IIFT Mock Test - 10 (New Pattern) - CAT MCQ

In the questions consists of a paragraph in which the first sentence is fixed and the sentences following it are jumbled. Choose from among the options the most logical order of the sentences.

S1.1 frowned but before I could say a word Ron took the problem out of his pocket.

P. I had to be firm, therefore, I refused to help him.

Q. It looked innocent enough, small thing it was, curled up in the palm of his hand.

R. Small problems, especially Ron’s, had a tendency to become big problems and take over your life.

S. It looked so harmless and for a second I hesitated but I knew it wouldn’t stay like that.

A base word has been used in the options given below. Choose the option in which the usage of the word is incorrect or inappropriate.

Throw

Choose the correct meaning of the idiom given below.

To wait for the other shoe to drop

Fill in the blank with the appropriate preposition.

If governments are _____ continue with the opening up of markets there will be winners and there will be losers.

Choose the correct meaning of the idiom given below.

To cut corners

Identify the oxymoron:

Certain foreign words are frequently used in English language. Identify the origin of the given words:

I. coup d'etat

II. fait accompli

III. tete-e-tete

IV. elite

Choose the correct meaning of the idiom given below:

An apple pie order

What is the meaning of the French word?

Potpourri

What is the meaning of the French word?

Chauffeur

Choose the option closest in meaning to the word 'Ruffle':

Identify the oxymoron :

Fill in the blanks with the most appropriate pair of words from the given options.

_______ native speakers are concerned, no language, dialect, or accent can meaningfully be

_________ as primitive, broken, or inferior.

Fill in the blanks with the words that best fit the meaning of the sentence as a whole.

The ________ of antibiotics is a potentially__________health hazard as many diseases are transferred from animals to humans.

In the questions consists of a paragraph in which the first sentence is fixed and the sentences following it are jumbled. Choose from among the options the most logical order of the sentences.

S1. The Mahabharata is an ocean, and in classical India the ocean was thought to be the source at once of gems and of sea-monsters.

P. It is a work that belongs to the global cultural commons, and it deserves as wide an audience as possible.

Q. No other work of the Indie narrative imagination is as capacious.

R. The reader is liable to discover in it treasures as well as horrors, both the strange and the eerily familiar.

S. What it lacks in poetic intensity, it makes up in its efforts to capture the original’s breadth within two covers, allowing a new audience a controlled glimpse of an inexhaustible source.

A base word has been used in the options given below. Choose the option in which the usage of the word is incorrect or inappropriate.

Hold

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

In 1737, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire astonished the great scientists of London by solving the most pressing technological problem of the day: how to determine the longitude of a ship at sea. The conventional wisdom was that some kind of astronomical method would be needed. Other inventors suggested crackpot schemes that involved casting magic spells or ringing the world with a circle of outposts that would mark the time with cannon fire.

John Harrison’s solution — simple in principle, fiendishly hard to execute — was to build an accurate clock, one that despite fluctuating temperatures and rolling ocean swells, could show the time at Greenwich while anywhere in the world. Harrison and countless other creative minds were focused on the longitude problem by a £20,000 prize for the person who solved it, several million pounds in today’s money.

Why was the prize necessary? Because ideas are hard to develop and easy to imitate. Harrison’s clocks could, with effort, have been reverse engineered. An astronomical method for finding longitude could have been copied with ease. Inventing something new is for gullible people; smart people sit back and rip off the idea later. One way to give the clever lot an incentive to research new ideas, then, is an innovation prize — that is, a substantial cash reward for solving a well-defined problem. (Retrospective awards such as the Nobel Prize are different.) For decades after Harrison’s triumph, prizes were a well-established approach to the problem of encouraging innovation. Then they fell out of favour, with policymakers instead encouraging innovation with a mix of upfront research grants and patent protection. Now, however, prizes are making a comeback. The most eye-catching examples have been in the private sector: the $1m Netflix prize for improved personalisation of film recommendations or the $10m Ansari X prize for private space flight. Last year Nesta, a UK-based charity for the promotion of innovation, launched a “new longitude prize” of £10m for an improved test for bacterial infections, marking the anniversary of the original prize’s founding in 1714.

