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

This question asks you to find the underlying belief that made Mr. Thakur choose one-on-one wage talks over group bargaining. The caselet gives a direct clue: it says Mr. Thakur felt that by dealing directly with individuals, he could show the management's concern for the employees. That single line is the premise the whole initiative rests on, so check each option against it.

1. Better goodwill through the president's involvement: this matches the caselet directly. Mr. Thakur believed that when the top person in the company personally sat down with an employee over wages, the employee would see the management as caring, which builds goodwill. This is exactly the reasoning the passage gives for his initiative.
2. Bargaining scope causes dissatisfaction: the caselet never says Mr. Thakur was trying to stop bargaining because it upsets employees. His stated aim was to reward good performers and show concern, not to prevent dissatisfaction from bargaining. This is not supported by the text.
3. Preventing collective action: this sounds plausible on the surface, since one-on-one deals do stop group bargaining as a side effect. But the caselet gives no hint that Mr. Thakur's actual motive was to block collective action. His stated reasoning was about goodwill and recognising performance, not about weakening the supervisors as a group. Reading this into the case goes beyond what is written.
4. Forcing lower wages individually: the caselet says the deals were meant to reward better performers, not squeeze wages down. This option contradicts the stated intent.

The correct option is the one about goodwill, since it is stated almost word for word in the passage: Mr. Thakur wanted individual dealing to project the management's concern for employees, and that concern was expected to build goodwill among the workers.

Let's summarize:

• Always anchor a 'most likely premise' question to a sentence actually written in the caselet, not to a plausible-sounding outside idea.
• Options that require you to assume a hidden, unstated motive (like blocking collective action) are weaker than an option the passage states directly.

So the premise behind Mr. Thakur's initiative is that direct involvement of the president in wage matters would build better goodwill towards the management among the workers.