UPHESC Assistant Professor Agricultural Economics 2025 PYQs

Concept: Line managers have command authority; staff specialists advise. Conflict arises from overlapping roles and mistrust.

1. Remedies: clear definition of authority and responsibility, mutual respect, consultation and a congenial (cooperative) organisational climate.
2. Removing staff (B) loses expert advice; giving staff authority over line (D) breaks unity of command.
3. Merely loading responsibility on line managers (C) does not remove the friction.

Short trick: Cooperation, not domination, solves line–staff conflict.

Concept: A skill inventory is a record of each employee's profile used for internal staffing and promotion.

1. Contains: personal data, education, skills, training received, job and salary history, performance, potential and career preferences.
2. The organisation's training schedule is a company-level plan, not information about an employee.

Short trick: Skill inventory = data about people, not about the company's calendar.

Concept: Training is short-term and job-specific (often manual/technical skills for operatives); management development is a long-term process for managers.

1. It develops a broad set of conceptual, human and technical skills — decision making, leadership, communication.
2. Hence it is concerned with multi-skill development, not specific or manual job skills.

Short trick: Training = specific job skill; Development = many skills for the future.

Concept: Managerial Grid (1964) — Robert Blake and Jane Mouton.

1. Two axes, 1–9: concern for production and concern for people; styles such as 1,1 impoverished, 9,1 task, 1,9 country club, 5,5 middle road, 9,9 team management (best).
2. Reddin — 3-D theory of leadership effectiveness; Likert — four systems of management; Mayo — Hawthorne studies.

Short trick: Grid = Blake & Mouton; 9,9 = team management.

Concept: Porter (Competitive Strategy, 1980): the fundamental determinant of a firm's profitability is industry attractiveness, shaped by the five competitive forces.

1. Five forces: rivalry, threat of new entrants, threat of substitutes, bargaining power of buyers and of suppliers.
2. Bargaining power is only one of these forces; economies of scale is an entry barrier.
3. The ‘diamond’ explains national competitive advantage, not a firm's profitability. The second determinant is the firm's relative position within the industry.

Short trick: Profitability = industry attractiveness (5 forces) + competitive position.

Concept: Standard limitations of SWOT (e.g. Hill & Jones / Wheelen–Hunger):

1. Strengths need not translate into competitive advantage.
2. It is a static, one-shot view of a moving target.
3. It may over-emphasise a single dimension of strategy.
4. Its external focus is criticised as too narrow — not too broad and integrative. So (C) is not a limitation as stated.

Short trick: SWOT criticism: static, narrow, single-dimension; never ‘too broad’.

Concept: A portfolio entrepreneur owns and runs several businesses at the same time.

1. Serial entrepreneur — starts businesses one after another.
2. Intrapreneur — acts entrepreneurially as an employee inside an existing organisation.
3. Corporate entrepreneurship — new ventures created by an established company.

Short trick: Portfolio = many at once; serial = one after another.

Concept: A feasibility study tests whether a proposed venture is viable — technically, commercially, financially, legally and organisationally.

1. Its overall purpose is to find out whether there are obstacles that would prevent success before resources are committed.
2. Finding customers and estimating sales are only parts of the market-feasibility component.

Short trick: Feasibility = ‘Can it work, and what could stop it?’

Concept: Policies are general statements that guide thinking and decision making, leaving room for discretion (Koontz).

1. Procedures — chronological sequence of steps for doing a task.
2. Rules — specific required action, no discretion.
3. Projects/programmes — specific one-time plans.

Short trick: Policy guides, procedure sequences, rule commands.

Concept: Schumpeter: the entrepreneur is an innovator who carries out ‘new combinations’.

1. Five types of innovation: new product, new method, new market, new source of supply, new organisation of industry.
2. Invention is creating something new; innovation is putting it to commercial use — the entrepreneur's role.
3. Routine management is not entrepreneurship.

Short trick: Inventor creates; entrepreneur innovates (Schumpeter).