Glossary of Business Jargon

360-DEGREE APPRAISAL	A performance appraisal by peers, subordinates, superiors, and sometimes clients who are in a position to evaluate a manager's performance.
ACHIEVEMENT ORIENTATION	A worldview that values assertiveness, performance, success, and competition.
ADMINISTRATIVE MANAGEMENT	The study of how to create an organizational structure and control system that leads to high efficiency and effectiveness.
ADMINISTRATIVE MODEL	An approach to decision making that explains why decision making is inherently uncertain and risky and why managers usually make satisfactory rather than optimum decisions.
AGREEABLENESS	The tendency to get along well with other people.
AMBIGUOUS INFORMATION	Information that can be interpreted in multiple and often conflicting ways.
APPLICATIONS SOFTWARE	Software designed for a specific task or use.
ARBITRATOR	A third-party negotiator who can impose what he or she thinks is a fair solution to a conflict that both parties are obligated to abide by.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE	Behavior performed by a machine that, if performed by a human being, would be called "intelligent."
ATTITUDE	A collection of feelings and beliefs.
ATTRACTION-SELECTION-ATTRITION (ASA) FRAMEWORK	A model that explains how personality may influence organizational culture.
AUTHORITY	The power to hold people accountable for their actions and to make decisions concerning the use of organizational resources.
B2B MARKETPLACE	An Internet-based trading platform set up to connect buyers and sellers in an industry.
B2B NETWORK STRUCTURE	A series of global strategic alliances that an organization creates with suppliers, manufacturers, and/or distributors to produce and market a product.
BARRIERS TO ENTRY	Factors that make it difficult and costly for an organization to enter a particular task environment or industry.
BEHAVIORAL MANAGEMENT	The study of how managers should behave to motivate employees and encourage them to perform at high levels and be committed to the achievement of organizational goals.
BENCHMARKING	The process of comparing one company's performance on specific dimensions with the performance of other, high-performing organizations.
BOTTOM-UP CHANGE	A gradual or evolutionary approach to change in which managers at all levels work together to develop a detailed plan for change.
BOUNDARY SPANNING	Interacting with individuals and groups outside the organization to obtain valuable information from the environment.
BOUNDARYLESS CAREER	A career that is not attached to or bound to a single organization and consists of a variety of work experiences in multiple organizations.
BOUNDARYLESS ORGANIZATION	An organization whose members are linked by computers, faxes, computer-aided design systems, and video teleconferencing and who rarely, if ever, see one another face-to-face.
BOUNDED RATIONALITY	Cognitive limitations that constrain one's ability to interpret, process, and act on information.
BRAND LOYALTY	Customers' preference for the products of organizations currently existing in the task environment.
BUREAUCRACY	A formal system of organization and administration designed to ensure efficiency and effectiveness.
BUREAUCRATIC CONTROL	Control of behavior by means of a comprehensive system of rules and standard operating procedures.
BUSINESS-LEVEL PLAN	Divisional managers' decisions pertaining to divisions' long-term goals, overall strategy, and structure.
BUSINESS-LEVEL STRATEGY	A plan that indicates how a division intends to compete against its rivals in an industry.
BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS (B2B) COMMERCE	Trade that takes place between companies using IT and the Internet to link and coordinate the value chains of different companies.
BUSINESS-TO-CUSTOMER (B2C) COMMERCE	Trade that takes place between a company and individual customers using IT and the Internet.
CAFETERIA-STYLE BENEFIT PLAN	A plan from which employees can choose the benefits that they want.
CAREER	The sum total of work-related experiences throughout a person's life.
CAREER PLATEAU	A position from which the chances of being promoted or obtaining a more responsible job are slight.
CENTRALIZATION	The concentration of authority at the top of the managerial hierarchy.
CHARISMATIC LEADER	An enthusiastic, self-confident leader who is able to clearly communicate his or her vision of how good things could be.
CLAN CONTROL	The control exerted on individuals and groups in an organization by shared values, norms, standards of behavior, and expectations.
CLASSICAL DECISION-MAKING MODEL	A prescriptive approach to decision making based on the assumption that the decision maker can identify and evaluate all possible alternatives and their consequences and rationally choose the most appropriate course of action.
COERCIVE POWER	The ability of a manager to punish others.
COLLECTIVE BARGAINING	Negotiations between labor unions and managers to resolve conflicts and disputes about issues such as working hours, wages, benefits, working conditions, and job security.
COLLECTIVISM	A worldview that values subordination of the individual to the goals of the group and adherence to the principle that people should be judged by their contribution to the group.
COMMAND GROUP	A group composed of subordinates who report to the same supervisor; also called department or unit.
COMMUNICATION	The sharing of information between two or more individuals or groups to reach a common understanding.
COMMUNICATION NETWORKS	The pathways along which information flows in groups and teams and throughout the organization.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE	The ability of one organization to outperform other organizations because it produces desired goods or services more efficiently and effectively than they do.
COMPETITORS	Organizations that produce goods and services that are similar to a particular organization's goods and services.
CONCENTRATION ON A SINGLE INDUSTRY	Reinvesting a company's profits to strengthen its competitive position in its current industry.
CONCEPTUAL SKILLS	The ability to analyze and diagnose a situation and to distinguish between cause and effect.
CONCURRENT CONTROL	Control that gives managers immediate feedback on how efficiently inputs are being transformed into outputs so that managers can correct problems as they arise.
CONSCIENTIOUSNESS	The tendency to be careful, scrupulous, and persevering.
CONSIDERATION	Behavior indicating that a manager trusts, respects, and cares about subordinates.
CONTINGENCY THEORY	The idea that the organizational structures and control systems managers choose depend on—are contingent on—characteristics of the external environment in which the organization operates.
CONTROL SYSTEMS	Formal target-setting, monitoring, evaluation, and feedback systems that provide managers with information about how well the organization's strategy and structure are working.
