Employment-At-Will Doctrine

Employment-At-Will Doctrine

Introduction

This paper aims to discuss the various employee related behavioral issues that are concerned with the employment-at-will doctrine and how the supervisor of an accounting department reacts to these different issues. To begin with, employment-at-will doctrine states that if an employee is hired at will and they have no legal protection, with certain exceptions, to revert the decision of the employer to let them go without any sufficient warning. Thus, an employee can be terminated without any significant reason and warning by the employer (The National Council for State Legislatures, 1987). Similarly, an employee too can leave his or her job without any advance notice and without incurring any legal liability.

A more formal description for Employment-At-Will doctrine is that the absence of a legal employment contract, in which instance both the employee and employer are not limited to provide justification at the time of separation from employment. The underlying principle behind this doctrine is that it encourages efficiency and flexibility at the work place and allows best resource to be inducted into the company (www.colorado.gov, 2011). While, Louise (2010) comments under the auspices of this contract both the employer and the employee can terminate the employment contract based on two conditions that firstly, that an employment contract did not existed and secondly the employer does not belong to any union.

Discussion

In this section, an outlook to the different behaviors of the newly hired employee Jennifer shall ensue. The first situation entails that Jennifer has been provided with all the necessary training about computer programs that she has to work with as part of her job description. However, it has been noted that, despite these trainings, she has been unable to comprehend fully and use the computer applications even after the training. This has significantly had an effect on her work performance and on repeated mentions about her lagging performance, Jennifer has expressly claimed that her work quality is good, and she has been performing really well, and her boss is not acknowledging her efforts properly. To propose a solution to such an event being a supervisor and manager at the accounting firm, I will follow certain steps by firstly speaking at length with the Jennifer's direct reporting authorities and discuss their professional opinion about Jennifer's' work performance since her induction. Secondly, to arrange a meeting with Jennifer herself with the motive to observe and gather insights for the probable causes that Jennifer is finding hard to adjust and perform adequately. This may lead to results such as, perhaps it is just because of simple laziness of Jennifer towards her work or maybe she truly finds the computer applications challenging. The last step in this procedure would be to make a final decision that if the lack of work performance on behalf of Jennifer is solely due to her laziness or not, in case this is true then being the supervisor and employing the doctrine of at-will gives me the liberty to fire Jennifer without any further ...