You are an administrator of a department in a health organization that has recently been reorganized. Personnel from other units have been permanently transferred into your department so that your department can take on additional tasks in support of the mission of the health organization.

After 2 months have passed, one of your new employees comes to you asking for you to complete his annual job performance appraisal. You are surprised because all annual performance appraisals were supposed to have been completed by the supervisors of the departments losing the personnel before they were transferred into your department. Because you do not feel you know the new employee well enough to do an annual performance appraisal, you call the former supervisor and ask that she complete the performance evaluation herself on the employee. The losing supervisor refuses, saying that the issue is now your problem. The losing supervisor further states that no one from the human resources department told her that she was supposed to do a performance appraisal on the employee before the employee left her division. The losing supervisor also confides that writing a performance appraisal 90 days after it is due will trigger a “red flag” with human resources, which may reflect negatively on the losing supervisor's management and the supervisory effectiveness of her department.

Frustrated with the situation, you approach your supervisor and ask for his guidance. He suggests that you change the date on the employee's internal transfer documents, making it seem as if the employee arrived in your department yesterday. Your supervisor also says that he will talk to the other department leader and make sure she did an evaluation for 12 months on the employee, and not just for 9 months. He also suggests that you could provide some input on the evaluation because the employee did work for you for the last 60 days. Your supervisor says, “This happens all the time.” He continues by stating, “It is easily corrected by creating a new set of documents.” He assures you that there is nothing illegal about this practice and that this methodology is used frequently to correct otherwise careless administrative actions in the facility.

Your supervisor then tells you to go back to your office, retrieve the transfer documents already in place, and replace them with new ones containing the dates you and he just talked about. As you walk back to your office, you begin to feel uncomfortable with the prospect of taking an administratively correct set of documents, destroying them, and then replacing them with some newly created documents that do not represent the actual dates of the transfer. You believe that this practice provides further support for an otherwise ineffective human resources system. However, as a new department head, you are uncomfortable losing favor with the boss who controls your future in the organization.

To protect yourself, you call the organization's legal counsel to get some advice on an informal basis. Legal counsel tells you that your supervisor is, indeed, correct; it is not illegal to change the documents if changing them results in a correction to a previously made administrative error. You counter by telling legal counsel that this may not have been a human resources or administrative error as much as it is an attempt to avoid a negative human resources action. Legal counsel suggests you go back and discuss the issues with your supervisor if you are uncomfortable doing anything regarding this matter. This suggestion makes you even more uncomfortable, because your boss is not an individual who enjoys repeating himself or being challenged or questioned by his employees. Such events are perceived by your boss as the actions of disloyal employees. You are certain that going back to your supervisor will result in an uncomfortable event for you.

Answer the following questions in a case study analysis:

1. What would you do or what would be the right thing to do?
2. What other factors do you consider in making a decision here?
3. What ethical framework or distributive justice theory best supports your decisions regarding the case, and why?
4. What essential leadership principles did your supervisor lack, and how would you help your supervisor do the right thing?

Answer rating: 100% (QA)

Case Study Analysis Ethical Dilemma in Performance Appraisal 1 The right thing to do in this situation is to maintain honesty and integrity in the per... View the full answer