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

Step 1: Understanding the Question.
We are given four possible interventions Mr. Thakur could have taken, and asked to rank them from the one with the biggest positive impact on the organisation to the one with the smallest, then match that order to an option.

Step 2: Key Formula or Approach.
Judge each intervention by how directly and how permanently it fixes the actual root problem, which is that night shift supervisors had no channel to discuss their wage contracts before those contracts were imposed. An intervention that is not grounded in a caselet fact, or that only delays the problem, ranks lower than one that structurally solves it.

Step 3: Detailed Explanation.
Statement 2, creating a process for night shift supervisors to interact with Mr. Thakur, goes straight at the actual gap described in the caselet: night shift supervisors, unlike day shift ones, never got one-on-one negotiation. Fixing this gap has the highest organisational impact because it solves the real problem for the whole night shift group, not just Ram Lal.
Statement 3, an open door policy for all employees, has real but slightly lower impact, since it helps every employee reach Mr. Thakur, but it is a broader, less targeted fix than a process built specifically for the group that was actually left out.
Statement 1, delegating wage negotiation to the Personnel Department, is a workable option but it changes who does the negotiating rather than guaranteeing that negotiation happens at all; it ranks below the two above.
Statement 4 rests on a detail, supervisors being rotated across shifts every two months, that is never mentioned anywhere in the caselet. An intervention built on an assumption not supported by the passage cannot be relied on, and postponing a decision does not solve the underlying access problem anyway, it only delays it. So statement 4 has the least organisational impact among the four, not the most.
Putting these together, the order from highest to lowest impact is 2, 3, 1, 4, which is option E in the original five-option list.

Step 4: Final Answer.
The ranking of decreasing organisational impact is: create a night shift interaction process, then an open door policy, then delegation to Personnel, then the two-month postponement.