Q5 - Company policy: An employee of

[kmewmewblue]

All seems like violating the company's policy....
Help please!!!

[demetri.blaisdell]

For principle example questions, we make a mental checklist (you don't have time to write it down!) that captures the essential parts of the principle. Here, my checklist looks like this:

Employees must be unbiased towards family members.

Not a very complicated principle. However, in (A) we get an application of this principle that we wouldn't expect. As we read the principle, we were probably thinking of people trying to help their family members. (A) has someone being biased against their siblings in a hiring situation. Take one more look at the principle. It says impartial, which means you can't help or hurt your family members based on their relation to you.

(B) doesn't violate the principle. In fact, it's exactly what you should be doing: treating your mother like any other customer.

(C) looks good at first, but who says you have to fire someone? We don't know if they deserved to be fired or not, so we have no way of knowing if the principle is being applied or not.

(D) is out of scope. Is this a family member?

(E) is just like (C). You can and should promote a family member over someone else if the family member is more qualified. We have no way of knowing who was more qualified here.

I hope that clears this one up. Let me know if you have any questions.

Demetri

[zaidjawed]

Hey Demetri,
I chose A on this one but found myself jumping between A and D. When i first read the stimulus, I accepted impartiality toward family members as being a priority over others, however, I didn't see the policy as being limited only to family members. Given this, can we not say that the employee in D is still being treated unfairly? Or is it that we don't have more info about the employee( in D) having had done work that was deserving some sort of advancement? Would this additional piece of information in conjunction with the info in choice D make D a viable candidate for this question?

[demetri.blaisdell]

I think you raise a good point, zaidjawed. The policy is to be impartial. Even though it says "particularly when dealing with family members," it isn't restricted only to them. I think you identified the two problems with (D):

1) We don't really know if refusing to advance the employee is being impartial. It sorta looks like it because the employee hasn't been late and the supervisor says he has skipped work but we can't be sure without assuming that others aren't being treated that way.

2) The policy says particularly with family members. The question stem also says "most clearly violates" the policy. This is probably the best reason not to choose (D). Even if this might arguably be a violation, it's not the one that most clearly violates the policy.

Good catch on this one. I hope this explanation helps. Let me know if you have any questions.

Demetri

[zaidjawed]

Thanks Demetri,
That clears up all problems with this question.

[patrice.antoine]

(E) is just like (C). You can and should promote a family member over someone else if the family member is more qualified. We have no way of knowing who was more qualified here.

Where are you getting the "more qualified" from? The principle states nothing about more or less qualifications. Just that an employee must be impartial especially when dealing with family members and this rule extends to hiring and firing and quality of service.

I thin (E) can be eliminated on the basis of not knowing how the family member is being compared to the other employee (ie are they being compared on the basis of work product, etc.). It's too ambiguous.

[demetri.blaisdell]

Good question, patrice.antoine. I didn't mean to suggest that the family member is actually more qualified. The point is that we don't know who is more qualified. You're also right that we don't know the criteria at all. Basically, we don't know if the decision was partial or impartial so we can't evaluate the decision.

Hope this helps.

Demetri

[WaltGrace1983]

I just thought I'd add that I don't think (D) violates the principle at all. It is logical to claim that an employee has SOMETIMES skipped work or that work has been sloppy even though it has been two years since the last incident. Sure, the boss might suck, but it is not necessarily being biased because those incidents actually did occur. It would be a whole other thing if they didn't occur and the boss wasn't advancing the person "out of spite" or something.

[asafezrati]

Here is why I didn't take A:

100 candidates took an entry test which is similar to the LSAT. The top score, which belonged to my brother, was 140. It is required of candidates to score 150 at a minimum if they are to be considered for hiring. No one did it, so no one hired, including my brother which apparently was the most qualified according to the score.

...

Im confused here.

[contropositive]

I am so confused about this.

First of all, it came up on my homework when I was practicing "what must be false" (this is my homework for Testmasters.net).

Secondly, the stimulus doesn't tell us "only family members" it says "..., particularly family members." So for me the principle (as I read above ) is not "be unbiased towards family members" it was more like "be fair to everyone when doing business"

A sounded like the right answer at first but then when I read the other answer choices they seemed just as good as A except D. So I picked D. Here is my reasoning for all of them Please let me know where I went wrong with this

A) perhaps they were overqualified and sometimes there are companies that do not hire overqualified people. So this person didn't hire his relative even though the relative was more qualified than other applicants....how is this biased?

B) I didn't see this as treating your mother fairly, because again for me the stimulus is just saying "don't be biased" so it didn't matter whether or not those complained were relatives or not. For them to send complimentary products to all those who complain is a kind gesture to show we are not ignoring your complaints and siding with our employee.

C) At first it seems like a good answer but then no one said we NEED to fire people. Perhaps the relative is the best employee the company has, why fire him/her? it would be correct answer if it said, "never firing a family member, even though this relative's work has been sloppy and any other employee would have been fired by now"

D) if the employee is not being promoted for reasons that are not true then wouldn't this be biased? if I didn't get promoted and the manager was claiming reasons that are not true then I would correctly conclude the manager is being biased. however, perhaps the problem with this answer choice is "over two years" does this mean the last incident was two years ago? meaning the reasoning the manager is giving did occur but it just hasn't occur over two years now? in this case, it would be incorrect answer choice because the manager is not being biased even thought he is holding a grudge

E) perhaps the relative is fabulous why not promote him? this wouldn't go against the policy.

[rinagoldfield]

Thanks for your posts. I can see how (A) is not flawless – we don’t know whether the siblings are qualified enough despite being more qualified than other candidates. However, it’s the best of the options. I think it’s easiest to see this by comparing (A) to (C). (C) presents a situation where no family member is fired… isn’t that unfair? But wait! We don’t know anything about the quality of the sibling workers. So he have absolutely no basis on which to evaluate whether they should be fired or not. (A), on the other hand, gives us information on the quality of the sibling workers. That information doesn’t seem to jive with the employment outcome (no one was hired). Sure, the information is incomplete, but (A) presents the best example of a disconnect between sibling behavior and employment outcome.

(B) presents a scenario in which the mother is treated the same as everyone else. This is the definition of impartial.

(D) says nothing about family members, which is really important to the original policy.

(E) is like (C). It lacks information about the quality of the sibling employee. Without that, we can’t evaluate whether this promotion was fair or not.