Personnel actions & the Rolda analysis

Some of the stress a worker attributes to the job comes not from the work itself but from how the worker was managed — a discipline, a performance evaluation, a demotion, a termination. The statute treats these differently. Under §3208.3(h)the subdivision that excludes lawful, good-faith personnel actions from the industrial causation calculation, a lawful, nondiscriminatory, good-faith personnel action that is a substantial cause of the injury is a defense, and those causes are excluded from the industrial calculation. The reasoning is that an employer should not be liable for psychiatric harm flowing from legitimate, fairly conducted management decisions.

That carve-out is not automatic. The Rolda analysis is the sequence the Workers' Compensation Appeals Board uses to test it, and a clinician's apportionment should mirror its logic.

1. 1Determine the actual events of employment — the specific, concrete occurrences the worker points to, separated from subjective interpretation.
2. 2Decide whether the predominant cause of the psychiatric injury is industrial under the §3208.3 more-than-50% standard.
3. 3If good-faith personnel actions are a substantial cause, determine whether those actions were lawful and conducted in good faith — and if so, exclude them from the industrial calculation.

The ordering matters. The personnel-action defense is reached only after the actual events are pinned down and the predominant-cause question is framed; it then subtracts qualifying personnel-action causes from what counts as industrial. The employer bears the burden of proving that a personnel action was lawful and undertaken in good faith — it is not the worker's job to disprove good faith.

In the teaching case, the psychologist's apportionment assigns 5% to a good-faith personnel action. That slice is small and, being a qualifying good-faith action, is set aside from the industrial side of the ledger. It does not threaten the determination, because work exposure already stands at 70% — but recording it accurately is what makes the opinion defensible rather than merely favorable.