But why are innovation prizes attractive, when the existing system of grants and patents seems to have served us reasonably well so far? Research grants may be too conservative, favouring establishment figures working on unambitious projects, and rewarding process rather than results. Such conservatism is not inevitable but it goes with the territory. An innovation prize seems more meritocratic and, since it pays only for results, the prizes can set radical goals.

Patents are particularly problematic, since they encourage the development of something that anyone can use — a new idea — with the perverse reward of restricting access to that idea. That is a trade-off that is easily bungled, with patents that last too long, are too broad, too easy to secure and too difficult to challenge. Even a well-crafted patent system depends on there being a ready market for the innovation in question. Few people will pay much for a malaria vaccine but it would be socially very valuable, as would a new class of antibiotics. A prize can easily reward long-term social priorities such as these; a patent cannot.

But there is a danger of expecting too much from prizes. If we are to scrap patents entirely, prizes would be far too narrow a replacement. (Who would have sponsored a prize “for inventing the internet”? Not all innovations exist to solve precooked problems such as finding longitude.) If we use patents and prizes in parallel, however, there’s a self-selection problem: inventors with truly valuable ideas apply for patents, while those with dross apply for prizes. A new working paper from economic historian Zorina Khan points out that Royal Society of Arts prizes in the 19th century suffered from exactly such adverse selection. Khan also observes that many celebrated historical innovation prizes were actually mired in controversy, with prizes awarded for unoriginal or ineffective ideas, or denied to the deserving. It’s easy to point to a few success stories but there are plenty of those for patents and grants too.

For my money the patent system urgently needs reform, with patents that are harder to earn and easier to challenge. Innovation prizes definitely have their place, especially where markets for a socially valuable innovation may not exist. But we do a good idea no favours by overselling it. We should also probably stop going on about the Longitude Prize or at least we should admit what Nesta’s new prize website does not: that Harrison’s invention was rewarded with decades of suspicion and controversy. The Board of Longitude, the government body set up to administer the prize, questioned both the accuracy of his clocks and whether they could be replicated. Harrison did receive numerous payments for his efforts — but neither he nor anyone else ever won the Longitude Prize.

Q. Which of the following statements is true?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

In 1737, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire astonished the great scientists of London by solving the most pressing technological problem of the day: how to determine the longitude of a ship at sea. The conventional wisdom was that some kind of astronomical method would be needed. Other inventors suggested crackpot schemes that involved casting magic spells or ringing the world with a circle of outposts that would mark the time with cannon fire.

John Harrison’s solution — simple in principle, fiendishly hard to execute — was to build an accurate clock, one that despite fluctuating temperatures and rolling ocean swells, could show the time at Greenwich while anywhere in the world. Harrison and countless other creative minds were focused on the longitude problem by a £20,000 prize for the person who solved it, several million pounds in today’s money.

Why was the prize necessary? Because ideas are hard to develop and easy to imitate. Harrison’s clocks could, with effort, have been reverse engineered. An astronomical method for finding longitude could have been copied with ease. Inventing something new is for gullible people; smart people sit back and rip off the idea later. One way to give the clever lot an incentive to research new ideas, then, is an innovation prize — that is, a substantial cash reward for solving a well-defined problem. (Retrospective awards such as the Nobel Prize are different.) For decades after Harrison’s triumph, prizes were a well-established approach to the problem of encouraging innovation. Then they fell out of favour, with policymakers instead encouraging innovation with a mix of upfront research grants and patent protection. Now, however, prizes are making a comeback. The most eye-catching examples have been in the private sector: the $1m Netflix prize for improved personalisation of film recommendations or the $10m Ansari X prize for private space flight. Last year Nesta, a UK-based charity for the promotion of innovation, launched a “new longitude prize” of £10m for an improved test for bacterial infections, marking the anniversary of the original prize’s founding in 1714.

But why are innovation prizes attractive, when the existing system of grants and patents seems to have served us reasonably well so far? Research grants may be too conservative, favouring establishment figures working on unambitious projects, and rewarding process rather than results. Such conservatism is not inevitable but it goes with the territory. An innovation prize seems more meritocratic and, since it pays only for results, the prizes can set radical goals.