CONTROLLING	Evaluating how well an organization is achieving its goals and taking action to maintain or improve performance; one of the four principal tasks of management.
CORE COMPETENCY	The specific set of departmental skills, knowledge, and experience that allows one organization to outperform another.
CORE MEMBERS	The members of a team who bear primary responsibility for the success of a project and who stay with a project from inception to completion.
CORPORATE-LEVEL PLAN	Top management's decisions pertaining to the organization's mission, overall strategy, and structure.
CORPORATE-LEVEL STRATEGY	A plan that indicates in which industries and national markets an organization intends to compete.
CREATIVITY	A decision maker's ability to discover original and novel ideas that lead to feasible alternative courses of action.
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAM	A group of managers brought together from different departments to perform organizational tasks.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT (CRM)	A technique that uses IT to develop an ongoing relationship with customers to maximize the value an organization can deliver to them over time.
CUSTOMERS	Individuals and groups that buy the goods and services that an organization produces.
DATA	Raw, unsummarized, and unanalyzed facts.
DECENTRALIZING AUTHORITY	Giving lower-level managers and nonmanagerial employees the right to make important decisions about how to use organizational resources.
DECISION MAKING	The process by which managers respond to opportunities and threats by analyzing options and making determinations about specific organizational goals and courses of action.
DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM	An interactive computer-based management information system that managers can use to make nonroutine decisions.
DECODING	Interpreting and trying to make sense of a message.
DEFENSIVE APPROACH	Companies and their managers behave ethically to the degree that they stay within the law and abide strictly with legal requirements.
DELPHI TECHNIQUE	A decision-making technique in which group members do not meet face-to-face but respond in writing to questions posed by the group leader.
DEMOGRAPHIC FORCES	Outcomes of changes in, or changing attitudes toward, the characteristics of a population, such as age, gender, ethnic origin, race, sexual orientation, and social class.
DEPARTMENT	A group of people who work together and possess similar skills or use the same knowledge, tools, or techniques to perform their jobs.
DEVELOPMENT	Building the knowledge and skills of organizational members so that they are prepared to take on new responsibilities and challenges.
DEVELOPMENTAL CONSIDERATION	Behavior a leader engages in to support and encourage followers and help them develop and grow on the job.
DEVIL'S ADVOCACY	Critical analysis of a preferred alternative, made in response to challenges raised by a group member who, playing the role of devil's advocate, defends unpopular or opposing alternatives for the sake of argument.
DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY	Distinguishing an organization's products from the products of competitors on dimensions such as product design, quality, or after-sales service.
DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE	A moral principle calling for the distribution of pay raises, promotions, and other organizational resources to be based on meaningful contributions that individuals have made and not on personal characteristics over which they have no control.
DISTRIBUTORS	Organizations that help other organizations sell their goods or services to customers.
DIVERSIFICATION	Expanding a company's business operations into a new industry in order to produce new kinds of valuable goods or services.
DIVERSITY	Differences among people in age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, and capabilities/ disabilities.
DIVISION OF LABOR	Splitting the work to be performed into particular tasks and assigning tasks to individual workers.
DIVISIONAL STRUCTURE	An organizational structure composed of separate business units within which are the functions that work together to produce a specific product for a specific customer.
E-COMMERCE	Trade that takes place between companies, and between companies and individual customers, using IT and the Internet.
ECONOMIC FORCES	Interest rates, inflation, unemployment, economic growth, and other factors that affect the general health and well-being of a nation or the regional economy of an organization.
ECONOMIES OF SCALE	Cost advantages associated with large operations.
EFFECTIVE CAREER MANAGEMENT	Ensuring that at all levels in the organization there are well-qualified workers who can assume more responsible positions as needed.
EFFECTIVENESS	A measure of the appropriateness of the goals an organization is pursuing and of the degree to which the organization achieves those goals.
EFFICIENCY	A measure of how well or how productively resources are used to achieve a goal.
EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE	The ability to understand and manage one's own moods and emotions and the moods and emotions of other people.
EMOTIONS	Intense, relatively short-lived feelings.
EMPLOYEE STOCK OPTION	A financial instrument that entitles the bearer to buy shares of an organization's stock at a certain price during a certain period of time or under certain conditions.
EMPOWERMENT	The expansion of employees' knowledge, tasks, and decision-making responsibilities.
ENCODING	Translating a message into understandable symbols or language.
ENTERPRISE RESOURCE PLANNING (ERP) SYSTEMS	Multimodule application software packages that coordinate the functional activities necessary to move products from the product design stage to the final customer stage.
ENTREPRENEUR	An individual who notices opportunities and decides how to mobilize the resources necessary to produce new and improved goods and services.
ENTREPRENEURSHIP	The mobilization of resources to take advantage of an opportunity to provide customers with new or improved goods and services.
EQUAL EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITY (EEO)	The equal right of all citizens to the opportunity to obtain employment regardless of their gender, age, race, country of origin, religion, or disabilities.
EQUITY	The justice, impartiality, and fairness to which all organizational members are entitled.
EQUITY THEORY	A theory of motivation that focuses on people's perceptions of the fairness of their work outcomes relative to their work inputs.
ETHICAL DILEMMA	The quandary people find themselves in when they have to decide if they should act in a way that might help another person or group even though doing so might go against their own self-interest.
ETHICS	The inner-guiding moral principles, values, and beliefs that people use to analyze or interpret a situation and then decide what is the "right" or appropriate way to behave.
ETHICS OMBUDSMAN	A manager responsible for communicating and teaching ethical standards to all employees and monitoring their conformity to those standards.
EXECUTIVE SUPPORT SYSTEM	A sophisticated version of a decision support system that is designed to meet the needs of top managers.
