Employment at Will Doctrine

Assignment 1: Employment-At-Will Doctrine

Law and Ethics in the Business Environment

Abstract

This paper includes four different examples of a new employee behavior. For each scenario I described measures that I would take to address a situation if I were a manager and supervisor of an accounting department. Each setting requires specific steps in order to solve the problem without further negative consequences for both the employee and the company. While writing this assignment I referred to the current U.S. legislation and various online materials such as journal articles, documents from the web sites of governmental agencies, and legal cases.

Assignment 1: Employment-At-Will Doctrine

1. In accordance with the employment-at-will doctrine, employers are given broad discretion to fire employees “for a good reason, a bad reason, or no reason at all” (Halbert & Ingulli, 2012). In this particular situation the company is legally allowed to terminate employment relationship with Jennifer due to the absence of a civil right or a safety issue involved in this case. Even if she had a written contract of employment with the company for a specific term, she could still be fired because of her incapability to perform the job responsibilities. For a reasonable and acting in good faith employer this incapability would be a good and sufficient cause for terminating an employee’s services.

If I were a supervisor of an accounting department at this company, my first step of addressing this situation would be talking to Jennifer personally in order to find out why after a few months of training she is still unable to use the computer tools required to perform her job. At the beginning of the conversation I would reassure her that I appreciate her efforts to be a good worker. Then I will ask her if she found the training to be difficult or insufficient – maybe the problem here is not Jennifer, but the way the training is done. If that is not the...