FIA ACCA

ANSWERS
22.5 C Rationale: A mobile phone enables both colleagues and customers to reach you when you are out
of the office. It also enables you to call the office eg to check inventory availability of items, place
immediate orders and so on. (If you had a laptop, this would be even better: you could have
direct connection with office systems.) Options A and B all involve linked computer systems, so
are not relevant.
22.6 A Rationale: Security is a key vulnerability of e-mail: there is no guarantee of privacy (and a risk of
accidentally sending the message to the wrong person). The other options are significant
strengths, however. If you hesitated over D, think about how e-mail can be used for
memos/reports/letters, and how many formats (visual, audio) can be ‘attached’ to e-mail
messages.
22.7 B Rationale: Counselling is facilitating others through the process of defining and exploring their
own issues and coming up with their own solutions: this is relatively non-directive. Advising is a
relatively directive role: offering information and recommendations on the best course of action to
take. Counselling is often not directly task-related: it is often about helping employees to
formulate learning goals or to cope with work (or non-work) problems.
22.8 C Rationale: The grapevine is a ‘rumour mill’: information is often inaccurate and exaggerated.
Communication is, however, fast, selective (in that information is not randomly passed on to
everyone) and up-to-date (information is often more current than in the formal system).
22.9 C Rationale: Exception reporting may improve the quality of upward communication (making it
more selective), but it does not encourage it: if anything, it may create a culture in which staff
don’t ‘bother’ their superiors with information. The other options are all ways of encouraging
upward flow of information and ideas – which otherwise tends to be rare in organisations.
22.10 D Rationale: The sender encodes the message and transmits it through a medium to the receiver
who decodes it into information. The answer cannot be A since you need to have a message to
feedback on before you provide the feedback.
Ways in: It might help you to picture the radio signal diagram in your mind.
22.11 C Rationale: Notice boards are unsuitable for upward communication, and organisation manuals
and team briefings are for downward communication.
Pitfalls: You needed to be aware of the nature of a team briefing, which is for information and
instructions to be given (downward) to a team.
22.12 C Rationale: Noise is the other main type of communication problem: interferences in the
environment in which communication takes place, affecting the clarity, accuracy or arrival of the
message. Redundancy is a positive principle in this context: you can use more than one form of
communication, so that if one message does not get through (perhaps because of noise or
distortion), another may. Feedback is an essential part of the communication cycle: it is the
response which indicates to the sender whether the message has been correctly received.
22.13 D Rationale: The wheel was the fastest and the Y was the second fasted in Leavitt’s experiment.
The chain was the slowest. The reason was the fact that messages came through and were
distributed from a central source.
22.14 A
Examiner's comments. The examiner commented that around 50% of students got this question
wrong and highlighted the point that students must clearly understand the key definitions within
the syllabus. For example, coaching is not one-way so option B could immediately be eliminated.
It is important to look for key words (clues) to the right answer.
22.15 B Rationale: Research shows that people pay more attention to non-verbal cues in interpreting
what someone means than they do to the words themselves. The other statements are true.
Pitfalls: You may have wrongly selected option C if you associated non-verbal communication too
narrowly as ‘body language’: be aware of the full range of non-verbal signals that can be given or
received.
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