EXPECTANCY	In expectancy theory, a perception about the extent to which effort results in a certain level of performance.
EXPECTANCY THEORY	The theory that motivation will be high when workers believe that high levels of effort lead to high performance and high performance leads to the attainment of desired outcomes.
EXPERT POWER	Power that is based on the special knowledge, skills, and expertise that a leader possesses.
EXPERT SYSTEM	A management information system that employs human knowledge, embedded in a computer, to solve problems that ordinarily require human expertise.
EXPORTING	Making products at home and selling them abroad.
EXTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL	The tendency to locate responsibility for one's fate in outside forces and to believe that one's own behavior has little impact on outcomes.
EXTINCTION	Curtailing the performance of dysfunctional behaviors by eliminating whatever is reinforcing them.
EXTRAVERSION	The tendency to experience positive emotions and moods and to feel good about oneself and the rest of the world.
EXTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR	Behavior that is performed to acquire material or social rewards or to avoid punishment.
FACILITIES LAYOUT	The strategy of designing the machine-worker interface to increase operating system efficiency.
FEEDBACK CONTROL	Control that gives managers information about customers' reactions to goods and services so that corrective action can be taken if necessary.
FEEDFORWARD CONTROL	Control that allows managers to anticipate problems before they arise.
FILTERING	Withholding part of a message because of the mistaken belief that the receiver does not need or will not want the information.
FIRST-LINE MANAGER	A manager who is responsible for the daily supervision of nonmanagerial employees.
FLEXIBLE MANUFACTURING	The set of techniques that attempt to reduce the costs associated with the product assembly process or the way services are delivered to customers.
FOCUSED DIFFERENTIATION STRATEGY	Serving only one segment of the overall market and trying to be the most differentiated organization serving that segment.
FOCUSED LOW-COST STRATEGY	Serving only one segment of the overall market and trying to be the lowest-cost organization serving that segment.
FOLKWAYS	The routine social conventions of everyday life.
FORMAL APPRAISAL	An appraisal conducted at a set time during the year and based on performance dimensions and measures that were specified in advance.
FORMAL GROUP	A group that managers establish to achieve organizational goals.
FRANCHISING	Selling to a foreign organization the rights to use a brand name and operating know-how in return for a lump-sum payment and a share of the profits.
FREE-TRADE DOCTRINE	The idea that if each country specializes in the production of the goods and services that it can produce most efficiently, this will make the best use of global resources.
FRIENDSHIP GROUP	An informal group composed of employees who enjoy one another's company and socialize with one another.
FUNCTIONAL STRUCTURE	An organizational structure composed of all the departments that an organization requires to produce its goods or services.
FUNCTIONAL-LEVEL PLAN	Functional managers' decisions pertaining to the goals that they propose to pursue to help the division attain its business-level goals.
FUNCTIONAL-LEVEL STRATEGY	A plan of action to improve the ability of each of an organization's functions to perform its task-specific activities in ways that add value to an organization's goods and services.
GATEKEEPING	Deciding what information to allow into the organization and what information to keep out.
GENERAL ENVIRONMENT	The wide-ranging global, economic, technological, sociocultural, demographic, political, and legal forces that affect an organization and its task environment.
GEOGRAPHIC STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which each region of a country or area of the world is served by a self-contained division.
GLASS CEILING	A metaphor alluding to the invisible barriers that prevent minorities and women from being promoted to top corporate positions.
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT	The set of global forces and conditions that operate beyond an organization's boundaries but affect a manager's ability to acquire and utilize resources.
GLOBAL ORGANIZATION	An organization that operates and competes in more than one country.
GLOBAL OUTSOURCING	The purchase of inputs from overseas suppliers or the production of inputs abroad to lower production costs and improve product quality or design.
GLOBAL STRATEGY	Selling the same standardized product and using the same basic marketing approach in each national market.
GLOBALIZATION	The set of specific and general forces that work together to integrate and connect economic, political, and social systems across countries, cultures, or geographical regions so that nations become increasingly interdependent and similar.
GOAL-SETTING THEORY	A theory that focuses on identifying the types of goals that are most effective in producing high levels of motivation and performance and explaining why goals have these effects.
GROUP	Two or more people who interact with each other to accomplish certain goals or meet certain needs.
GROUP COHESIVENESS	The degree to which members are attracted to or loyal to their group.
GROUP DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM	An executive support system that links top managers so that they can function as a team.
GROUP NORMS	Shared guidelines or rules for behavior that most group members follow.
GROUP ROLE	A set of behaviors and tasks that a member of a group is expected to perform because of his or her position in the group.
GROUPTHINK	A pattern of faulty and biased decision making that occurs in groups whose members strive for agreement among themselves at the expense of accurately assessing information relevant to a decision.
GROUPWARE	Computer software that enables members of groups and teams to share information with one another.
HAWTHORNE EFFECT	The finding that a manager's behavior or leadership approach can affect workers' level of performance.
HERZBERG'S MOTIVATOR-HYGIENE THEORY	A need theory that distinguishes between motivator needs (related to the nature of the work itself) and hygiene needs (related to the physical and psychological context in which the work is performed) and proposes that motivator needs must be met for motivation and job satisfaction to be high.
HIERARCHY OF AUTHORITY	An organization's chain of command, specifying the relative authority of each manager.
HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT SEXUAL HARASSMENT	Telling lewd jokes, displaying pornography, making sexually oriented remarks about someone's personal appearance, and other sex-related actions that make the work environment unpleasant.
HUMAN RELATIONS MOVEMENT	A management approach that advocates the idea that supervisors should receive behavioral training to manage subordinates in ways that elicit their cooperation and increase their productivity.
HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT (HRM)	Activities that managers engage in to attract and retain employees and to ensure that they perform at a high level and contribute to the accomplishment of organizational goals.
