Mills Paper Company: Performance Management and Age Discrimination

This report analyzes the performance management practices of Mills Paper Company, focusing on the case of John Carpenter, a general accountant who was terminated due to poor performance. The report evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of the company's Management by Objectives (MBO) performance appraisal system, including its impact on employee commitment and organizational structure. It further examines the actions of Lance Amato, the CFO, regarding Carpenter's termination, providing a perspective on the timing and fairness of the decision. The report also identifies relevant employment laws, such as job discrimination and age discrimination, that are applicable to the case, and outlines the elements of a legally defensible performance appraisal system. The analysis highlights potential legal vulnerabilities and offers insights into improving performance management practices to avoid similar issues in the future.

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:

4
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
i) Failure in Providing Guidelines: This is the first and the foremost weakness of
MBO performance appraisal in Mills Paper Company The goal setters do not get proper
guidelines from this appraisal and hence organization suffers major issue.
ii) Difficulty in Setting Objectives: Another significant weakness of this particular
management by objectives appraisal is that there is difficulty in setting objectives (Vukšić,
Bach & Popovič, 2013). It needs subsequent information to arrive at conclusion and since
MBO does not help in setting objectives, several organizations often avoid this performance
appraisal for their employees.
iii) Danger of Inflexibility: This is the third distinctive and important weakness of
MBO. It is extremely inflexible to be implemented and employees might face major issues
due to such inflexibility and organizational performances would be degraded majorly. This
weakness can even lead to make the corporate objectives completely obsolete for revised
policies.
iv) Emphasis on Short Term Objectives: The final weakness of MBO is that it puts
on emphasis over short term objectives. An organization becomes successful with both long
term and short term objectives (Khamooshi & Golafshani, 2014). However, MBO only
focuses on short term objectives and there is a high possibility that long term and short term
objectives might not be compatible with one another.

5
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Question 2
Observation of Lance Amato for Carpenter getting terminated earlier
Lance Amato is the CFO of Mills Company and he has worked with John Carpenter.
He has made an observation that John must have been sacked earlier. I completely agree with
his observation. Since, John was unable to improve his performance even after receiving
several warnings and targets from his seniors. Moreover, he even had been demoted with
lower pay (Decramer, Smolders & Vanderstraeten, 2013). Two years earlier, when he was
hired by Mills Paper Company, John had to sign a written agreement on performance, a
standardized ethical letter, a confidentiality and integrity agreement and a patent for his work.
The expectations as well as objectives of positions of the employees were being put into the
performance agreement per year. Carpenter and the supervisor had eventually agreed on
performance objectives as well as metrics as per MBO agreement.
The tenure of Carpenter at Mills Company was marred by several demotions and poor
performance appraisals (Cascio, 2014). However, after first quarter of working, John received
a poorer performance rating from the immediate supervisor. Moreover, other supervisors and
managers have also complained about Carpenter regarding his performance. However, after
several warnings and targets, when he was terminated from the post, he was extremely
shocked and emotionally distressed. The main reason for such emotional instability is that he
did not expect that he will not be getting any more chances from his company (Cania, 2014).
As he had already got few opportunities and chances, expectations were rose to a high level.
Moreover, since he had joined this organization at 56 years of age with sufficient
experience, he was unable to cope up with the new advancements and ideas that Mills Paper
Company and Crane wanted to impose on him. This type of frustration led to John Carpenter
to file a legal case against Mills Company even after getting severance pay for 21 weeks and

6
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
payment for the unutilized vacation time and could even utilize organizational outplacement
services. However, if he had been terminated earlier, his expectations would not have been
built and Mills Paper Company would not have faced such legal situations. Therefore, I
strongly agree with the observation of Lance Amato regarding John Carpenter’s termination.

