Mills Paper Company: Performance Management or Age Discrimination

Running head: MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Mills Paper Company: Performance Management or Age Discrimination
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author’s Note:

1
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Table of Contents
Question 1..................................................................................................................................2
Question 2..................................................................................................................................5
Question 3..................................................................................................................................7
References..................................................................................................................................9

2
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Question 1
Evaluation of management of Mills Paper Company for Performance of John Carpenter
with Strengths and Weaknesses of approach to Performance Appraisals
Lance Amato is the CFO and John Carpenter is a general accountant within Mills
Paper Company. John Carpenter is getting terminated due to his performance, since he is not
meeting performance expectations in his job (Noe et al., 2017). Bob Crane is the new
supervisor of John and Crane rated John’s performance as average and needs improvement
during mid-year review. Crane even made a plan for improvement for John Carpenter and
decided to evaluate again after 3 months. However, after review, Carpenter was noticed that
there was no improvement in his work and rather he has degraded his performances.
Carpenter lost his position and was being demoted to the post of financial analyst, who has
lesser responsibilities, although with same payment (Van Dooren, Bouckaert & Halligan,
2015). Amato gave him option to get demoted to general accountant and even getting
terminated for his inability during performances. Carpenter selected the option of demotion
with decrement in wages from 65000 dollars to 61000 dollars. However, he was unable to
meet minimum targets, that are set for John and thus he was sacked from the post. John filed
a legal complaint against the organization of Mills for discrimination in age, intentional
infliction for emotional distresses and even unfair performance appraisal.
According to the management of Mills Paper Company, the performance of Carpenter
degraded majorly and he was not being able to perform as per expectations. Although he was
given deadline and few opportunities for working in a better manner, he did not improve
himself and hence was terminated from the post (Ahmed et al., 2016). They have been
following MBO or management by objectives appraisal system for their employees. The
major strengths of management by objectives performance appraisal are as follows:

3
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
i) Better Management: The first strength of MBO is that it helps in better
management of organization and organizational people. This strength is required for setting
goals for all types of activities to ensure that the goals are being achieved (Mone & London,
2018). The organizational resources and objectives are also well balanced and objectives act
as controls as well as performance standards.
ii) Clarifying Organization: The second important and significant strength of
performance appraisal of management by objectives is clarifying organizational structure and
roles. Both authority and responsibility are being assigned according to need of tasks
(Nielsen, 2013). There exists no utilization of fixing objectives without delegation of
requisite authority.
iii) Encouragement of Personal Commitment: MBO performance appraisal is also
required for encouraging personal commitments. The employees commit themselves towards
their achievement of all specific objectives or goals. They can follow the instructions
provided by supervisors and thus discipline is highly maintained (Kearney, 2018). The main
purpose of this type of appraisal is that the employees do not face any complexity during goal
achievement.
iv) Development of Controls: The final strength of MBO is that it is effective in
devising efficient controls. The requirement to set these controls would be setting of
standards and also finding out deviations (Shields et al., 2015). The verifiable goals are being
set and hence organizational performances are checked properly.
In spite of having such distinctive strengths, there are few weaknesses that are
required to be analysed for this purpose and these weaknesses are as follows: