MGT 434 MIDTERM EXAM QUESTIONS WITH VERIFIED SOLUTIONS LATEST UPDATE 2026

MGT 434 MIDTERM EXAM QUESTIONS WITH VERIFIED SOLUTIONS LATEST UPDATE 2026 Human Resource Management - Answers the policies, practices, and systems that influence employees' behavior, attitudes, and performance HR Management Practices - Answers Analysis and design of work HR planning Recruiting Selection Training and development Compensation Performance management Employee relations Competiveness - Answers a company's ability to maintain and gain market share in an industry Shared Service Model - Answers A way to organize the HR function that includes centers of expertise, service centers, and business partners self-service - Answers Giving employees online access to human resources information Outsourcing - Answers An organization's use of an outside organization for a broad set of services evidence-based HR - Answers Demonstrating that human resource practices have a positive influence on the company's bottom line or key stakeholders (employees, customers, community, shareholders) HR or Workforce Analytics - Answers The practice of using data from HR databases and other data sources to make evidence-based human resource decisions Big Data - Answers Information merged from a variety of sources, including HR databases, corporate financial statements, and employee surveys, to make evidence-based HR decisions and show that HR practices can influence the organization's bottom line Sustainability - Answers the ability of a company to make profit without sacrificing the resource of its employees, the community, or the environment. Based on an approach to organizational decision making that considers the long-term impact of strategies on stakeholders Globalization - Answers U.S. businesses must •Develop global markets •Use their practices to improve global competitiveness •Better prepare employees for global assignments Entering International Markets •Exporting products overseas •Building manufacturing facilities or service centers in other countries •Entering into alliances with foreign companies •Engaging in e-commerce Offshoring and Reshoring Technology - Answers Reducing HRM role in administrative tasks, maintaining records, and providing self-service to employees •Shift to self-service gives employees access to many HR issues •HR managers have more time to work on employee issues Stakeholders - Answers the various interest groups who have relationships and, consequently, whose interests are tied to organization intangible assets - Answers A type of company asset including human capital, customer capital, social capital, and intellectual capital knowledge workers - Answers employees who own the intellectual means of producing a product or service empowering - Answers giving employees responsibility and authority to make decisions learning organization - Answers An organization whose employees are continuously attempting to learn new things and apply what they have learned to improve product or service quality change - Answers The adoption of a new idea or behavior by a company employee engagement - Answers the degree to which employees are fully involved in their work and the strength of their job and company commitment Talent Management - Answers Attracting, retaining, developing, and motivating highly skilled employees and managers nontraditional employment - Answers includes the use of independent contractors, freelancers, on-call workers, temporary workers, and contract company workers gig economy - Answers companies who rely primarily on non-traditional employment to meet service and product demands Balanced Scorecard - Answers A means of performance measurement that gives managers a chance to look at their company from the perspectives of internal and external customers, employees, and shareholders social responsibilty - Answers the company's ability to meet its needs without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs Total Quality Management (TQM) - Answers A cooperative form of doing business that relies on the talents and capabilities of both labor and management to continually improve quality and productivity Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award (MBNQA) - Answers an award established in 1987 to promote quality awareness, to recognize quality achievements of US companies, and to publicize successful quality strategies ISO 9000:2015 - Answers a series of quality assurance standards developed by the International Organization for Standardization in Switzerland and adopted worldwide Six Sigma Process - Answers System of measuring, analyzing, improving, and controlling processes once they meet quality standards Lean Thinking - Answers A way to do more with less effort, equipment, space, and time, but still provide customers with what they need and want Internal Labor Force - Answers labor force of current employees External Labor Market - Answers Persons outside the firm who are actively seeking employment Ethics - Answers the fundamental principles of right and wrong by which employees and companies interact Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 - Answers A congressional act passed in response to illegal and unethical behavior by managers and executives. The act sets stricter rules for business especially accounting practices--including requiring more open and consistent disclosure of financial data, CEOs' assurance that the data is completely accurate--and provisions that affect the employee-employer relationship (e.g., development of a code of conduct for senior financial officers). Offshoring - Answers A special case of outsourcing where the jobs that move actually leave one country and go to another. Reshoring - Answers Moving jobs from overseas to the U.S. social networking - Answers Websites and blogs that facilitate interactions between people. artificial intelligence - Answers technology that can think like a human Human resource information system (HRIS) - Answers A system used to acquire, store, manipulate, analyze, retrieve, and distribute HR information HR Dashboard - Answers HR metrics such as productivity and absenteeism that are accessible by employees and managers through the company intranet or human resource information system High-performance work systems - Answers Work systems that maximize the fit between employees and technology. virtual teams - Answers Teams that are separated by time, geographic distance, culture and/or organizational boundaries and rely exclusively on technology for interaction