Sacked!

Not me. At least, not as far as I know. But I have been reading some bits and pieces about the whole notion this week. There isn't all that much that I could find that's been written about it - I guess beause it's hard to find large numbers of willing participants, but I'd be really pleased if anyone knows of any research or could direct me to something that might be interest. In particular I'm really trying to find out what impact being sacked has on career trajectories - do people's careers recover, and if so what factors contribute to a successful future career?

There has been quite a bit written about what happens when CEOs are sacked, some of which is quite interesting. One paper ( Ward et al 1995) found that the age at which the CEOs are sacked makes quite a difference to their future career path. The very worse time to be sacked is, apparently, in your fifties. Earlier than that, and you have a high chance of finding another similar CEO role, and from 60 onwards, you're in a pretty good position to find one or more advisory positions, but in your fifties, you appear to be caught between the two - possibly seen as too old for a CEO post and too inexperienced for an advisory role. But the paper doesn't make it clear whether these career paths are specifically linked to the fact that the participants in the study were sacked.

The other thing the paper looked at is whether the reason for the sacking made a difference to the future career path of the CEOs. The authors classified the reasons for sacking into two categories - reasons which might be thought of as negative (e.g. fraud, poor performance, misconduct etc) and those which might be thought of as neutral (such as taking responsibility for someone else's mistake, leaving after a takeover or going on a point of principle), and found that CEOs sacked for "negative" reasons were only marginally less likely to find successful future positions than those who were sacked for neutral reasons.

I found another paper looking at sackings in young people (Kellner et al 2011). It didn't follow participants' careers after sacking, but provided quite an interesting analysis of the reasons for the sackings. Now it must be borne in mind that the analysis was based entirely on the reports of those who had been sacked, (althogh the researchers seemed to use quite thorough interviewing skills to try and unearth the details of the circumstances, and it was quite a large sample n=1259) but the reasons for sackings were to my mind, quite shocking, in terms of the widespread non-compliance with equal opportunities legislation. The most common category of reasons was "leave or personal circumstance" of which the biggest categories were sick leave and injury. Many of those sacked for taking sick leave took only a single day's leave and 1/5th provided a medical certificate to explain their absence. Of those sacked for or following an injury, 4/5ths sustained their injuries at work, as part of their duties. The quotes from participants were astonishing, one participant, for example, saying "chemical burns at work to eyes and stomach. Coerced into resigning when put in Work Cover claim".
The final category I'm going to mention is that 60 of the participants had been sacked for being pregnant, in general when the women suffer from morning sickness.

Discrimination, alive and kicking.

Kellner, A., McDonald, P. and Waterhouse, J. (2011) "Sacked! An investigation of young workers' dismissal", Journal of Management and Organisation 17 (2) 226 - 244
Ward, A., Soonenfeld, J.A. and Kimberly, J.R. (1995) "In Search of a Kingdon: determinants of subsequent career outcomes for chief executives who are fired" Human Resource Management 34 (1) 117 - 139