Question

Read the following caselet and answer the question that follows.

Mr. Rajiv Singhal, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Loha India Ltd. (a steel manufacturing company), had just been visited by several other directors of the company. The directors were upset with the recent actions of the company president, Mr. Ganesh Thakur. They demanded that the board consider firing the president.

Mr. Thakur, recently appointed as president, had undertaken to solve some of the management-employee problems by dealing directly with individuals as often as possible. The company did not have a history of strikes or any other form of collective action and was considered to have a good work culture. However, Mr. Thakur felt that by dealing directly with individuals, he could show the management's concern for the employees. An important step Mr. Thakur took was to negotiate the wages of the supervisors with each supervisor one on one. In these negotiation meetings he did not involve anyone else, including the Personnel Department which reported to him, so that he could take an unbiased decision. After negotiation, a wage contract was drawn up for each supervisor. He felt this would recognise and reward the better performers. Mr. Thakur carried out this process for most of the supervisors, except those working the night shift. For them he drew up the contracts on his own, benchmarking the night shift supervisors' wages against the day shift supervisors' wages.

For several days, Ram Lal, a night shift supervisor, had been trying to get an appointment with Mr. Thakur about his wages. He was upset, not only because he could not see the president, but also because there had been no discussion about his wage contract before it was put into effect. As a family man with six dependents, he felt his weekly wage should be higher than what he had been given.

Last Thursday afternoon, Ram Lal stopped by the president's office and tried to see him. Mr. Thakur's secretary refused his request on the grounds that Mr. Thakur was busy. Angry, Ram Lal walked into the president's office and confronted the startled Mr. Thakur with his demand for a better wage. Mr. Thakur stood up and told Ram Lal to get out of his office and raise his grievance through the official channel. Ram Lal took a swing at the president, who in turn punched Ram Lal on the jaw and knocked him unconscious.

The most likely premise behind Mr. Thakur's step of holding individual meetings with the supervisors seems to be:

• A. Involvement of the company's president in the wage problems of employees will build better goodwill towards the management among the workers.
• B. Employee-related policies should allow scope for bargaining by employees, which leads to unsatisfied employees.
• C. Individual agreements with supervisors would let the management prevent any possible collective action by the supervisors.
• D. Management will be able to force supervisors to accept lower wages individually this way.

Hint:

Look for the exact sentence in the caselet that explains why Mr. Thakur chose to deal with employees one on one.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is A

Step 1: Understanding the Question:
We need the belief that drove Mr. Thakur to negotiate wages with supervisors one at a time instead of through a group process. A premise here is the unstated (or lightly stated) assumption behind a manager's action.

Step 2: Key Formula or Approach:
Work backward from the stated purpose of the action to the belief that must be true for that purpose to make sense. The caselet tells us Mr. Thakur wanted to 'portray the management's concern for the employees' through direct dealing. So the assumption must connect direct dealing with a positive outcome for the management's image.

Step 3: Detailed Explanation:
If Mr. Thakur believed direct, individual talks would make employees feel cared for, then the natural next belief is that this care would translate into goodwill for the management among the workforce.
Check this against each remaining idea: forcing down wages contradicts the passage's language of 'rewarding better performers'. Stopping collective bargaining is never mentioned as his goal anywhere in the text, so it cannot be the premise even though it is a possible side effect. Blaming bargaining itself for unhappy employees is also absent from the passage.
Only the goodwill idea lines up word for word with the caselet's own explanation of Mr. Thakur's thinking.

Step 4: Final Answer:
The premise is that involving the company's president directly in wage discussions builds better goodwill towards the management among the workers.