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 situation with Mr. Lal could have been avoided if Mr. Thakur had:
1. Delegated the task of negotiating wage contracts for night shift employees to the Personnel department.
2. Created a process for supervisors working the night shift so that they could have an opportunity to interact with him.
3. Created an open door policy that would have allowed employees to see him without any appointment.
4. Postponed the decision on wage revision for supervisors in the night shift for two months, since supervisors were rotated across different shifts every two months.
The option that best arranges the above managerial interventions in decreasing order of organisational impact is:

• A. 4, 2, 3, 1
• B. 4, 3, 2, 1
• C. 4, 3, 1, 2
• D. 2, 3, 1, 4

Hint:

Check whether statement 4's claim about shift rotation is even mentioned in the caselet before ranking it highly.

Answer 1

The Correct Option is D

This is a ranking question, so instead of jumping to the given orderings, first score each of the four interventions on its own against the real problem in the caselet: night shift supervisors, especially Ram Lal, never got the same one-on-one wage talks as the day shift supervisors, and had no way to reach Mr. Thakur before their contracts were finalised.

1. Statement 2, a process for night shift supervisors to interact with Mr. Thakur: this fixes the exact gap the caselet describes and does so for the whole affected group. It has the highest impact of the four.
2. Statement 3, an open door policy for all employees: this also solves the access problem, and for everyone, not just the night shift, so its impact is broad. It ranks just under statement 2 because it is a general fix rather than one aimed at the specific group that was actually left out.
3. Statement 1, delegating wage talks to Personnel: this is a reasonable structural change, since Personnel is meant to handle wage policy, but it does not by itself guarantee that night shift supervisors get heard, it just moves the task to someone else. Its impact sits below statements 2 and 3.
4. Statement 4, postponing the wage decision for two months: this claims supervisors rotate shifts every two months, a detail that is nowhere in the caselet. Since we cannot verify this premise from the passage, and postponement does not fix the access problem at all, it only puts it off, this has the smallest organisational impact of the four.

Ranking from most to least impact gives 2, 3, 1, 4. Checking the given orderings, this matches the option that lists 2, 3, 1, 4 in exactly that sequence.

Let's summarize:

• Rank interventions by how squarely they fix the caselet's actual root problem.
• Treat any statement built on a fact not stated in the passage, like the two-month rotation, as weak and unreliable, so it should rank near the bottom.

So the decreasing order of organisational impact is 2, 3, 1, 4.