Vettel: On track for dismissal? What do you do when your employee thinks they know best?

Vettel: On track for dismissal? What do you do when your employee thinks they know best?


Sebastian Vettel has made the headlines again this week after suggesting that he would probably not follow team orders again, after having ignored a team order not to challenge team mate Webber in the Malaysian Grand Prix a couple of weeks ago.

How can Red Bull or any other company deal with a complete lack of regard for following instructions from one of their employees?

Every employment contract has implied into it an employee’s obligation to obey the employer’s lawful and reasonable orders. An employee’s refusal to obey such orders, as Vettel has done in this case, is potentially a fair reason to dismiss the employee for misconduct. However, the fact that an employee has disobeyed an instruction will not guarantee that a dismissal will be considered fair. There are three issues that Tribunals concentrate on when faced with disobedience dismissals: (1) whether the order given was legitimate; (2) whether the order was reasonable; and (3) the reasonableness of the employee's refusal.

Therefore, an individual dismissed in Vettel’s position would no doubt make arguments along the lines that it was not reasonable for Red Bull to instruct him not to race to the best of his ability and that his refusal to obey was reasonable given that his future career depends upon his continued success.

Of course, all of this is in fact irrelevant in the case of multi-world champion Vettel! When an employee is as successful and key to an organisation as Vettel is, it will usually take an extreme, and no doubt expensive, act of disobedience for their employer to consider dismissal.