Patents are particularly problematic, since they encourage the development of something that anyone can use — a new idea — with the perverse reward of restricting access to that idea. That is a trade-off that is easily bungled, with patents that last too long, are too broad, too easy to secure and too difficult to challenge. Even a well-crafted patent system depends on there being a ready market for the innovation in question. Few people will pay much for a malaria vaccine but it would be socially very valuable, as would a new class of antibiotics. A prize can easily reward long-term social priorities such as these; a patent cannot.

But there is a danger of expecting too much from prizes. If we are to scrap patents entirely, prizes would be far too narrow a replacement. (Who would have sponsored a prize “for inventing the internet”? Not all innovations exist to solve precooked problems such as finding longitude.) If we use patents and prizes in parallel, however, there’s a self-selection problem: inventors with truly valuable ideas apply for patents, while those with dross apply for prizes. A new working paper from economic historian Zorina Khan points out that Royal Society of Arts prizes in the 19th century suffered from exactly such adverse selection. Khan also observes that many celebrated historical innovation prizes were actually mired in controversy, with prizes awarded for unoriginal or ineffective ideas, or denied to the deserving. It’s easy to point to a few success stories but there are plenty of those for patents and grants too.

For my money the patent system urgently needs reform, with patents that are harder to earn and easier to challenge. Innovation prizes definitely have their place, especially where markets for a socially valuable innovation may not exist. But we do a good idea no favours by overselling it. We should also probably stop going on about the Longitude Prize or at least we should admit what Nesta’s new prize website does not: that Harrison’s invention was rewarded with decades of suspicion and controversy. The Board of Longitude, the government body set up to administer the prize, questioned both the accuracy of his clocks and whether they could be replicated. Harrison did receive numerous payments for his efforts — but neither he nor anyone else ever won the Longitude Prize.

Q. What could be a plausible reason for scrapping patent system?

Which of the following brings out the disadvantage of patents as compared with prizes?

From the above passage, it clearly emerges that:

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Claude Elwood Shannon, a mathematician born in Gaylord, Michigan (U.S.) in 1916, is credited with two important contributions to information technology: the application of Boolean theory to electronic switching, thus laying the groundwork for the digital computer, and developing the new field called information theory. It is difficult to overstate the impact which Claude Shannon has had on the 20th century and the way we live and work in it, yet he remains practically unknown to the general public. Shannon spent the bulk of his career, a span of over 30 years from 1941 to 1972, at Bell Labs where he worked as a mathematician dedicated to research.

While a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s, Shannon worked for Vannevar Bush who was at that time building a mechanical computer, the Differential Analyser. Shannon had the insight to apply the two-valued Boolean logic to electrical circuits (which could be in either of two states - on or off). This syncretism of two hitherto distinct fields earned Shannon his MS in 1937 and his doctorate in 1940.

Not content with laying the logical foundations of both the modern telephone switch and the digital computer, Shannon went on to invent the discipline of information theory and revolutionize the field of communications. He developed the concept of entropy in communication systems, the idea that information is based on uncertainty. This concept says that the more uncertainty in a communication channel, the more information that can be transmitted and vice versa. Shannon used mathematics to define the capacity of any communications channel to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. He envisioned the possibility of error-free communications for telecommunications, the Internet, and satellite systems.

A Mathematical Theory Of Communication , published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948, outlines the principles of his information theory. Information Theory also has important ramifications for the field of cryptography as explained in his 1949 paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems- in a nutshell, the more entropy a cryptographic system has, the harder the resulting encryption is to break.

Shannon's varied retirement interests included inventing unicycles, motorized pogo sticks, and chess-playing robots as well as juggling - he developed an equation describing the relationship between the position of the balls and the action of the hands. Claude Shannon died on February 24, 2001.

Q. What is the concept of entropy described in the passage?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Claude Elwood Shannon, a mathematician born in Gaylord, Michigan (U.S.) in 1916, is credited with two important contributions to information technology: the application of Boolean theory to electronic switching, thus laying the groundwork for the digital computer, and developing the new field called information theory. It is difficult to overstate the impact which Claude Shannon has had on the 20th century and the way we live and work in it, yet he remains practically unknown to the general public. Shannon spent the bulk of his career, a span of over 30 years from 1941 to 1972, at Bell Labs where he worked as a mathematician dedicated to research.