HUMAN RESOURCE PLANNING	Activities that managers engage in to forecast their current and future needs for human resources.
HUMAN SKILLS	The ability to understand, alter, lead, and control the behavior of other individuals and groups.
HYBRID STRUCTURE	The structure of a large organization that has many divisions and simultaneously uses many different organizational structures.
HYPERCOMPETITION	Permanent, ongoing, intense competition brought about in an industry by advancing technology or changing customer tastes.
ILLUSION OF CONTROL	A source of cognitive bias resulting from the tendency to overestimate one's own ability to control activities and events.
IMPORTING	Selling products at home that are made abroad.
INCREMENTAL PRODUCT INNOVATION	The gradual improvement and refinement to existing products that occurs over time as existing technologies are perfected.
INDIVIDUAL ETHICS	Personal standards and values that determine how people view their responsibilities to others and how they should act in situations when their own self-interests are at stake.
INDIVIDUALISM	A worldview that values individual freedom and self-expression and adherence to the principle that people should be judged by their individual achievements rather than by their social background.
INEQUITY	Lack of fairness.
INFORMAL APPRAISAL	An unscheduled appraisal of ongoing progress and areas for improvement.
INFORMAL GROUP	A group that managers or nonmanagerial employees form to help achieve their own goals or meet their own needs.
INFORMAL ORGANIZATION	The system of behavioral rules and norms that emerge in a group.
INFORMATION	Data that are organized in a meaningful fashion.
INFORMATION DISTORTION	Changes in the meaning of a message as the message passes through a series of senders and receivers.
INFORMATION OVERLOAD	The potential for important information to be ignored or overlooked while tangential information receives attention.
INFORMATION RICHNESS	The amount of information that a communication medium can carry and the extent to which the medium enables the sender and receiver to reach a common understanding.
INFORMATION SYSTEM	A system for acquiring, organizing, storing, manipulating, and transmitting information.
INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY	The set of methods or techniques for acquiring, organizing, storing, manipulating, and transmitting information.
INITIATING STRUCTURE	Behavior that managers engage in to ensure that work gets done, subordinates perform their jobs acceptably, and the organization is efficient and effective.
INITIATIVE	The ability to act on one's own, without direction from a superior.
INNOVATION	The process of creating new or improved goods and services or developing better ways to produce or provide them.
INPUT	Anything a person contributes to his or her job or organization.
INSTRUMENTAL VALUE	A mode of conduct that an individual seeks to follow.
INSTRUMENTALITY	In expectancy theory, a perception about the extent to which performance results in the attainment of outcomes.
INTEGRATING MECHANISMS	Organizing tools that managers can use to increase communication and coordination among functions and divisions.
INTELLECTUAL STIMULATION	Behavior a leader engages in to make followers be aware of problems and view these problems in new ways, consistent with the leader's vision.
INTEREST GROUP	An informal group composed of employees seeking to achieve a common goal related to their membership in an organization.
INTERNAL LOCUS OF CONTROL	The tendency to locate responsibility for one's fate within oneself.
INTERNET	A global system of computer networks.
INTRANET	A companywide system of computer networks.
INTRAPRENEUR	A manager, scientist, or researcher who works inside an organization and notices opportunities to develop new or improved products and better ways to make them.
INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR	Behavior that is performed for its own sake.
INTUITION	Feelings, beliefs, and hunches that come readily to mind, require little effort and information gathering, and result in on-the-spot decisions.
INVENTORY	The stock of raw materials, inputs, and component parts that an organization has on hand at a particular time.
JARGON	Specialized language that members of an occupation, group, or organization develop to facilitate communication among themselves.
JOB ANALYSIS	Identifying the tasks, duties, and responsibilities that make up a job and the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to perform the job.
JOB DESIGN	The process by which managers decide how to divide tasks into specific jobs.
JOB ENLARGEMENT	Increasing the number of different tasks in a given job by changing the division of labor.
JOB ENRICHMENT	Increasing the degree of responsibility a worker has over his or her job.
JOB SATISFACTION	The collection of feelings and beliefs that managers have about their current jobs.
JOB SIMPLIFICATION	The process of reducing the number of tasks that each worker performs.
JOB SPECIALIZATION	The process by which a division of labor occurs as different workers specialize in different tasks over time.
JOINT VENTURE	A strategic alliance among two or more companies that agree to jointly establish and share the ownership of a new business.
JUSTICE RULE	An ethical decision is a decision that distributes benefits and harms among people and groups in a fair, equitable, or impartial way.
JUST-IN-TIME (JIT) INVENTORY SYSTEM	A system in which parts or supplies arrive at an organization when they are needed, not before.
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM	A company-specific virtual information system that systematizes the knowledge of its employees and facilitates the sharing and integrating of their expertise.
LABOR RELATIONS	The activities that managers engage in to ensure that they have effective working relationships with the labor unions that represent their employees' interests.
LATERAL MOVE	A job change that entails no major changes in responsibility or authority levels.
LEADER	An individual who is able to exert influence over other people to help achieve group or organizational goals.
LEADER–MEMBER RELATIONS	The extent to which followers like, trust, and are loyal to their leader; a determinant of how favorable a situation is for leading.
LEADERSHIP	The process by which an individual exerts influence over other people and inspires, motivates, and directs their activities to help achieve group or organizational goals.
LEADERSHIP SUBSTITUTE	A characteristic of a subordinate or of a situation or context that acts in place of the influence of a leader and makes leadership unnecessary.
LEADING	Articulating a clear vision and energizing and enabling organizational members so that they understand the part they play in achieving organizational goals; one of the four principal tasks of management.
LEARNING	A relatively permanent change in knowledge or behavior that results from practice or experience.
LEARNING ORGANIZATION	An organization in which managers try to maximize the ability of individuals and groups to think and behave creatively and thus maximize the potential for organizational learning to take place.
