What do you think of the statement that termination of employment almost always represents a failure

of management? Think back to situations you’ve seen where someone was fired. Was it entirely the
employee’s fault? Was there no way the employer could have foreseen the issue?

I do not share the opinion that termination is mostly due to the failure of the management as either
party (employee or employer) can be responsible for this. To start with, there are serious legal
implications of wrongful dismissal which employers are aware of and would want to guide against. Also,
most employers have layers of processes including warnings and reviews of the circumstances by
different levels of management before concluding on termination. In addition, employment is mostly
based on employee’s past activities and achievements and it is difficult to predict future behaviours,
Hence, that is why there are “Just cause” termination reasons such as serious misconduct,
incompetence, conflict, and willful disobedience, as identified by Noe et. al. (2016, p. 340). For example,
it will not be fair to blame the management if after taking an employee through all forms of trainings on
harassment and the employee still chooses to sexually harass a colleague.

However, there are other ways that employers directly and/or indirectly causes or contributes largely to
the termination of the employee. Someone close to me got a job in a big, fast-paced company and was
not taken through any form of onboarding process except for a one-week mandatory online training and
was given several major projects with close deadlines right from the second week. Without any
familiarity with the company culture, terms used, acronyms meanings, he comes home spending the
nights reading about the company from various sources and many other employees he talked to were
complaining about the same thing. He was frustrated and his appointment was terminated after he
missed the deadlines on those projects. Therefore, employers should set conducive environment for
their employees to succeed while also anticipating their future needs such as wage increase, promotion,
as well as continuous training and development.