Office Liaison Can Affect Job of Either Party

When Barbara and Jim Prouty got married, the Irvine engineering company they both worked for asked that one of them quit. The choice was up to them.

They based their decision on practicality: As a project manager, Jim earned more than Barbara did as his administrative assistant.

She left; he stayed. But she wasn’t happy about it: “I thought I was a good worker, making good money, and I had three children (from a previous marriage) I was responsible for. I was very independent. I didn’t just want to lay the financial burden on Jim.”

For years, the norm was that when an office romance led to job loss, the loser was the woman. More and more, though, decisions are being made case by case. Even though it was Barbara who ended up leaving, the decision was in the couple’s hands, not the company’s.

Take the case of Standley Hoch, chief executive of General Public Utilities in New Jersey. He quit last spring when it was revealed that he was having an affair with Susan Schepman, director of human resources. The charge was that he had helped her professionally. Three weeks later, she quit as well.

A recent issue of Working Woman magazine compares the Hoch-Schepman case with a more famous incident that happened more than a decade earlier to William Agee and Mary Cunningham.

Cunningham was a vice president of Bendix Corp. and Agee was the chief executive. They were accused of having an affair that had led to Cunningham’s speedy rise up the corporate ladder. She was forced to resign; he kept his job.

Working Woman says the Hoch-Schepman case signals “new rules of romance between boss and subordinate . . . neither party is likely to go unscathed.”

Mark Alch, senior vice president of Drake Beam Morin Inc. in Irvine, said that subordinates--whether men or women--are being given more consideration. The reason is legal liability.

“Companies are very careful of litigation,” said Alch, whose outplacement company counsels people who have been fired and helps prepare them for a job search. “A spurned lover can say, ‘You promised me a life together, then you threw me out. The company was aware of it and allowed it to happen,’ ” and therefore could be sued.

He said that companies were aware of those possibilities even before the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings made sexual harassment a household topic.

One of the reasons women seemed to lose out for years when office romances became public is that they more often worked in lower-level jobs. Now that women are better represented in positions of corporate leadership, one would think that would change.

Neither Alch nor fellow outplacement counselor Bill Ellermeyer of Lee Hecht Harrison Inc. in Irvine said they were aware of any Southern California men who had lost a job over an office romance.

Ellermeyer pointed out that the premise that subordinates are harmed by office romances with their bosses is flawed. “It’s often beneficial to the lower-level person,” he said. “In my years in the corporate world, I’ve often noticed that the more junior person seems privileged for a time.”

In fact, Ellermeyer met his wife at work, while he was a human relations director and she was a receptionist.

“On paper, it’s not something that should be done, but I’m sure it happens a lot,” he said. “This is a difficult topic. As long as there are men and women, they’re going to get together.”

Barbara Prouty said she faced that problem as well. She was offered the possibility of transferring to another division after she married, but none of the other managers wanted to be Barbara’s boss.

“The divisions were very competitive,” she said. “No boss really wanted me because they thought I would go home and tell Jim everything.”

Two years after Barbara quit, Jim did also. They have started their own engineering company from their Laguna Hills home, Provista Inc. The company consults with manufacturing firms to help them address pollution and waste disposal regulations.

Beginning a new business could have been stressful to their relationship, but Barbara thinks it helped that they worked together before. She said that their office romance, eventually, resulted in a happy ending.