Ch.8 Complete Test Bank Complexity, Learning, And Innovation

CHAPTER 8: Complexity, Learning, and Innovation

MULTIPLE CHOICE

1. For managers, one the most perplexing features of health care organizations is that they frequently exhibit ____ behavior.

PTS: 1

2. ____ is the tendency for interventions to be delayed, diluted, or defeated by the response of the system to the intervention itself.

PTS: 1

3. ____ feedback loops counteract or oppose whatever is happening in a system.

PTS: 1

4. ____ dynamics are a set of concepts and tools developed at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the 1950s to help corporate managers improve executive decision making about industrial processes.

PTS: 1

5. Managers can use “____,” as described by Sterman, to help them understand dynamic complexity and gain insight into sources of policy resistance.

PTS: 1

6. ____ learning is when problem solvers adjust their behavior and work processes in response to changing events or trends.

PTS: 1

7. The ____ effect is the tendency to infer specific characteristics of a person or organization from our overall impressions or feelings about that person or organization.

PTS: 1

8. Through ____, innovators learn about possible action alternatives, outcome preferences, and contextual factors.

PTS: 1

9. ____ is the process of learning about action–outcome relationships through successive experimentation of actions producing desired outcomes.

PTS: 1

10. Three common myths or misconceptions about innovation are that (1) innovation is good, (2) there is a formula, and (3) innovation is ____.

PTS: 1

COMPLETION

1. Management theories reflect the “____________________” of their time.

PTS: 1

2. ____________________ are arrangements of interacting, interdependent parts that produce emergent behavior.

PTS: 1

3. When organizations operate at the edge of chaos, new ideas, products, practices, and relationships can spontaneously emerge that are neither predicted nor anticipated by participants or observers. This is known as the phenomenon of ____________________.

PTS: 1

4. ____________________ involves the acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, instruction, or experience.

PTS: 1

5. Peter Senge’s 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline, described ____________________ as places where “people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning to learn together.”

PTS: 1

6. The noun ____________________ refers to an “idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit adopting it.”

PTS: 1

7. Through ____________________, innovators learn about action–outcome relationships; in particular, they learn through successive experimentation which actions reliably produce desired outcomes.

PTS: 1

8. Investors and top managers who are frequently involved throughout the process of innovation development and often serve a variety of changing and conflicting roles are referred to as ____________________.

PTS: 1

9. Innovation efforts within established organizations require a constant flow of internal “____________________” in the form of human resources, managerial support, and budgetary allocation.

PTS: 1

10. Health care organizations exhibit three characteristics of complex systems: interdependence, nonlinearity, and ____________________.

PTS: 1

MATCHING

Match each item with a statement below:

1. Discipline of constantly surfacing, testing, and improving our assumptions about how the world works

2. Discipline of generating a common answer to the question, “What do we want to create?”

3. Discipline of seeing wholes, perceiving the structures that underlie dynamically complex systems, and identifying high-leverage change opportunities

4. Discipline of creating alignment such that team members think insightfully about complex problems, synergize their knowledge and skills, and produce coordinated action

5. Arises from the number of constituent elements of a system or the number of interrelationships that might exist among them

6. Situation where a complex system’s behavior follows an inherently unpredictable path, but it does so within limits

7. Arises from the operation of feedback loops

8. Simple error-and-correction process whereby problem solvers look for solutions within an organization’s policies, plans, values, and rules

9. Discipline of individual learning, without which organizational learning cannot occur

10. Where problem solvers attempt to close the gap between desired and actual states of affairs by questioning and modifying the organization’s policies, plans, values, and rules