HRM70304 Managing People for Performance Assessment 3 September 2025

ASSESSMENT SUBMISSION DECLARATION FORM

Dear Students,

Taylor’s University/College upholds the highest standards of academic integrity. Students must complete their work honestly and ethically, ensuring that all submitted assessments reflect their own understanding and efforts. Any form of academic misconduct, including but not limited to plagiarism, collusion, contract cheating, falsification, and unauthorised use of Gen AI tools, is strictly prohibited and will be subject to disciplinary action in accordance with university regulations.

In this form, there are two (2) sections namely: Section 1 Instruction on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (to be completed by the module leader) and Section 2 Student Acknowledgement and Declaration (to be completed, signed and submitted by the students together with their assessment).

Students are responsible for properly acknowledging all sources, tools, and external contributions in their work. Misuse of AI-generated content, failure to attribute sources, or engagement in dishonest practices may result in penalties ranging from warnings to expulsion, as outlined in the Student Handbook.

This Assessment Submission Declaration Form is attached to the assessment brief. Students are required to complete the Assessment Submission Declaration Form in any piece of work submitted at Taylor’s University/College, except for assessments completed and submitted in controlled environments. For group assessments, each member of the group must complete an Assessment Submission Declaration Form.

SECTION 1: INSTRUCTION ON THE USE OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FOR THIS ASSESSMENT

The section below is to be completed by the module leader, i.e. module leader is to put a ‘v’ in the relevant checkbox.

INFORMATION ON PENALTIES RELATING TO ACADEMIC MISCONDUCT

 INFORMATION ON INVESTIGATION PROCESS REGARDING SUSPECTED MISUSE OF GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TOOLS

SECTION 2: STUDENT ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND DECLARATION

(*This section is to be completed by students. Students must submit the completed and signed copy of this form together with their assessment)

Part A

 Case study

“A Yahoo Employee-Ranking System Favored by Marissa Mayer is Challenged in Court”

One of Marissa Mayer’s signature policies as chief executive of Yahoo has been the quarterly performance review, in which every employee at the company is ranked on a scale of 1 to 5. The ratings have been used to fire hundreds of employees since Ms. Mayer joined the company in mid-2012.

Now, as Ms. Mayer prepares to announce a streamlining plan on Tuesday that is likely to involve even more job cuts, one former manager who lost his job is challenging the entire system as discriminatory and a violation of federal and California laws governing mass layoffs.

In a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in San Jose, Calif., on Monday, Gregory Anderson, an editor who oversaw Yahoo’s autos, homes, shopping, small business and travel sites in Sunnyvale, Calif., until he was fired in November 2014, alleges that the company’s senior managers routinely manipulated the rating system to fire hundreds of people without just cause to achieve the company’s financial goals.

Mr. Anderson said the cuts, including what his boss said was the firing of about 600 other low-performing Yahoo employees at the time of his termination, amounted to illegal mass layoffs.

Under California law, the layoff of more than 50 employees within 30 days at a single location like Yahoo’s Sunnyvale headquarters requires an employer to give workers 60 days of advance notice. A similar federal law, known as the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act, requires advance notice for a layoff of 500 or more employees.

Yahoo has never provided such notices. But it did cut 1,100 employees over a period of months in late 2014 and early 2015, ostensibly for performance reasons.

Mr. Anderson’s suit provides a peek inside Yahoo’s controversial quarterly performance review system, which Ms. Mayer adopted on the recommendation of McKinsey & Company, a management consulting company. Similar systems were once widely used in corporate America, and companies like Amazon.com still employ analogous methods.

But others, like General Electric and Microsoft, have dropped such rankings as a tool for routine firings because of their corrosive effect on productivity and employee morale.

At Yahoo, the program, known internally as Q.P.R., has been a sore spot among managers and employees since it began. The court filing said that managers were forced to give poor rankings to a certain percentage of their team, regardless of actual performance. Ratings given by front-line managers were arbitrarily changed by higher-level executives who often had no direct knowledge of the employee’s work. And employees were never told their exact rating and had no effective avenue of appeal.

“The Q.P.R. process was opaque and the employees did not know who was making the final decisions, what numbers were being assigned by whom along the way, or why those numbers were being changed,” the lawsuit says. “This manipulation of the Q.P.R. process permitted employment decisions, including terminations, to be made on the basis of personal biases and stereotyping.”

Mr. Anderson said that in his case, he had received high ratings and a promotion before taking a leave of absence in the summer of 2014 to study at the University of Michigan on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. Although the fellowship leave was approved by two top Yahoo executives, Kathy Savitt and Jackie Reses, who have since left the company, Mr. Anderson said that his boss’s boss, Megan Liberman, called him on Nov. 10 to inform him that he was in the bottom 5 percent of the company’s work force, all of whom were being fired.

In the suit, Mr. Anderson said he was fired for several reasons unrelated to performance. He said he had complained to management about the impact of the Q.P.R. process on the people he supervised and had reported an attempted bribe management by one employee who wanted him to reduce another employee’s rating.

He also alleged gender discrimination, claiming that the media group, which was overseen by Ms. Savitt and Ms. Liberman, systematically favored women in hiring, promotions and layoffs.

Question 1.A

Quality of definition

Work Required: Define the term ‘Organizational Justice’ and its three categories —Distributive Justice, Procedural Justice, and Interactional Justice. While you should express the definitions of these categories in your own words, be sure to include citations for the sources you reference, specifying the author’s name and year of publication.

In preparing your answers, please pay attention to the following aspects: quality of sentencing and grammar, usage of clear structure, relevance of your justifications complete with references.

Reference List:

Insert ALL reference list here

Question 2.A

Identifying accurate misconducts

Work Required:  Following your reading of the case study, what ethical misconduct could Yahoo have committed if Anderson’s accusation was true? You are required to provide one misconduct for each of the following categories: Distributive justice, Procedural justice, and Interactional justice. The misconducts provided should be relevant and placed in the appropriate category. You are required to justify how the misconducts fit the selected category, using relevant citations to support your answer.

In preparing your answers, please pay attention to the following aspects: quality of sentencing and grammar, usage of clear structure, relevance of your justifications complete with references.

Reference List:

Insert ALL reference list here

Question 3.A

Quality of discussion

Work Required:  Illustrate four (4) aspects of the performance management system inclusive of the company processes you would like to reinvent at Yahoo based on the information in the case study and information from the module. Additionally, for each aspect, you are expected to provide at least one (1) real world example of a company known for its effective performance management system or a relevant theory.

In preparing your answers, please pay attention to the following aspects: quality of sentencing and grammar, usage of clear structure complete with introduction, body, and conclusion along with correct in-text citation and reference list formatting.

  Reference List:

Insert ALL reference list here

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Answer

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