Sarah: Our regulations for staff review are vague and thus difficult to interpret.
Conclusion (Thus)
Some staff may be dismissed merely because their personal views conflict with those of their supervisors.
Evidence
According to regulations, if performing unsatisfactorily → then dismissal
But there's no definition of "unsatisfactory".
Evaluate
On Strengthen + Principle questions, we're expecting the correct answer to feel like a conditional rule:
If [this thing that matches the Evidence] is true, then [the conclusion] is true.
Usually the conclusion is an action we should take or a value judgment we should have. However, this conclusion is causal. We're trying to strengthen the idea that one thing will causally lead to another.
Let's think about the Causal Chain the author is envisioning:
1. If your supervisor deems your performance unsatisfactory, it's grounds for dismissal. But there's no definition of what "unsatisfactory" behavior means.
2. So supervisors will stretch "unsatisfactory" to mean whatever suits their purposes, when they want to fire someone.
3. So if a supervisor gets into a fight with an employee because their personal views conflict, the supervisor will employ her prerogative to say,
Goal
We need to strengthen this causal story the author is envisioning where we get from lacking a definition for "unsatisfactory performance" to employers actually abusing that ambiguity in order to make up grounds for firing employees whose personal views they don't like.