LEARNING THEORIES	Theories that focus on increasing employee motivation and performance by linking the outcomes that employees receive to the performance of desired behaviors and the attainment of goals.
LEGITIMATE POWER	The authority that a manager has by virtue of his or her position in an organization's hierarchy.
LICENSING	Allowing a foreign organization to take charge of manufacturing and distributing a product in its country or world region in return for a negotiated fee.
LINE MANAGER	Someone in the direct line or chain of command who has formal authority over people and resources at lower levels.
LINE OF AUTHORITY	The chain of command extending from the top to the bottom of an organization.
LINEAR CAREER	A career consisting of a sequence of jobs in which each new job entails additional responsibility, a greater impact on an organization, new skills, and upward movement in an organization's hierarchy.
LONG-TERM ORIENTATION	A worldview that values thrift and persistence in achieving goals.
LOW-COST STRATEGY	Driving the organization's costs down below the costs of its rivals.
MANAGEMENT	The planning, organizing, leading, and controlling of human and other resources to achieve organizational goals efficiently and effectively.
MANAGEMENT BY OBJECTIVES (MBO)	A goal-setting process in which a manager and each of his or her subordinates negotiate specific goals and objectives for the subordinate to achieve and then periodically evaluate the extent to which the subordinate is achieving those goals.
MANAGEMENT BY WANDERING AROUND	A face-to-face communication technique in which a manager walks around a work area and talks informally with employees about issues and concerns.
MANAGEMENT INFORMATION SYSTEM (MIS)	A specific form of IT that managers utilize to generate the specific, detailed information they need to perform their roles effectively.
MARKET STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which each kind of customer is served by a self-contained division; also called customer structure.
MASLOW'S HIERARCHY OF NEEDS	An arrangement of five basic needs that, according to Maslow, motivate behavior. Maslow proposed that the lowest level of unmet needs is the prime motivator and that only one level of needs is motivational at a time.
MATRIX STRUCTURE	An organizational structure that simultaneously groups people and resources by function and by product.
MECHANISTIC STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which authority is centralized, tasks and rules are clearly specified, and employees are closely supervised.
MEDIUM	The pathway through which an encoded message is transmitted to a receiver.
MENTORING	A process by which an experienced member of an organization (the mentor) provides advice and guidance to a less experienced member (the protégé) and helps the less experienced member learn how to advance in the organization and in his or her career.
MERIT PAY PLAN	A compensation plan that bases pay on performance.
MESSAGE	The information that a sender wants to share.
MIDDLE MANAGER	A manager who supervises first-line managers and is responsible for finding the best way to use resources to achieve organizational goals.
MISSION STATEMENT	A broad declaration of an organization's purpose that identifies the organization's products and customers and distinguishes the organization from its competitors.
MOOD	A feeling or state of mind.
MORAL RIGHTS RULE	An ethical decision is one that best maintains and protects the fundamental or inalienable rights and privileges of the people affected by it.
MORES	Norms that are considered to be central to the functioning of society and to social life.
MOTIVATION	Psychological forces that determine the direction of a person's behavior in an organization, a person's level of effort, and a person's level of persistence.
MULTIDOMESTIC STRATEGY	Customizing products and marketing strategies to specific national conditions.
NATIONAL CULTURE	The set of values that a society considers important and the norms of behavior that are approved or sanctioned in that society.
NEED	A requirement or necessity for survival and well-being.
NEED FOR ACHIEVEMENT	The extent to which an individual has a strong desire to perform challenging tasks well and to meet personal standards for excellence.
NEED FOR AFFILIATION	The extent to which an individual is concerned about establishing and maintaining good interpersonal relations, being liked, and having other people get along.
NEED FOR POWER	The extent to which an individual desires to control or influence others.
NEED THEORIES	Theories of motivation that focus on what needs people are trying to satisfy at work and what outcomes will satisfy those needs.
NEEDS ASSESSMENT	An assessment of which employees need training or development and what type of skills or knowledge they need to acquire.
NEGATIVE AFFECTIVITY	The tendency to experience negative emotions and moods, to feel distressed, and to be critical of oneself and others.
NEGATIVE REINFORCEMENT	Eliminating or removing undesired outcomes when people perform organizationally functional behaviors.
NETWORK STRUCTURE	A series of strategic alliances that an organization creates with suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors to produce and market a product.
NETWORKING	The exchange of information through a group or network of interlinked computers.
NOISE	Anything that hampers any stage of the communication process.
NOMINAL GROUP TECHNIQUE	A decision-making technique in which group members write down ideas and solutions, read their suggestions to the whole group, and discuss and then rank the alternatives.
NONPROGRAMMED DECISION MAKING	Nonroutine decision making that occurs in response to unusual, unpredictable opportunities and threats.
NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION	The encoding of messages by means of facial expressions, body language, and styles of dress.
NORMS	Unwritten, informal codes of conduct that prescribe how people should act in particular situations and are considered important by most members of a group or organization.
NURTURING ORIENTATION	A worldview that values the quality of life, warm personal friendships, and services and care for the weak.
OBJECTIVE APPRAISAL	An appraisal that is based on facts and is likely to be numerical.
OCCUPATIONAL ETHICS	Standards that govern how members of a profession, trade, or craft should conduct themselves when performing work-related activities.
ON-THE-JOB TRAINING	Training that takes place in the work setting as employees perform their job tasks.
OPENNESS TO EXPERIENCE	The tendency to be original, have broad interests, be open to a wide range of stimuli, be daring, and take risks.
OPERANT CONDITIONING THEORY	The theory that people learn to perform behaviors that lead to desired consequences and learn not to perform behaviors that lead to undesired consequences.
OPERATING BUDGET	A budget that states how managers intend to use organizational resources to achieve organizational goals.
