Mary Corey Case

Case 2: Mary Corey’s case

1. Discuss the main issues in the case. Can Helen terminate Mary without running into legal problems? Discuss.

Introduction

In the Mary Corey case there were multiple areas of concern. The main areas include: attitude, attendance and performance. Termination of employment by an employer carries the risk of a possible legal challenge. Based on the organizations policies or the employee’s employment contract, termination could result from professional misconduct or poor performance.

Body

In this case, Mary Corey has worked for four years at Statewide services corporation, with Helen Rowe as her direct Supervisor. Mary was a consistent high performer that had suddenly fallen into a situation of poor performance. Her supervisor reviewed her past work records to try and evaluate reasons for the decline in her performance. During the Christmas period, Mary started taking longer lunch breaks; however, Helen took no specific action against her. She also nodded off to sleep on two occasions. On a few occasions Mary arrived late at work and became increasingly short tempered with periodic outbursts. Her co-workers automatically assumed the reason for this change in behaviour was because she was having problems at home.

In February, Mary had gone out for lunch and never returned until two days later exclaiming she had stomach flu.

After a repeated series of turning up later, Helen issued Mary with her first written warning. After receiving this warning, her punctuality, level of performance and interaction with her co-workers improved.

A month later, again, Helen noticed Mary slipping back to lateness and irritability with her co-workers. In addition, she also seemed to have difficulty in completing her work after returning from her lunch break.

In May, Mary was issued with a second disciplinary notice for deteriorating work performance as well as a repeated instance of punctuality and attendance. Helen also highlighted to her that she was in danger of losing her job.

Again, Mary’s productivity and performance improved, however, she was awarded a less than satisfactory result in her performance evaluation. In July, Mary returned, 45 minutes late from her lunch break, smelling strongly of peppermint and created a distraction to other employees while trying to settle in. Helen then confronted Mary, to which she burst into tears and stormed out. Mary then returned to work 2 two days later and requested an immediate transfer to a less pressured department. Most co-workers assumed her behaviour was related to alcohol or drug abuse, but there was no evidence to substantiate the assumption. Helen wanted to fire Mary as she was concerned that her performance