Logical Reasoning

PT144 · S4 · Q9 A manager cannot extract the best

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A manager cannot extract the best performance from employees by threatening them with termination or offering financial rewards for high productivity.

Situation

You can't get the best out of your employee by threatening them with bad stuff or offering rewards if they do good stuff.

Instead, they need to want to do a good job for its own sake.

Recommendation

A great way to get them to want a job for its own sake is to delegate responsibility to them, especially for decisions that used to be managerial.

Goal

The answers look shorter than the stimulus, so we may or may not get the preamble about .

It's more likely that we'll hear the advice for getting them to love something for its own sake.

By making someone feel more important / more involved (delegating managerial decisions to them), you can make them more motivated to do a good job for its own sake.

9.

Which one of the following propositions is best illustrated by the situation described in the passage?

  1. Increased responsibility can improve a

    Bad Effect Match

    We're trying to reinforce the idea that giving someone increased responsibility led to them wanting to do a good job for its own sake. This is saying it leads to them having an improved sense of how power should be used.

    6% picked this

  2. It is often the case

    Out of Scope: prestige

    We're trying to reinforce the idea that giving someone increased responsibility led to them wanting to do a good job for its own sake. We never talked about "prestige" and don't want to stretch what we've read too far. Just because you've been delegated a responsibility doesn't mean you've gotten an uptick in prestige. Also, "often" is a little strong, given that we only have one example being described in this prompt.

    5% picked this

  3. Correct

    In some cases one's effectiveness

    Why this is right

    This has lovably soft language ("in some cases"), but is otherwise a sneaky one to warm up to. We're trying to reinforce the idea that giving someone increased responsibility led to them wanting to do a good job for its own sake. This is talking about that, but via the manager's perspective. When you delegate to an employee some decisions that previously had to be made by the manager, you've experienced a "partial relinquishing of control". And doing such delegating is one of the best ways to achieve an employee's being motivated to do a good job for its own sake . A manager's job is to extract the best performance from employees, and the key to extracting the best performance is when employees want to do a good job for its own sake. So a manager's effectiveness at extracting the best performance from her employees can be increased by partially relinquishing control and delegating some of her responsibilities to her subordinates. .

    Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

    71% picked this

  4. People who carry out decisions

    Opposite, if anything

    Managers are people who carry out decisions, and according to this answer managers are in the best position to determine what those decisions should be. This seems like a mismatch for the paragraph, in which the manager was delegating some of her decisions to her subordinates.

    3% picked this

  5. Business works best by harnessing

    Opposite, if anything

    We were told that "avoiding getting fired" and "receiving a financial reward" were not good ways to get the best performance from employees, so those sound like techniques in which business doesn't not work best. And yet, those techniques attempt to harness the self-interest of individuals. It's in one's self-interest to not get fired or to receive a financial reward.

    15% picked this

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