While a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s, Shannon worked for Vannevar Bush who was at that time building a mechanical computer, the Differential Analyser. Shannon had the insight to apply the two-valued Boolean logic to electrical circuits (which could be in either of two states - on or off). This syncretism of two hitherto distinct fields earned Shannon his MS in 1937 and his doctorate in 1940.

Not content with laying the logical foundations of both the modern telephone switch and the digital computer, Shannon went on to invent the discipline of information theory and revolutionize the field of communications. He developed the concept of entropy in communication systems, the idea that information is based on uncertainty. This concept says that the more uncertainty in a communication channel, the more information that can be transmitted and vice versa. Shannon used mathematics to define the capacity of any communications channel to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. He envisioned the possibility of error-free communications for telecommunications, the Internet, and satellite systems.

A Mathematical Theory Of Communication , published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948, outlines the principles of his information theory. Information Theory also has important ramifications for the field of cryptography as explained in his 1949 paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems- in a nutshell, the more entropy a cryptographic system has, the harder the resulting encryption is to break.

Shannon's varied retirement interests included inventing unicycles, motorized pogo sticks, and chess-playing robots as well as juggling - he developed an equation describing the relationship between the position of the balls and the action of the hands. Claude Shannon died on February 24, 2001.

Q. Shannon basically brought a:

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Claude Elwood Shannon, a mathematician born in Gaylord, Michigan (U.S.) in 1916, is credited with two important contributions to information technology: the application of Boolean theory to electronic switching, thus laying the groundwork for the digital computer, and developing the new field called information theory. It is difficult to overstate the impact which Claude Shannon has had on the 20th century and the way we live and work in it, yet he remains practically unknown to the general public. Shannon spent the bulk of his career, a span of over 30 years from 1941 to 1972, at Bell Labs where he worked as a mathematician dedicated to research.

While a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s, Shannon worked for Vannevar Bush who was at that time building a mechanical computer, the Differential Analyser. Shannon had the insight to apply the two-valued Boolean logic to electrical circuits (which could be in either of two states - on or off). This syncretism of two hitherto distinct fields earned Shannon his MS in 1937 and his doctorate in 1940.

Not content with laying the logical foundations of both the modern telephone switch and the digital computer, Shannon went on to invent the discipline of information theory and revolutionize the field of communications. He developed the concept of entropy in communication systems, the idea that information is based on uncertainty. This concept says that the more uncertainty in a communication channel, the more information that can be transmitted and vice versa. Shannon used mathematics to define the capacity of any communications channel to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. He envisioned the possibility of error-free communications for telecommunications, the Internet, and satellite systems.

A Mathematical Theory Of Communication , published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948, outlines the principles of his information theory. Information Theory also has important ramifications for the field of cryptography as explained in his 1949 paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems- in a nutshell, the more entropy a cryptographic system has, the harder the resulting encryption is to break.

Shannon's varied retirement interests included inventing unicycles, motorized pogo sticks, and chess-playing robots as well as juggling - he developed an equation describing the relationship between the position of the balls and the action of the hands. Claude Shannon died on February 24, 2001.

Q. What can be said about Shannon's thought as expressed in 1949 paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems?

Answer the following question based on the information given below.

Claude Elwood Shannon, a mathematician born in Gaylord, Michigan (U.S.) in 1916, is credited with two important contributions to information technology: the application of Boolean theory to electronic switching, thus laying the groundwork for the digital computer, and developing the new field called information theory. It is difficult to overstate the impact which Claude Shannon has had on the 20th century and the way we live and work in it, yet he remains practically unknown to the general public. Shannon spent the bulk of his career, a span of over 30 years from 1941 to 1972, at Bell Labs where he worked as a mathematician dedicated to research.

While a graduate student at MIT in the late 1930s, Shannon worked for Vannevar Bush who was at that time building a mechanical computer, the Differential Analyser. Shannon had the insight to apply the two-valued Boolean logic to electrical circuits (which could be in either of two states - on or off). This syncretism of two hitherto distinct fields earned Shannon his MS in 1937 and his doctorate in 1940.

