Chapter 8 Flashcards
Authoritarianism at the workplace:
David Ewing, formerly of Harvard Business Review, believes that too many corporations routinely violate the civil liberties of their employees.
Historically, authoritarianism stems from:
(1) The rise of professional management and personnel engineering.
(2) The common-law doctrine that employees can be discharged without cause (“employment at will”).
The Wagner Act of 1935 -
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 -
- The Wagner Act of 1935 prohibited firing workers because of union membership or union activities.
- The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and subsequent legislation prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, creed, nationality, sex, or age.
Current trends:
The law seems to be moving away from the doctrine of “employment at will.”
- But some businesspeople support it as a desirable legal policy and embrace it as a moral doctrine.
- They deny that employers have any obligations to their employees beyond those specified by law or by explicit legal contract.
- They view employees as lacking any meaningful moral rights, seeing them as expendable assets, as means to an end.
The hiring process may be fairly approached based on its 3 principal steps –
screening, testing, and interviewing:
Screening:
The first step of the hiring process, the pooling and ranking candidates with qualifications – when done improperly, it undermines effective recruitment and invites injustices into the process.
job description vs job specification
job description - lists the details of the job including duties, responsibilities, working conditions and physical requirements.
job specification - describes the required professional qualifications such as skills, background, education, and work experience.
Both must be complete and accurate.
Wrongful discrimination - def plus protected categories
A moral concern in which candidates are judged on physical or ethnic traits rather than qualifications.
- Sex, age, race, national origin, and religion are not job-related and should not affect hiring decisions.
- BFOQ
- Firms are not allowed to rely on the preferences of their customers as a reason for discriminatory employment practices.
- ADA American Disabilities Act
- Excluding based on language, lifestyle, physical appearance, ill-considered educational requirements, or gaps in work history may also be unfair.
Bona fide occupationas qualifications (BFOQs) – (def and scope)
Job specifications to which the civil rights law does not apply. Very limited in scope:
- No BFOQs for race or color
- Sex BFOQs exist only to allow for authenticity (male model) and modesty (women’s locker room attendants)
Americans with Disabiities Act (ADA)
Discrimination against the disabled is illegal, effective for firms with 15 or more employees
Testing: Def and 4 rules
Testing: Tests are an integral part of the hiring process, especially in large firms – often designed to measure the applicant’s verbal, quantitative, and logical skills.
1) Tests must be valid: Test Validity - whether test scores correlate with performance in some other activity (i.e., whether the test measures the skill or ability it is intended to measure).
2) Tests must be reliable: Test Reliability - refers to whether test results are replicable (i.e., whether a subject’s scores will remain relatively consistent from test to test).
3) Tests that lack validity or reliability are unfair.
4) Tests may be unfair if they are culturally biased or if the skills they measure do not relate directly to job performance.
Interviewing: Moral issues in interviews usually relate to the manner in which they are conducted. Interviewers should…
Situational interviews
…Interviewers should focus on the humanity of the candidate and not allow biases, stereotypes, and preconceptions to color the evaluation.
- Situational interviews: Those interviews in which job candidates must role play in a mock work scenario – some believe this makes it harder for a candidate to put on a false front.
Promotions: Factors that determine promotion:
1) Job qualification
2) Seniority
3) Inbreeding: The practice of promoting exclusively from within the firm – it presents similar moral challenges as in the case of seniority.
4) Nepotism: The practice of showing favoritism to relatives and close friends – it is not always objectionable (especially in family-owned businesses) but may affect managerial responsibilities, hurt morale, create resentment, or result in unfair treatment of other employees.
Discipline and Discharge: Two basic principles in the fair handling of disciplinary issues:
1) Just cause: requires that reasons for discipline or discharge deal with job performance.
2) Due process: refers to the fairness of procedures used to impose sanctions on employees.
- Requires both the hearing of grievances and the setting up of a step-by-step procedure by which an employee can appeal a managerial decision.
Employers have the right to fire employees who perform inadequately – but should provide sufficient warning, severance pay, and sometimes displacement counseling.
Def of: 1) Firing 2) Termination 3) Layoff 40 Position elimination
1) Firing – for-cause dismissal – the result of employee theft, gross insubordinations, release of proprietary information
2) Termination – results from an employee’s poor performance –(from his or her failure to fulfill expectations)
3) Layoff – refers to the temporary unemployment experienced by hourly employees and implies that they are “subject to recall”
4) Position elimination – the permanent elimination of a job as a result of workforce reduction , plan closing, or department consolidation.
