Procedural Justice Case Analysis

In our readings this week, we discussed procedural justice, due process and whether they are related, in my opinion they are. Procedural justice is the perception that decisions are implemented in fairness and transparency. Due process is when the employer advises the employee with a written notice of the reason for the termination and is presented at least 30 days prior to termination. A copy of the notice will also be sent to the Department of Labor office where the employee’s office is located. When the true process of procedural justice is implemented, people feel they have been treated with respect and dignity allowing the individual to accept outcomes they may not like (Burgess & Cast 2013). In combining the aspects of procedural justice …show more content…
There was no consistency in the selection process of how to downsize, the way in which the downsizing happened was not fair across offices, or in the way the elimination process was thought out in the first round of layoffs. Lauder made the decision to downsize based on the organization having too many offices and not for economic reasons. The downsizing did not improve the company’s long term financial health because there had to be a second round of layoffs for that very reason. . He should have reevaluated the closing of the Vail office because it was the office that was making the most profit and had the opportunity of eventually bringing back the top client. Everyone saw the closing of the office to be unfair, particularly the head of the Vail office Mike Rollins. Although the downsizing resulted in lowering the labor costs, it cost the company in the area relating to its skilled workers, relationships between the organization, it clients and staff was interrupted as well as feelings of negativity from the surviving offices and managers. The Vail office had highly qualified people that could have been transferred to other offices, but wasn’t given the opportunity to do so. The downsizing did not improve the company’s long term financial health because there had to be a second round of layoffs for that very reason. In this case the layoff appeared to be procedurally unfair because of the manager perceived the anxiety and …show more content…
They were more concerned with how the organization was going to look at the announcement of the earning rather than the effect it was going to have on 110 people at the Vail office plus managers and other employees it had around the world as well as the Vail community (Delong and Vijayaraghavan, 2002). The decision to close the Vail office was a biased one. The procedures were not impartial or neutral in that they did not communicate with anyone at the Vail office to even give consideration to what the company could have done differently. Lauder did not ask for the opinion of Rollins or whether what he was doing was fair across the board of the organization. The company did not gain the trust of the employees before deciding to announce the layoffs, thus leading Rollins to not defend Lauder when the employees were asking the questions of him. Lauder did not offer any transparency to the employees or senior management of the organization. It seems that only three people in the organization knew what was taking place and that was Jim Bradley, Alberto Marquez and Andrew Laude; no one else in the organization seemed to have mattered to them. The procedures by which the organization chose to take the steps were in secret. Lauder had no clear way to access where the layoff the first round of layoffs should have taken