between team members business model - Answers a story of how the firm will create value for customers and how it will do it profitably margins - Answers the difference between what you charge for your product and the variable costs of that product Contribution Margin - Answers what contributes to your ability to cover your fixed costs gross margin - Answers the total amount of margin you made and is calculated as the number of units sold times the contribution margin Strategic Human Resource Management - Answers A pattern of planned human resource deployments and activities intended to enable an organization to achieve its goals strategy formulation - Answers The process of deciding on a strategic direction by defining a company's mission and goals, its external opportunities and threats, and its internal strengths and weaknesses strategy implementation - Answers The process of devising structures and allocating resources to enact the strategy a company has chosen four levels of linkages - Answers Administrative linkage One-way linkage Two-way linkage Integrative linkage Administrative Linkage - Answers the lowest level of interaction HRM functions attention is focused day-to-day activities the company's strategic business planning function exists without any input from the HRM department HRM department is completely divorced from any component of the strategic management process One-way linkage - Answers firms strategic business planning function develops the strategic plan and then informs the HRM function of the plan often leads to strategic plans that the company cannot successfully implement Two-way linkage - Answers allows for consideration of HR issues during the strategy formulation process Steps: 1. strategic planning team informs the HRM function of the various strategies the company is considering 2. HRM executives analyze the human resource implications of the various strategies 3. after decision has been made, the strategic plan is passed on to the HRM executive who develops the plan to implement it interdependent Integrative linkage - Answers dynamic and multifaceted, based on continuing rather than sequential interaction have their HRM functions built in to the strategy formulation and implementation process Goals - Answers What an organization hopes to achieve in the medium- to long-term future External analysis - Answers Examining the organization's operating environment to identify strategic opportunities and threats Internal Analysis - Answers The process of examining an organization's strengths and weaknesses Strategic choice - Answers The organization's strategy; the ways an organization will attempt to fulfill its mission and achieve its long-term goals Job Analysis - Answers the process of getting detailed information about jobs Job Design - Answers the process of defining the way work will be performed and the tasks that will be required in a given job recruitment - Answers the process of seeking applicants for potential employment selection - Answers the process by which the organization attempts to identify applicants with the necessary knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics that will help the organization achieve its goals training - Answers A planned effort to facilitate the learning of job-related knowledge, skills, and behavior by employees. development - Answers the acquisition of knowledge, skills, and behaviors that improve an employee's ability to meet changes in job requirements and in client and customer demands Performance Management - Answers The means through which managers ensure that employees' activities and outputs are congruent with the organization's goals. role behaviors - Answers Behaviors that are required of an individual in his or her role as a jobholder in a social work environment. External Growth Strategy - Answers An emphasis on acquiring vendors and suppliers or buying businesses that allow a company to expand into new markets. Concentration Strategy - Answers A strategy focusing on increasing market share, reducing costs, or creating and maintaining a market niche for products and services. Internal Growth Strategy - Answers A focus on new market and product development, innovation, and joint ventures. mergers and acquisitions - Answers On the increase HR needs to be involved •People issues can cause problems •Different organizational cultures •Conflict resolution Downsizing - Answers the planned elimination of large numbers of personnel with the goal of enhancing the organization's competitiveness Emergent Strategies - Answers •Consist of the strategies that evolve from the grassroots of the organization •Can be thought of as what organizations actually do, as opposed to what they intend to do •Usually identified by those lower in the organizational hierarchy Enhancing Firm Competitiveness - Answers •Develop a human capital pool that gives the company the unique ability to adapt to an ever-changing environment. •Learning organization Work-flow design - Answers the process of analyzing the tasks necessary for the production of a product or service, prior to allocating and assigning these tasks to a particular job category or person •Important in understanding how to bundle tasks into discrete jobs Organization structure - Answers refers to the stable and formal network of vertical and horizontal interconnections among jobs that constitute the organization - Need to understand how jobs at different levels relate Centralization - Answers Degree to which decision-making authority resides at the top of the organizational chart. Departmentalization - Answers degree to which work units are grouped based on functional similarity or similarity of work flow Importance of Job Analysis - Answers •Work redesign •Human resource planning •Selection •Training and development •Performance appraisal •Career planning •Job evaluation job description - Answers a list of the tasks, duties, and responsibilities (TDRs) that a job entails job specification - Answers a list of the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs) that an individual must have to perform the job Lean production - Answers refers to processes developed in Japan, but then adopted worldwide, emphasizing manufacturing goods with a minimum amount of time, materials, money—and most important—people Structural configurations - Answers Functional structure •High levels of centralization •Very efficient with little redundancy Divisional structure •Low levels of centralization •More flexible and innovative •Not efficient