- A.Assigning authority and responsibility to lower-level employees — multiplies leadership capacity and develops talent, but requires trust and clear accountability. ✓
- B.John Kotter's eight-step process — urgency, coalition, vision, communicate, empower, wins, sustain, anchor — for leading large-scale organizational change.
- C.Functional, divisional, matrix, network, and team structures — each with different trade-offs in coordination, accountability, and adaptability.
- D.Assigning authority and responsibility to lower-level employees — multiplies leadership capacity and develops talent, but requires trust and clear accountability.
Delegation is assigning authority and responsibility to lower-level employees — multiplies leadership capacity and develops talent, but requires trust and clear accountability. The other options describe related but distinct concepts in Management & Organization — see the deep-dive guide for the full distinction.
How to think about questions like this
Without delegation, organizations cannot scale past one leader's capacity. Questions like this test whether you can distinguish Delegation from neighboring concepts. The most common trap is choosing a closely-related concept that sounds similar but applies in a different context.
When you see a definition question on an exam, do two things: (1) translate the question into your own words, then (2) generate the answer in your own words before reading the options. This avoids the cognitive bias of recognizing a familiar phrase as correct just because it is familiar.