NMIMS Assignment Solution - 1st Semester - June 2018

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Business Communication and Etiquette

Q1. Share the organizational grapevine that you have experienced in your career or industry. In your opinion please highlight how grapevine communication is beneficial & detrimental to any organization. (10 Marks)
Q2. To facilitate inter-departmental cooperation, what measures would you recommend to your colleagues and subordinates to take? What kind of barriers in communication do you face and what is your strategy to overcome them? (10 Marks)
Q3. You are the leader in a healthcare industry. You often work closely with your Corporate Communications and PR team so they can ensure a positive brand image for your chain of hospitals.
a. To stay updated and connected with the latest trends in the industry, state and justify your opinion on the importance of boundary spanning? (5 Marks)
b. A recent incident of insensitive patient interaction at your hospital has tarnished your image in the media. What will you do to control the damage and handle the crisis? (5 Marks)

Business Economics

Q1. Demand forecasting is not a speculative exercise into the unknown. It is essentially a reasonable judgement of future probabilities of the market events based on scientific background. Explain the statement by elaborating different qualitative and quantitative methods of demand forecasting. Which of the methods described by you is most suitable for forecasting the demand for "expensive mobile" and why? (10 Marks).
Q2. Which market is characterized by the "competition among few"? how is this market different from the "competition among many"? Explain how the producers in this kind of market promote their own interests by giving real world examples like OPEC, Cement Cartels, etc. (10 Marks)
Q3. A) Explain how the consumer attains utility maximisation and producer ensures cost minimization with the help of indifference curve and isoquant technique. (5 Marks)
Q3. B) "There is a high cross elasticity of demand between new and old cars". Discuss the statement by explaining the features of cross elasticity of demand. Also compare and contrast cross elasticity with other types of elasticities of demand. (5 Marks)

Corporate Social Responsibility

Q1. Sustainability is the current focus of business community globally and businesses worldwide are including sustainability considerations in their strategic business decisions as well as long term plans. Choose any one current and live company, Indian or Multinational and explain how it is implementing any three sustainability actions to reduce their negative environmental footprints and why (refer to the sustainability report of the chosen company) (10 Marks)
Q2. With the introduction of Companies Act 2013 for the first time CSR has been legally acknowledged. Study the section 135, CSR rules as well as Schedule VII of Companies Act 2013. According to you explain 10 logical reasons why in the Companies Act 2013 CSR spend has been made selectively applicable for businesses in our country. (10 Marks)
Q3. "Society is one of the critical stakeholders of business".
a. How does business impact local community positively as well as negatively?
b. With the help of a live example from any company, Indian or Multinational, elaborate how businesses are finding innovative ways to bring benefits to themselves as well as to the local communities in which they operate.
(5 Marks)

Information Systems for Managers

Q1. The Healthcare industry is inundated with massive volumes of data generated each minute. With the adoption of electronic health, mobile health and wearable technologies this is poised to increase dramatically over the next few years. This comprises of data that exists in the form of records, compliance & regulatory requirement. The recent trends demonstrate the transition from maintaining data in hard copies to digital data. As the Chief-Information-Officer (CIO), of a reputed hospital in the city, the management and you are in talks of migrating this data to the cloud. What are the benefits of adopting the cloud and the major challenges that you anticipate to face with regard to cloud adoption? Give justification for adopting the cloud. (10 Marks)
Q2. Information Technology (IT) has become an integral part of the modern supply chains. Explain the concept of Supply Chain and with the help of an example from the retail sector, discuss how Information Systems are helping the organization in improving its supply chain performance. Mention any two future IT trends in supply chain. (10 Marks)
Q3. Digital music is gaining firmer ground in India. 56 percent of digital music revenue in Asia comes from music streaming. Players like Gaana, Hungama, Saavn, Wynk etc. offer users to stream music online and save songs offline with a premium subscription. They have grabbed a significant share of the audience who have given up the traditional methods of downloading music to streaming it online. Advertisers and telecom providers have also joined the bandwagon. The primary reasons for this growing popularity can be attributed to the rise in the number of digital natives, improved internet connectivity, more localized curated song lists, personalization of content, competitive pricing, huge library , availability across different platforms, simple user interface and sharing digital music with others across social platforms. Despite this, the path to profitability is challenged by user ability to willingness to pay for subscription, low advertising prices, and high content costs.
a. How do you think these companies use analytics to lure customers to use their app or convert the existing ones from "freemiums" to "premiums" (the subscription based model)? What are the different type of analytics? Does using analytics benefit the companies? (5 Marks)
b. Define Social Media and explain how these companies use Social Media to increase their business? Is it a wise choice to use social media to connect with customers?
(5 Marks)

