Administrative Thought Questions and Answers

Answer: D

A shared value system and common standards of behaviour are not a feature of a formal organization. They belong to the informal organization, which grows out of the personal interaction and the social relationships of the members.

A formal organization has legal status, permanence and primacy of structure: it is deliberately designed, it exists apart from the particular persons in it, and its structure of authority and roles comes first. So the first three are features and not the answer.

Answer: B

The correct matching is The Administrative State by Dwight Waldo (iii), Administrative Theories and Politics by Peter Self (iv), The Elements of Administration by L. Urwick (i) and Principles of Public Administration by F.W. Willoughby (ii). The code is iii, iv, i, ii.

The other codes give a book to the wrong author, for example the first code gives The Administrative State to Urwick and the last gives Principles of Public Administration to Urwick. Each of these books is well known and its author is a standard reference in the subject.

Answer: A

Both statements are correct and the Reason is the correct explanation of the Assertion, which is the first code.

Follett can be seen as a link between the classical and the behavioural theories because she kept some classical principles, such as the universality of principles, while also stressing the human side, including emotions and group processes. The Reason gives exactly these two features, so it explains the Assertion. The codes that treat either statement as false are wrong, and the second code is wrong since the Reason is the explanation.

Answer: C

The fusion of individual aspirations with organisational goals, of individual skills with organisational position and of individual conduct with organisational role is advocated by Chris Argyris. His work on the fusion process says that the organisation and the individual should reconcile their needs.

Chester Barnard wrote on cooperation and the executive, Rensis Likert on participative management systems, and Kurt Lewin on group dynamics and change. None of them is linked with the fusion process.

Answer: C

The valence-expectancy theory of motivation was propounded by Victor H. Vroom. In his 1964 book on work and motivation he argued that the strength of the urge to act depends on the valence, which is the value placed on an outcome, and on the expectancy that effort will lead to it.

Hersey and Blanchard are known for situational leadership, and Blake and Mouton for the managerial grid. Hobhouse is a sociologist and political thinker, and has no such theory.

Answer: A

Both statements are correct and the Reason is the correct explanation of the Assertion, as the key gives. Drucker's view is that leadership is defined by results and not by personal attributes.

If productivity of work is the responsibility of the manager and not of the worker, then the manager as leader is judged by what the group achieves. This is why the Reason explains the Assertion. The third and fourth codes, which call either one false, are rejected, and the second code is rejected since the Reason links directly to the Assertion.

Answer: A

The statement that organization is the form of every human association for the attainment of a common purpose is by J.D. Mooney. His writings on the principles of organization, with Reiley, define organization in this general way.

L.D. White, John Gaus and Luther Gulick are other writers on public administration, but this definition is not given as theirs, so the other options are rejected.

Answer: A

According to Chester Barnard an organisation is not a leviathan and is an impersonal system of coordinated human effort, so the code is (i) and (iv).

Barnard defined a formal organisation as a system of consciously coordinated activities or forces of two or more persons, and he was not describing the organisation man or the pejorative sense of bureaucracy. So (ii) and (iii), which describe other writers' pictures, are not his view and the codes containing them are wrong.

Answer: C

The correct matching is the classical approach with Henri Fayol (iii), the human relations approach with Elton Mayo (iv), the systems approach with Chester Barnard (i) and the socio-psychological approach with Douglas McGregor (ii). The code is iii, iv, i, ii.

Fayol's administrative principles are classical, Mayo's Hawthorne studies began the human relations school, Barnard saw the organisation as a cooperative system, and McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y rest on psychology. The other codes swap at least two of these.

Answer: A

Taylor called the deliberate under-working of men skiving in the key's wording, the practice usually known as soldiering.

Frederick Taylor observed that workers held back their output on purpose, keeping well below what they could do, partly from fear that higher output would cost jobs and partly because wages did not reward extra effort. He named this restriction of output and treated it as a main evil that scientific management had to remove.

The other options are not names of the phenomenon. Lack of standards of work, unscientific decision making and failure of management to design jobs are, in Taylor's view, causes or conditions around the problem, not the word for workers purposely operating below capacity.