OB Exam 1 Practice Questions

1. According to the Rule of 1/8th:

a) 1/8 of employees are independently motivated regardless of the treatment that they receive from the
organization
b) roughly 1/8 of organizations will implement programs – and stick with them long enough – that they
will increase profits; most organizations don’t understand the value of their employees
c) failing to hire 1/8 of the number of the minority job candidates relative to the number of non-minority
candidates can be evidence of discrimination
d) 1/8 of all employees have moderate to high levels of psychological problems which will be costly to
organizations
e) 1/8 of organizational profits are lost to counterproductive work behaviors by employees each year, and
the number is growing

2. Steve is listening to a lecture in a psychology class. He is most likely to remember what is said if:
a. the lecture includes metaphors about famous historical figures
b. the lecture is structured and organized well
c. the information presented is relevant to him and makes him think of himself
d. the lecture includes slides which feature attractive models wearing relatively little clothing

3. My friend Bob is a huge Steelers fan (he is over 40 and wears a Troy Palamalu jersey).
Before the Super Bowl, he was convinced that his life would be much, much better if the
Steelers won the Super Bowl. Now that the Steelers have won the Super Bowl, his life is no
better. This is because, as humans:
a. we are prone to making errors in the way we make attributions
b. we are self-centered, and events are really only important to us if we are responsible for their occurrence
c. we are poor affective forecasters
d. the success of teams and groups with which we identify are not important to our self-concepts
e. we should never, ever wear a football jersey once we reach the age of 40 unless we are Brett Favre and
we have a big contract with Wrangler jeans

4. Picking a college is a difficult decision. It’s likely that you didn’t consider every possible alternative when
you chose Clemson – because there are simply too many alternatives to critically evaluate every single one.
Rather than maximize, decision makers operate within the confines of __________ i.e., they construct
simplified models that extract essential features from problems without capturing all of their complexity.
a. Bounded rationality or bounded discretion
b. Intuitive decision making
c. Optimal decision making
d. Dyanetics

5. While there hasn’t been any violence yet, it’s obvious that there is a lot of bad blood in the Tues/Thurs
2 P.M. O.B. class. Although no one has really said this aloud yet, it’s pretty clear that the accounting
majors think that the marketing majors second-rate slackers who spend all day trying to design the
perfect commercial when everyone knows that all it takes is a monkey, celebrity, baby or puppy to
sell anything. On the other hand, the marketing folks think that the accountants are math geeks who
need to put away their pocket protectors and stop studying so much. These problems are caused by
________, or judging someone based on the perception of the group to which they belong.
a. stereotyping
b. social construaling
c. projecting, or the mirror image fallacy
d. failure to accurately make attributions
e. pure stupidity
OB Exam 1 Practice Questions

6. According to Lovallo and Kahneman (Delusions of Success), the main reason why new ventures, mergers
and acquisitions, and other new projects frequently fail at such a high rate is _____.
a) A natural consequence of companies taking rational risks in uncertain situations
b) Delusional optimism driven by our desire to maintain a positive self-concept
c) A function of narcissistic leaders
d) A result of cultural factors that suggest we should make projections that will typically be lower than
what we expect to achieve

Answers:
1b, 2c, 3c, 4a, 5a, 6b