ends, Welch completely remolded GE in his style—impatient, aggressive, and competitive.
In the 1980s, as Welch began his remaking of GE, he picked up the nickname of "Neutron Jack." A play off of the neutron bomb, which kills people but leaves buildings standing. Welch cut more than 100,000 jobs—a fourth of GE's workforce—through mass layoffs, divestitures, forced retirements, and relocating U.S. jobs to overseas locations with cheaper labor. He pressured his managers and the employees who remained to drive themselves to meet ever-more-demanding efficiency standards. He was blatantly impatient when things did not move very rapidly. For instance, a former technical worker at a GE plant that makes industrial drives says his unit set aggressive goals every year. "We would meet and beat those goals, but it was never good enough. It was always, could have done more.' We felt the philosophy at General Electric was that they could replace us in a heartbeat." To reinforce the competitive environment, Welch established a comprehensive performance evaluation and ranking system for managers. Outstanding managers were highly rewarded while those at the bottom of the annual rankings were routinely fired.
Welch's demanding goals and penchant for closing down poor-performing units upended the lives of thousands of employees and severely strained the bonds between the company and many of the
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communities in which it operated. There were also a number of scandals that surfaced under Welch's watch at GE. These ranged from the company's 1985 admission that it had submitted time cards for too much overtime on government contracts to the 1994 bond-trading scandal at its former Kidder Peabody Co. investment-banking unit.
Welch's style was a blend of restlessness, bluntness, sarcasm, emotional volatility, and teasing humor. As one former GE vice chairman said about Welch, "even when he has fun, he's driving himself. He won't give up till he has won whatever he does." Welch regularly put in days of 12 hours or more but he expected the same kind of dedication from his employees. When he got angry, he could lash out with personal attacks that sometimes left shamed managers hurt and speechless.

Describe Welch's leadership style using the Ohio State dimensions, the managerial grid, and LMX theory.
7

Assess Welch's leadership effectiveness as assessed by stockholders, GE managers, and GE employees where GE operations are located.
7
OR
Q.5
Read the following case and answer the given questions.
The reality of software development in a huge company like Microsoft (it employs more than 48,000 people) is that a substantial portion of your work involves days of boredom punctuated by hours of tedium. You basically spend your time in an isolated office writing code and sitting in meetings during which you participate in looking for and evaluating hundreds of bugs and potential bugs. Yet Microsoft has no problem in finding and retaining software programmers. Their programmers work horrendously long hours and obsess on the goal of shipping product.
From the day new employees begin work at Microsoft; they know they are special and that their employer is special. New hires all have one thing in common—they are smart. The company prides itself on putting all recruits through a grueling "interview loop," during which they confront a barrage of brain-teasers by future colleagues to see how well they think. Only the best and the brightest survive to become employees. The company does this because Micro softies truly believe that their company is special. For instance, it has a high tolerance for nonconformity. Would you believe that one software tester comes to work every day dressed in extravagant Victorian outfits? But the underlying theme that unites Micro softies is the belief that the firm has a manifest destiny to change the world. The least consequential decision by a programmer can have an outsized importance when it can affect a new release that might be used by 50 million people.
Microsoft employees are famous for putting in long hours. One program manager said, "In my first five years, I was the Microsoft stereotype. I lived on caffeine and vending-machine hamburgers and free beer and 20-hour workdays. . . . I had no life. . . . I considered everything outside the building as a necessary evil." More recently, things have changed. There are still a number of people, who put in 80-hour weeks, but 60- and 70-hour weeks are more typical and some even are doing their jobs in only 40 hours.
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No discussion of employee life at Microsoft would be complete without mentioning the company's lucrative stock option program. Microsoft created more millionaire employees, faster, than any company in American history—more than 10,000 by the late-1990s. While the company is certainly more than a place to get rich, executives still realize that money matters. One former manager claims that the human resources' department actually kept a running chart of employee satisfaction versus the company's stock price. "When the stock was up, human resources could turn off the ventilation and everybody would say they were happy. When the stock was down, we could give people massages and they would tell us that the massages were too hard." In the go-go 1990s, when Microsoft stock was doubling every few months and yearly stock splits were predictable, employees not only got to participate in Microsoft's manifest destiny, but they could get rich in the process. By the spring of 2002, with the world in a recession, stock prices down, and the growth for Microsoft products slowing, it was not so clear what was driving its employees to continue the company's dominance of the software industry.

If you were a programmer, would you want to work at Microsoft? Why or why not?
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How many activities in this case can you tie into specific motivation theories? List the activities, the motivation theories, and how they apply.
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