If a coworker is fired, do you assume "management" was right in its decision? (employee, owner)

[Wonder Why]

Looking back over my career I remember coming to work quite often and noticing a coworker was missing. No, he/she was not on vacation, they were gone permanently. They were terminated! FIRED!

I had never heard that there were any problems with their performance and all my interactions with that person was fine and I had thought they were doing a good job. But management disagreed.

The funny thing is my coworkers would love to gossip about the terminated employee for days afterwards. The person who had been a trusted co-worker the day before was now demonized and ridiculed.

How could this be? After much thought and introspection, I figured out that most people assume that "management" knows what they are doing and if they made a decision to terminate someone, it must be the right decision. All our old positive impressions of Bob, our terminated ex-co-worker, were wrong.

Management is always right in personnel decisions- right?

[charlygal]

I don't care either way.

[annabanana123]

Too little information to make a blanket assumption. I'd say generally management is right but not always.

[beer belly]

I can only speak for where I work. Union job, if you are terminated, and it gets past all the Union efforts....yes, you deserved it. Don't get me wrong, there are employees who do things that are they should be terminated for, but when you are the Administrators cronies, they look the other way.

[GuyInSD]

Originally Posted by beer belly

I can only speak for where I work. Union job, if you are terminated, and it gets past all the Union efforts....yes, you deserved it. Don't get me wrong, there are employees who do things that are they should be terminated for, but when you are the Administrators cronies, they look the other way.

analogous situation where I'm at - a DoD laboratory, so we're all Federal employees.

There's really only way two ways to get fired:
- do something (usually criminal) to lose your clearance
- do something criminal

It's very unusual to be fired for poor performance - generally, the most common tactic that management takes in those situations is to encourage the poor performer to transfer to somewhere else, and thus become someone else's problem - the processes/documentation/etc. required to actually fire someone for poor performance is so lengthy and cumbersome, that the vast majority of managers take the past of least resistance for removing those folks from their group (unless it's one of their buddies, of course - then they become part of the protected-from-ever-being-admonished club).

As for the OP - not enough information to go on; every situation is different.

[macrodome2]

Can't answer the question, as others have pointed out, "not enough information". However, what I will point out is management sees an entirely different side to an employee than a coworker does. The coworker may be oblivious to the employee's work output, time off, tardiness, and even theft. So there is probably more going on there than the coworkers are aware of.

[BigDGeek]

I've seen management make some pretty questionable decisions when terminating people either through laying them off or straight-up firing them. In my experience they're right maybe 4/10 times.

[chb119]

When I was an employee I always remembered, that I was not privileged to the full facts. What I thought I knew and what i actually knew were often two very different things. As an owner the picture is a little different.

[veuvegirl]

Do you assume the hire someone and make the right decision?

[ccm123]

Depends on the circumstances, sometimes management is correct, sometimes not.