Not content with laying the logical foundations of both the modern telephone switch and the digital computer, Shannon went on to invent the discipline of information theory and revolutionize the field of communications. He developed the concept of entropy in communication systems, the idea that information is based on uncertainty. This concept says that the more uncertainty in a communication channel, the more information that can be transmitted and vice versa. Shannon used mathematics to define the capacity of any communications channel to optimize the signal-to-noise ratio. He envisioned the possibility of error-free communications for telecommunications, the Internet, and satellite systems.

A Mathematical Theory Of Communication , published in the Bell Systems Technical Journal in 1948, outlines the principles of his information theory. Information Theory also has important ramifications for the field of cryptography as explained in his 1949 paper Communication Theory of Secrecy Systems- in a nutshell, the more entropy a cryptographic system has, the harder the resulting encryption is to break.

Shannon's varied retirement interests included inventing unicycles, motorized pogo sticks, and chess-playing robots as well as juggling - he developed an equation describing the relationship between the position of the balls and the action of the hands. Claude Shannon died on February 24, 2001.

Q. In the above passage, Shannon is being credited with:

Answer the questions based on the passage given below.

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments.

However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks. As a recent study led by Ning Li, of the University of Iowa, shows, a single “extra miler”-an employee who frequently contributes beyond the scope of his or her role-can drive team performance more than all the other members combined.

But this “escalating citizenship,” as the University of Oklahoma professor Mark Bolino calls it, only further fuels the demands placed on top collaborators. We find that what starts as a virtuous cycle soon turns vicious. Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn’t progress until they’ve weighed in. Worse, they are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective. And more often than not, the volume and diversity of work they do to benefit others goes unnoticed, because the requests are coming from other units, varied offices, or even multiple companies. In fact, when we use network analysis to identify the strongest collaborators in organizations, leaders are typically surprised by at least half the names on their lists. In our quest to reap the rewards of collaboration, we have inadvertently created open markets for it without recognizing the costs. First, it’s important to distinguish among the three types of “collaborative resources” that individual employees invest in others to create value: informational, social, and personal. Informational resources are knowledge and skills—expertise that can be recorded and passed on. Social resources involve one’s awareness, access, and position in a network, which can be used to help colleagues better collaborate with one another. Personal resources include one’s own time and energy.

These three resource types are not equally efficient. Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—without depleting the collaborator’s supply. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness, I also retain it for my own use. But an individual employee’s time and energy are finite, so each request to participate in or approve decisions for a project leaves less available for that person’s own work.

Unfortunately, personal resources are often the default demand when people want to collaborate. Instead of asking for specific informational or social resources—or better yet, searching in existing repositories such as reports or knowledge libraries—people ask for hands-on assistance they may not even need. An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request.

Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today’s most pressing business challenges. But more isn’t always better. Leaders must learn to recognize, promote, and efficiently distribute the right kinds of collaborative work, or their teams and top talent will bear the costs of too much demand for too little supply. In fact, we believe that the time may have come for organizations to hire chief collaboration officers. By creating a senior executive position dedicated to collaboration, leaders can send a clear signal about the importance of managing teamwork thoughtfully and provide the resources necessary to do it effectively. That might reduce the odds that the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts.

Q. Which of the collaborative resources is the conventional choice of people when they want to collaborate?

Answer the questions based on the passage given below.

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments.

However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks. As a recent study led by Ning Li, of the University of Iowa, shows, a single “extra miler”-an employee who frequently contributes beyond the scope of his or her role-can drive team performance more than all the other members combined.

But this “escalating citizenship,” as the University of Oklahoma professor Mark Bolino calls it, only further fuels the demands placed on top collaborators. We find that what starts as a virtuous cycle soon turns vicious. Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn’t progress until they’ve weighed in. Worse, they are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective. And more often than not, the volume and diversity of work they do to benefit others goes unnoticed, because the requests are coming from other units, varied offices, or even multiple companies. In fact, when we use network analysis to identify the strongest collaborators in organizations, leaders are typically surprised by at least half the names on their lists. In our quest to reap the rewards of collaboration, we have inadvertently created open markets for it without recognizing the costs. First, it’s important to distinguish among the three types of “collaborative resources” that individual employees invest in others to create value: informational, social, and personal. Informational resources are knowledge and skills—expertise that can be recorded and passed on. Social resources involve one’s awareness, access, and position in a network, which can be used to help colleagues better collaborate with one another. Personal resources include one’s own time and energy.

