Changing technology and markets have stimulated the team approach to management. Inflation, resource scarcity, reduced personnel levels and budget cuts have all underscored the need for better coordination in organizations. Team management provides for this coordination. Team management calls for new skills if personnel potential is to be fully realized. Although a team maybe composed of knowledgeable people, they must learn new ways of relating and working together to solve cross-functional problems.
When teams consist of experienced employees from hierarchical organizations, who had been conditioned to traditional organizational culture, cooperation may not occur naturally. It may need to be created.
Furthermore, the issue is not just how the team can function more effectively, but how it integrates with the overall organization or society it supposedly serves.
A group of individuals is not automatically a team. Therefore, teambuilding may be necessary in order to improve the group’s performance.
Casey, an expert in this filed, suggests that the cooperation process within teams, must be organized, promoted and managed. He believes that team cooperation results when members go beyond their individual capabilities, beyond what each is used to being and doing. Together, the team may then produce something new, unique, and superior to that of any one member. For this to happen, he suggests that the multicultural managers exhibit understandings of their own and others’ cultural influences and limitations. They should also cultivate such skills as toleration of ambiguity, persistence and patience, as well as assertiveness.
If a team manager exemplifies such qualities, then the team as a whole would be better able to realize their potential and achieve their objectives.
16. What should team members do to fully realize their potential?
17. What needs to be considered for effective team management?
18. What conclusion can we draw from what Casey says?
Passage 2
In early 1994, when Marc Andreessen was just 23 years old, he arrived in Silicon Valley with an idea that would change the world. As a student at the University of Illinois, he and his friends had developed a program called Mosaic, which allowed people to share information on the worldwide web. Before Mosaic, the web had been used mainly by scientists and other technical people, who were happy just to send and receive text. But web Mosaic, Andreessen and his friends, had developed a program, which could send images over the web as well.
Mosaic was an overnight success. It was put on the university’s network at the beginning of 1993, and by the end of the year, it had over a million users. Soon after, Andreessen went to seek his fortune in Silicon Valley. Once he got there, he started to have meetings with the man called Jim Clark, who was one of the valley’s most famous entrepreneurs.
In 1994, nobody was making any real money from the Internet, which was still very slow and hard to use. But Andreessen had seen an opportunity that would make him and Clark rich within 2 years. He suggested, they should create a new computer program that would do the same job as Mosaic, but would be much easier to use. Clark listened carefully to Andreessen, whose ideas and enthusiasm impressed him greatly. Eventually, Clark agreed to invest 3 million dollars of his own money in the project and raised an extra 15 million from venture capitalists who are always keen to listen to Clark’s new ideas.
19. What do we learn about Mosaic?
20. What did Andreessen do upon arriving Silicon Valley?
21. Why would venture capitalists willing to join in Clark’s investment?
Passage3
Advertising informs consumers about the existence and benefits of products and services, and attempts to persuade them to buy them. The best form of advertising is probably word-of-mouth advertising, which occurs when people tell their friends about the benefits of products or services that they have purchased. Yet virtually no providers of goods or services rely on this alone, but use paid advertising instead.
Indeed, many organizations also use institutional or prestige advertising, which is designed to build up their reputation rather than to sell particular products. Although large companies could easily set up their own advertising departments, write their own advertisements, and buy media space themselves, they tend to use the services of large advertising agencies. These are likely to have more resources and more knowledge about all aspects of advertising and advertising media than a single company. It is also easier for a dissatisfied company to give its account to another agency than it would be to fire its own advertising stuff.
The client company generally gives the advertising agency an agreed budget; a statement of the objectives of the advertising campaign, known as a brief; and an overall advertising strategy concerning the message to be communicated to the target customers. The agency creates advertisements and develops a media plan specifying which media will be used and in which proportions. Agencies often produce alternative ads or commercials that are pre-tested in newspapers, television stations, etc. in different parts of a country before a final choice is made prior to a national campaign.
Q22. What is probably the best form of advertising according to the speaker?
Q23. What does the speaker say is the purpose of many organizations using prestige adverting?
Q24. How do large companies generally handle their advertising?
Q25. What will advertising agencies often do before a national campaign?
聽力答案:
Passage 1
16. B) Follow closely the fast development of technology.
17. B) What type of personnel the team should be composed of.
18. D) A team manager should develop a certain set skills.
Passage 2
19. A) It is a program allowing people to share information on the Web.
20. B) He met with an entrepreneur named Jim Clark.
21. B) They had confidence in his new ideas.
Passage3
Q22. A. Word-of-mouth advertising.
Q23. D. To build up their reputation.
Q24. D. By using the services of large advertising agencies.
Q25. C. Pre-test alternative ads or commercials in certain regions.
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