7
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Question 3
Employment Laws relevant to Performance Appraisals for Carpenter against Mills Paper
Company with elements of Legally Defensible Performance Appraisal System
The major employment laws that are appropriate for performance appraisals for John
Carpenter against Mills Paper Company are as follows:
i) Job Discrimination: The first and the foremost employment law that is absolutely
relevant to performance appraisal for the case study of Mills Paper Company is job
discrimination (Nkomo, Fottler & McAfee, 2017). According to this employment law, no
organization has the right to differentiate or discriminate an employee based on their job or
performances.
ii) Overtime or Minimum Wage: The second employment law at is absolutely
relevant to performance appraisal for the case study of Mills Paper Company is overtime or
minimum wage (Noe et al., 2017). The wage or salary of the employee should not be affected
at any cost, however in this case scenario, after demotion, the salary of John Carpenter was
being reduced.
iii) Gender Pay Differences: Another distinctive and important employment law at is
absolutely relevant to performance appraisal for the case study of Mills Paper Company is
gender pay differences (Emerson, 2014). It is expected that since John is a man, Mills Paper
Company was able to terminate him easily, however the scenario would have been different
for a lady and it proves gender biased.
iv) Age Discrimination: The final important and significant employment law at is
completely relevant to the performance appraisal for the case study of Mills Paper Company
and John Carpenter is age discrimination. Carpenter was 56 years old, when he joined Mills

8
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Company and hence faced major age discrimination in work, which led to meeting targets
and not improving in work performances.
Yes, I think that John Carpenter prevails in the charges against Mills Paper Company.
The main reason for such statement is that he has faced major discrimination, in terms of age,
gender, wages and job discrimination (Noe et al., 2017). He was even demoted from his prior
position with less pay, which led to major emotional distress as well as effect on
performances.
The major elements of a legally defensible performance appraisal system are as
follows:
i) Employee Position.
ii) Standards Used.
iii) Critical Job Requirements and Expectations before Appraisal.
iv) System should not be based on comparisons between Employees.
v) Annual Performance Appraisal and Documentation of Performance Discussion.
vi) Proper Training.
vii) Timely Feedback.

9
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
References
Ahmed, T. M., Bezemer, C. P., Chen, T. H., Hassan, A. E., & Shang, W. (2016, May).
Studying the effectiveness of application performance management (APM) tools for
detecting performance regressions for web applications: an experience report.
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software
Repositories (pp. 1-12). ACM.
Cania, L. (2014). The impact of strategic human resource management on organizational
performance. Economia. Seria Management, 17(2), pp.373-383.
Cascio, W. F. (2014). Leveraging employer branding, performance management and human
resource development to enhance employee retention.
Decramer, A., Smolders, C., & Vanderstraeten, A. (2013). Employee performance
management culture and system features in higher education: relationship with
employee performance management satisfaction. The International Journal of Human
Resource Management, 24(2), 352-371.
Emerson, R. W. (2014). Business law. 5th Edition.
Kearney, R. (2018). Public sector performance: management, motivation, and measurement.
Routledge.
Khamooshi, H., & Golafshani, H. (2014). EDM: Earned Duration Management, a new
approach to schedule performance management and measurement. International
Journal of Project Management, 32(6), 1019-1041.
Mone, E. M., & London, M. (2018). Employee engagement through effective performance
management: A practical guide for managers. Routledge.

10
MILLS PAPER COMPANY
Nielsen, P. A. (2013). Performance management, managerial authority, and public service
performance. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 24(2), 431-458.
Nkomo, St. M., Fottler, M. D., & McAfee, R. B. (2017). Human Resource Management
Applications: Cases, Exercises, Incidents, and Skill Builders. 7th Edition.
Noe, R. A., Hollenbeck, J. R., Gerhart, B., & Wright, P. M. (2017). Human resource
management: Gaining a competitive advantage. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill
Education.
Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., ... &
Plimmer, G. (2015). Managing employee performance & reward: Concepts,
practices, strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Van Dooren, W., Bouckaert, G., & Halligan, J. (2015). Performance management in the
public sector. Routledge.
Vukšić, V. B., Bach, M. P., & Popovič, A. (2013). Supporting performance management with
business process management and business intelligence: A case analysis of integration
and orchestration. International journal of information management, 33(4), 613-619.