Gross misconduct justifies summary dismissal and this will normally cover acts of intentional misconduct but can also include acts or omissions of gross negligence. That is, when misconduct is unintentional.
In the case of Adesokan v Sainsbury’s [2017] EWCA Civ 22, A senior manager responsible for 20 supermarkets discovered that the junior manager had circulated in email inviting staff to manipulate sales results. When the senior manager discovered this email until the junior manager to “clarify it”. The senior manager did not even check that it had been done.
The manipulation of the figures was a clear breach of the standards within the supermarket and was regarded by the supermarket as fundamental to its work ethos. The result was that the senior manager was summarily dismissed for gross miss conduct is based on his gross negligence in not dealing with this issue properly. Then resulted in the senior manager bringing a common law claim for wrongful dismissal. However he lost his claim. The trial judge accepted that the manager had not acted dishonestly or intentionally but there was an element of gross negligence and therefore came within the scope of gross miss conduct is for stop the decision was approved by the CA which quoted earlier guidance on the point: ‘The focus is on the damage to the relationship between the parties. Dishonesty and other deliberate actions which poison the relationship
will obviously fall into the gross misconduct category, but so in an appropriate case can an act of gross negligence.’
The CA decided that the correct test is whether the negligent dereliction of duty was “so grave and weighty” as to amount to
justification for summary dismissal. In this case it was but the Court of Appeal made it clear this was an unusual case.
