Motivating Maiorino

Critical Issues On July 15th, 1991 the 63 year-old Fred Maiorino lost his job at the major pharmaceutical company, Schering-Plough. It was an ignominious end to an otherwise storied career of 35 years, and the culmination of an over two year struggle between Fred and his district manager, Jim Reed. In the legal battles that followed, Fred claimed that his termination was motivated by age discrimination on the part of his former employer, and eventually won a landmark victory of $8.44 million dollars, New Jersey’s largest ever age-discrimination award. The purpose of this paper is not pass judgment on Schering-Plough for its termination of Fred Maiorino, or whether their actions were right or wrong. We deal in the facts, not the morality of the situation – that is, an aging worker has a real or imagined failure to perform, in doing so he is eventually terminated from his job and prematurely ends a long and otherwise distinguished career. The focus of this paper is instead on the management failure that occurred – the lack of success in motivating Fred, the actions taken that led to a loss of confidence both in his employer, and Fred’s employer’s confidence in him, and more. All of these factors accumulated into the eventual loss of a distinguished and well-known employee in an industry that relies heavily on the interpersonal relationship and trust between a doctor and his pharmaceutical rep. Once Jim Reed determined that Fred wasn’t performing to his expectations, Reed took several steps to try and rectify the situation. Each of these actions will be mentioned in brief here, and then discussed more fully in the ‘recommendations’ section. To begin with, Reed offered Fred written encouragement, and also took steps to ‘coach’ Fred, gave him access to medical journals intended to help improve his sales pitch, and took a more personal interest my