OPERATING SYSTEM SOFTWARE	Software that tells computer hardware how to run.
OPERATIONS INFORMATION SYSTEM	A management information system that gathers, organizes, and summarizes comprehensive data in a form that managers can use in their nonroutine coordinating, controlling, and decision-making tasks
OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT	The management of any aspect of the production system that transforms inputs into finished goods and services.
OPERATIONS MANAGER	A manager who is responsible for managing an organization's production system and for determining where operating improvements might be made.
OPTIMUM DECISION	The most appropriate decision in light of what managers believe to be the most desirable future consequences for the organization.
ORDER	The methodical arrangement of positions to provide the organization with the greatest benefit and to provide employees with career opportunities.
ORGANIC STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which authority is decentralized to middle and first-line managers and tasks and roles are left ambiguous to encourage employees to cooperate and respond quickly to the unexpected.
ORGANIZATION	Collection of people who work together and coordinate their actions to achieve a wide variety of goals or desired future outcomes.
ORGANIZATION CHANGE	The movement of an organization away from its present state and toward some desired future state to increase its efficiency and effectiveness.
ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR MODIFICATION (OB MOD)	The systematic application of operant conditioning techniques to promote the performance of organizationally functional behaviors and discourage the performance of dysfunctional behaviors.
ORGANIZATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIORS (OCBS)	Behaviors that are not required of organizational members but that contribute to and are necessary for organizational efficiency, effectiveness, and competitive advantage.
ORGANIZATIONAL COMMITMENT	The collection of feelings and beliefs that managers have about their organization as a whole.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE	The shared set of beliefs, expectations, values, norms, and work routines that influence the ways in which individuals, groups, and teams interact with one another and cooperate to achieve organizational goals.
ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN	The process by which managers make specific organizing choices that result in a particular kind of organizational structure.
ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENT	The set of forces and conditions that operate beyond an organization's boundaries but affect a manager's ability to acquire and utilize resources.
ORGANIZATIONAL ETHICS	The guiding practices and beliefs through which a particular company and its managers view their responsibility toward their stakeholders.
ORGANIZATIONAL LEARNING	The process through which managers seek to improve employees' desire and ability to understand and manage the organization and its task environment.
ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE	A measure of how efficiently and effectively a manager uses resources to satisfy customers and achieve organizational goals.
ORGANIZATIONAL SOCIALIZATION	The process by which newcomers learn an organization's values and norms and acquire the work behaviors necessary to perform jobs effectively.
ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE	A formal system of task and reporting relationships that coordinates and motivates organizational members so that they work together to achieve organizational goals.
ORGANIZING	Structuring working relationships in a way that allows organizational members to work together to achieve organizational goals; one of the four principal tasks of management.
OUTCOME	Anything a person gets from a job or organization.
OUTSOURCE	To use outside suppliers and manufacturers to produce goods and services.
OUTSOURCING	Contracting with another company, usually abroad, to have it perform an activity the organization previously performed itself.
OVERPAYMENT INEQUITY	The inequity that exists when a person perceives that his or her own outcome-input ratio is greater than the ratio of a referent.
PATH-GOAL THEORY	A contingency model of leadership proposing that leaders can motivate subordinates by identifying their desired outcomes, rewarding them for high performance and the attainment of work goals with these desired outcomes, and clarifying for them the paths leading to the attainment of work goals.
PAY LEVEL	The relative position of an organization's pay incentives in comparison with those of other organizations in the same industry employing similar kinds or workers.
PAY STRUCTURE	The arrangement of jobs into categories reflecting their relative importance to the organization and its goals, levels of skill required, and other characteristics.
PERCEPTION	The process through which people select, organize, and interpret what they see, hear, touch, smell, and taste to give meaning and order to the world around them.
PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL	The evaluation of employees' job performance and contributions to their organization.
PERFORMANCE FEEDBACK	The process through which mangers share performance appraisal information with subordinates, give subordinates an opportunity to reflect on their own performance, and develop, with subordinates, plans for the future.
PERSONALITY TRAITS	Enduring tendencies to feel, think, and act in certain ways.
PLANNING	Identifying and selecting appropriate goals and courses of action; one of the four principal tasks of management.
POLITICAL AND LEGAL FORCES	Outcomes of changes in laws and regulations, such as the deregulation of industries, the privatization of organizations, and the increased emphasis on environmental protection.
POOLED TASK INTERDEPENDENCE	The task interdependence that exists when group members make separate and independent contributions to group performance.
POSITION POWER	The amount of legitimate, reward, and coercive power that a leader has by virtue of his or her position in an organization; a determinant of how favorable a situation is for leading.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT	Giving people outcomes they desire when they perform organizationally functional behaviors.
POTENTIAL COMPETITORS	Organizations that presently are not in a task environment but could enter if they so choose.
POWER DISTANCE	The degree to which societies accept the idea that inequalities in the power and well-being of their citizens are due to differences in individuals' physical and intellectual capabilities and heritage.
PRACTICAL RULE	An ethical decision is one that a manager has no reluctance about communicating to people outside the company because the typical person in a society would think it is acceptable.
PROACTIVE APPROACH	Companies and their managers actively embrace socially responsible behavior, going out of their way to learn about the needs of different stakeholder groups and utilizing organizational resources to promote the interests of all stakeholders.
PROCEDURAL JUSTICE	A moral principle calling for the use of fair procedures to determine how to distribute outcomes to organizational members.
PROCESS REENGINEERING	The fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvement in critical measures of performance such as cost, quality, service, and speed.
PRODUCT CHAMPION	A manager who takes "ownership" of a project and provides the leadership and vision that take a product from the idea stage to the final customer.
PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT	The management of the value-chain activities involved in bringing new or improved goods and services to the market.
PRODUCT LIFE CYCLE	The way demand for a product changes in a predictable pattern over time.