These three resource types are not equally efficient. Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—without depleting the collaborator’s supply. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness, I also retain it for my own use. But an individual employee’s time and energy are finite, so each request to participate in or approve decisions for a project leaves less available for that person’s own work.

Unfortunately, personal resources are often the default demand when people want to collaborate. Instead of asking for specific informational or social resources—or better yet, searching in existing repositories such as reports or knowledge libraries—people ask for hands-on assistance they may not even need. An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request.

Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today’s most pressing business challenges. But more isn’t always better. Leaders must learn to recognize, promote, and efficiently distribute the right kinds of collaborative work, or their teams and top talent will bear the costs of too much demand for too little supply. In fact, we believe that the time may have come for organizations to hire chief collaboration officers. By creating a senior executive position dedicated to collaboration, leaders can send a clear signal about the importance of managing teamwork thoughtfully and provide the resources necessary to do it effectively. That might reduce the odds that the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts.

Q. Which of the following is the most appropriate title for the passage?

Answer the questions based on the passage given below.

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. As business becomes increasingly global and cross-functional, silos are breaking down, connectivity is increasing, and teamwork is seen as a key to organizational success. Certainly, we find much to applaud in these developments.

However, when consumption of a valuable resource spikes that dramatically, it should also give us pause. Consider a typical week in your own organization. How much time do people spend in meetings, on the phone, and responding to e-mails? At many companies the proportion hovers around 80%, leaving employees little time for all the critical work they must complete on their own. Performance suffers as they are buried under an avalanche of requests for input or advice, access to resources, or attendance at a meeting. They take assignments home, and soon, according to a large body of evidence on stress, burnout and turnover become real risks. As a recent study led by Ning Li, of the University of Iowa, shows, a single “extra miler”-an employee who frequently contributes beyond the scope of his or her role-can drive team performance more than all the other members combined.

But this “escalating citizenship,” as the University of Oklahoma professor Mark Bolino calls it, only further fuels the demands placed on top collaborators. We find that what starts as a virtuous cycle soon turns vicious. Soon helpful employees become institutional bottlenecks: Work doesn’t progress until they’ve weighed in. Worse, they are so overtaxed that they’re no longer personally effective. And more often than not, the volume and diversity of work they do to benefit others goes unnoticed, because the requests are coming from other units, varied offices, or even multiple companies. In fact, when we use network analysis to identify the strongest collaborators in organizations, leaders are typically surprised by at least half the names on their lists. In our quest to reap the rewards of collaboration, we have inadvertently created open markets for it without recognizing the costs. First, it’s important to distinguish among the three types of “collaborative resources” that individual employees invest in others to create value: informational, social, and personal. Informational resources are knowledge and skills—expertise that can be recorded and passed on. Social resources involve one’s awareness, access, and position in a network, which can be used to help colleagues better collaborate with one another. Personal resources include one’s own time and energy.

These three resource types are not equally efficient. Informational and social resources can be shared—often in a single exchange—without depleting the collaborator’s supply. That is, when I offer you knowledge or network awareness, I also retain it for my own use. But an individual employee’s time and energy are finite, so each request to participate in or approve decisions for a project leaves less available for that person’s own work.

Unfortunately, personal resources are often the default demand when people want to collaborate. Instead of asking for specific informational or social resources—or better yet, searching in existing repositories such as reports or knowledge libraries—people ask for hands-on assistance they may not even need. An exchange that might have taken five minutes or less turns into a 30-minute calendar invite that strains personal resources on both sides of the request.

Collaboration is indeed the answer to many of today’s most pressing business challenges. But more isn’t always better. Leaders must learn to recognize, promote, and efficiently distribute the right kinds of collaborative work, or their teams and top talent will bear the costs of too much demand for too little supply. In fact, we believe that the time may have come for organizations to hire chief collaboration officers. By creating a senior executive position dedicated to collaboration, leaders can send a clear signal about the importance of managing teamwork thoughtfully and provide the resources necessary to do it effectively. That might reduce the odds that the whole becomes far less than the sum of its parts.

Q. What does the author mean by “escalating citizenship”?