Management Theory and Practice

Q1. Explain with examples, what type of leader is Sundar Pichai (CEO Google). What kind of leadership style does he practice? (10 Marks)
Q2. A team leader in an organization wants to take feedback about his leadership from his peers, superiors and subordinates. List the various tools of verbal and non-verbal communication that can be developed for this purpose. (10 Marks)
Q3. Ajay had always been an outstanding performer throughout academia. As expected he also got placed at his dream company. This company offered him lucrative compensation, great fringe benefits, job security and encouraging superiors. Two years have passed by at this company and Ajay no longer has the same thoughts about the job; though all has been the same. Ajay seems to have got bored of his mundane job and salary hikes don’t seem to motivate him anymore. He is on the verge of withdrawing.
a. What according to you is wrong with Ajay. (5 Marks)
b. Discuss Herzberg’s two factory in the light of the case. (5 Marks)

Organisational Behaviour

Q1. What is the role of a leader in motivating his/her subordinates? Explain the impact of leadership styles on subordinates with the help of three different theories of leadership in brief. (10 Marks)
Q2. In a large office an employee named Rozy may feel like a mere payroll number, but her informal group gives her personal attachment and status. With the members of her group she is somebody, even though in the formal structure she is only one of a thousand employees. She may not look forward to monitoring 750 accounts daily, but the informal group gives more meaning to her day. When she thinks of meeting her friends, sharing their interests, and eating with them, her day takes on a new dimension that makes easier any difficulty or tedious routine in her work. Suddenly Rozy developed some interpersonal and intergroup conflicts with some powerful members of the group. The group did not accept her. Her work became more disagreeable and compelled her to a transfer, to absenteeism and to a resignation.
Questions: Although informal groups may lead to several benefits, can these groups prove harmful?. Suggest some measures for Rozy to check the dysfunctions of informal groups? (10 Marks)
Q3. Hari Sinha is a marketing executive with Hardbyte Computer Peripherals Ltd. Hardbyte is a company with 10 years of existence and has a sound product range in computer peripherals. It sells its products at a slightly higher price in the market because of its goodwill for quality. Hari Sinha is one of the best marketing executives of the company and enjoys several company benefits for his excellent performance. Hari's boss Sudhir Pradhan is thoroughly satisfied with his work and likes Hari. Hari likes to sell to institutional buyers rather than small-time domestic customers. Hari also likes to work on challenging customers but not at the cost of wasting too much time on to please them. He constantly keeps himself focused on the targets to be achieved for the month and tries to reach the maximum. For him, it matters to be ahead in the race of selling and therefore he works very hard and smart. Sudhir has always tried to ensure that Hari is given enough scope to explore the potential customers on his own. He of course, feels a little worried about Hari's attitude towards those marketing executives who sell to small customers. He is at times belittling in his attitude towards them and even ridicules their efforts. However, Sudhir has tried to ignore this because of Hari's performance.Due to the recent slack in the IT industry, Hardbyte's business with corporate customers has dipped. Because of this Sudhir, has reallocated the targets to all the marketing executives. However, he knows Hari's fetish for corporate clients too well. But he also knows that Hari will have to be forced to go to small customers for promoting the products. Sudhir, is aware of the fact that Hari is a man of strong likes & dislikes and hence he is in a fix. He is also apprehensive that if Hari is not given an appropriate assignment then he may even consider leaving his job. Sudhir was fully aware that Hari had no dearth of opportunities. Sudhir knows that the dilemma that he is facing is serious and will have to be resolved suitably.
Questions
a) In a rapidly changing global scenario, what is the contribution of Individual Behavior in Organizations from the perspective of attitude, and perception? (5 Marks)
b) How understanding of personality helps in enhancing organization's effectiveness? (5 Marks)