PRODUCT STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which each product line or business is handled by a self-contained division.
PRODUCT TEAM STRUCTURE	An organizational structure in which employees are permanently assigned to a cross-functional team and report only to the product team manager or to one of his or her direct subordinates.
PRODUCTION BLOCKING	A loss of productivity in brainstorming sessions due to the unstructured nature of brainstorming.
PRODUCTION SYSTEM	The system that an organization uses to acquire inputs, convert the inputs into outputs, and dispose of the outputs.
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS	Standards that govern how members of a profession are to make decisions when the way they should behave is not clear-cut.
PROGRAMMED DECISION MAKING	Routine, virtually automatic decision making that follows established rules or guidelines.
PROSOCIALLY MOTIVATED BEHAVIOR	Behavior that is performed to benefit or help others.
PUNISHMENT	Administering an undesired or negative consequence when dysfunctional behavior occurs.
QUID PRO QUO SEXUAL HARASSMENT	Asking for or forcing an employee to perform sexual favors in exchange for receiving some reward or avoiding negative consequences.
REALISTIC JOB PREVIEW (RJP)	An honest assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of a job and organization.
REAL-TIME INFORMATION	Frequently updated information that reflects current conditions.
REASONED JUDGMENT	A decision that takes time and effort to make and results from careful information gathering, generation of alternatives, and evaluation of alternatives.
RECEIVER	The person or group for which a message is intended.
RECIPROCAL TASK INTERDEPENDENCE	The task interdependence that exists when the work performed by each group member is fully dependent on the work performed by other group members.
RECRUITMENT	Activities that managers engage in to develop a pool of qualified candidates for open positions.
REFERENT POWER	Power that comes from subordinates' and coworkers' respect, admiration, and loyalty.
RELATED DIVERSIFICATION	Entering a new business or industry to create a competitive advantage in one or more of an organization's existing divisions or businesses.
RELATIONSHIP-ORIENTED LEADERS	Leaders whose primary concern is to develop good relationships with their subordinates and to be liked by them.
RELIABILITY	The degree to which a tool or test measures the same thing each time it is used.
REPUTATION	The esteem or high repute that individuals or organizations gain when they behave ethically.
RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT TEAM	A team whose members have the expertise and experience needed to develop new products.
RESTRUCTURING	Downsizing an organization by eliminating the jobs of large numbers of top, middle, and first-line managers and nonmanagerial employees.
REWARD POWER	The ability of a manager to give or withhold tangible and intangible rewards.
RISK	The degree of probability that the possible outcomes of a particular course of action will occur.
ROLE MAKING	Taking the initiative to modify an assigned role by assuming additional responsibilities.
RULES	Formal written instructions that specify actions to be taken under different circumstances to achieve specific goals.
SATISFICING	Searching for and choosing an acceptable, or satisfactory, response to problems and opportunities, rather than trying to make the best decision.
SCIENTIFIC MANAGEMENT	The systematic study of relationships between people and tasks for the purpose of redesigning the work process to increase efficiency.
SELECTION	The process that mangers use to determine the relative qualifications of job applicants and their potential for performing well in a particular job.
SELF-EFFICACY	A person's belief about his or her ability to perform a behavior successfully.
SELF-ESTEEM	The degree to which individuals feel good about themselves and their capabilities.
SELF-MANAGED TEAM	A group of employees who assume responsibility for organizing, controlling, and supervising their own activities and monitoring the quality of the goods and services they provide.
SELF-MANAGED WORK TEAM	A group of employees who supervise their own activities and monitor the quality of the goods and services they provide.
SELF-REINFORCER	Any desired or attractive outcome or reward that a person gives to himself or herself for good performance.
SENDER	The person or group wishing to share information.
SEQUENTIAL TASK INTERDEPENDENCE	The task interdependence that exists when group members must perform specific tasks in a predetermined order.
SERVANT LEADER	A leader who has a strong desire to serve and work for the benefit of others.
SHORT-TERM ORIENTATION	A worldview that values personal stability or happiness and living for the present.
SKUNKWORKS	A group of intrapreneurs who are deliberately separated from the normal operation of an organization to encourage them to devote all their attention to developing new products.
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEUR	An individual who pursues initiatives and opportunities and mobilizes resources to address social problems and needs in order to improve society and well-being through creative solutions.
SOCIAL LEARNING THEORY	A theory that takes into account how learning and motivation are influenced by people's thoughts and beliefs and their observations of other people's behavior.
SOCIAL LOAFING	The tendency of individuals to put forth less effort when they work in groups than when they work alone.
SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY	The way a company's managers and employees view their duty or obligation to make decisions that protect, enhance, and promote the welfare and well-being of stakeholders and society as a whole.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE	The arrangement of relationships between individuals and groups in a society.
SOCIETAL ETHICS	Standards that govern how members of a society should deal with one another in matters involving issues such as fairness, justice, poverty, and the rights of the individual.
SOCIOCULTURAL FORCES	Pressures emanating from the social structure of a country or society or from the national culture.
SPAN OF CONTROL	The number of subordinates who report directly to a manager.
SPIRAL CAREER	A career consisting of a series of jobs that build on each other but tend to be fundamentally different.
STAFF MANAGER	Someone responsible for managing a specialist function, such as finance or marketing.
STAKEHOLDERS	The people and groups that supply a company with its productive resources and so have a claim on and stake in the company.
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES (SOPS)	Specific sets of written instructions about how to perform a certain aspect of a task.
STEADY-STATE CAREER	A career consisting of the same kind of job during a large part of an individual's work life.
STEREOTYPE	Simplistic and often inaccurate beliefs about the typical characteristics of particular groups of people.
STRATEGIC ALLIANCE	An agreement in which managers pool or share their organization's resources and know-how with a foreign company, and the two organizations share the rewards and risks of starting a new venture.
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT	The process by which managers design the components of an HRM system to be consistent with each other, with other elements of organizational architecture, and with the organization's strategy and goals.
STRATEGIC LEADERSHIP	The ability of the CEO and top managers to convey a compelling vision of what they want the organization to achieve to their subordinates.
STRATEGY	A cluster of decisions about what goals to pursue, what actions to take, and how to use resources to achieve goals.
STRATEGY FORMULATION	The development of a set of corporate-, business-, and functional-level strategies that allow an organization to accomplish its mission and achieve its goals.
SUBJECTIVE APPRAISAL	An appraisal that is based on perceptions of traits, behaviors, or results.
SUPPLIERS	Individuals and organizations that provide an organization with the input resources that it needs to produce goods and services.
SWOT ANALYSIS	A planning exercise in which managers identify organizational strengths (S) and weaknesses (W) and environmental opportunities (O) and threats (T).
SYNERGY	Performance gains that result when individuals and departments coordinate their actions.
TARIFF	A tax that a government imposes on imported or, occasionally, exported goods.
TASK ENVIRONMENT	The set of forces and conditions that originate with suppliers, distributors, customers, and competitors and affect an organization's ability to obtain inputs and dispose of its outputs because they influence managers on a daily basis.
TASK FORCE	A committee of managers or nonmanagerial employees from various departments or divisions who meet to solve a specific, mutual problem; also called ad hoc committee.
TASK FORCE	A committee of managers from various functions or divisions who meet to solve a specific, mutual problem; also called ad hoc committee.
TASK INTERDEPENDENCE	The degree to which the work performed by one member of a group influences the work performed by other members.
TASK STRUCTURE	The extent to which the work to be performed is clear-cut so that a leader's subordinates know what needs to be accomplished and how to go about doing it; a determinant of how favorable a situation is for leading.
TASK-ORIENTED LEADERS	Leaders whose primary concern is to ensure that subordinates perform at a high level.
TEAM	A group whose members work intensely with one another to achieve a specific common goal or objective.
TECHNICAL SKILLS	The job-specific knowledge and techniques required to perform an organizational role.
TECHNOLOGICAL FORCES	Outcomes of changes in the technology that managers use to design, produce, or distribute goods and services.
TECHNOLOGY	The combination of skills and equipment that managers use in the design, production, and distribution of goods and services.
TERMINAL VALUE	A lifelong goal or objective that an individual seeks to achieve.
THEORY X	A set of negative assumptions about workers that lead to the conclusion that a manager's task is to supervise workers closely and control their behavior.
THEORY Y	A set of positive assumptions about workers that lead to the conclusion that a manager's task is to create a work setting that encourages commitment to organizational goals and provides opportunities for workers to be imaginative and to exercise initiative and self-direction.
TIME HORIZON	The intended duration of a plan.
TOP MANAGER	A manager who establishes organizational goals, decides how departments should interact, and monitors the performance of middle managers.
TOP-DOWN CHANGE	A fast, revolutionary approach to change in which top managers identify what needs to be changed and then move quickly to implement the changes throughout the organization.
TOP-MANAGEMENT TEAM	A group composed of the CEO, the COO, the president, and the heads of the most important departments.
TRAINING	Teaching organizational members how to perform their current jobs and helping them acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be effective performers.
TRANSACTIONAL LEADERSHIP	Leadership that motivates subordinates by rewarding them for high performance and reprimanding them for low performance.
TRANSACTION-PROCESSING SYSTEM	A management information system designed to handle large volumes of routine, recurring transactions.
TRANSFORMATIONAL LEADERSHIP	Leadership that makes subordinates aware of the importance of their jobs and performance to the organization and aware of their own needs for personal growth and that motivates subordinates to work for the good of the organization.
TRANSITORY CAREER	A career in which a person changes jobs frequently and in which each job is different from the one that precedes it.
TRUST	The willingness of one person or group to have faith or confidence in the goodwill of another person, even though this puts them at risk.
TURNAROUND MANAGEMENT	The creation of a new vision for a struggling company based on a new approach to planning and organizing to make better use of a company's resources to allow it to survive and prosper.
UNCERTAINTY	Unpredictability.
UNCERTAINTY AVOIDANCE	The degree to which societies are willing to tolerate uncertainty and risk.
UNDERPAYMENT INEQUITY	The inequity that exists when a person perceives that his or her own outcome-input ratio is less than the ratio of a referent.
UNRELATED DIVERSIFICATION	Entering a new industry or buying a company in a new industry that is not related in any way to an organization's current businesses or industries.
UTILITARIAN RULE	An ethical decision is a decision that produces the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
VALENCE	In expectancy theory, how desirable each of the outcomes available from a job or organization is to a person.
VALIDITY	The degree to which a tool or test measures what it purports to measure.
VALUE CHAIN	The coordinated series or sequence of functional activities necessary to transform inputs such as new product concepts, raw materials, component parts, or professional skills into the finished goods or services customers value and want to buy.
VALUE SYSTEM	The terminal and instrumental values that are guiding principles in an individual's life.
VALUES	Ideas about what a society believes to be good, right, desirable, or beautiful.
VERBAL COMMUNICATION	The encoding of messages into words, either written or spoken.
VERTICAL INTEGRATION	Expanding a company's operations either backward into an industry that produces inputs for its products or forward into an industry that uses, distributes, or sells its products.
VICARIOUS LEARNING	Learning that occurs when the learner becomes motivated to perform a behavior by watching another person perform it and be reinforced for doing so; also called observational learning.
VIRTUAL TEAM	A team whose members rarely or never meet face-to-face but, rather, interact by using various forms of information technology such as e-mail, computer networks, telephone, fax, and videoconferences.
WHOLLY OWNED FOREIGN SUBSIDIARY	Production operations established in a foreign country independent of any local direct involvement.