A Manager Denies Training to a Bottom-Performing Employee and Lies That "Everyone's Vacationing Abroad"? Beware: Withholding Information Can Also Constitute Workplace Bullying

"His performance is already at the bottom. What's the point of the company spending money on new product training for him?"

"As a manager, shouldn't I naturally have the authority to decide who receives training?"

If a supervisor deliberately withholds work information and provides false information simply because an employee performs poorly—depriving them of opportunities to complete tasks or improve performance—the matter ceases to be a simple, lawful exercise of managerial discretion regarding reasonable and necessary training resource allocation.

Suppose headquarters of Blue Ocean Company is launching an important new product and notifies its Green Island branch: "Please have all sales team members return to headquarters for a two-day product training session."

Upon receiving the notification, Manager Wu of the Green Island branch thinks of Zhao A-min, whose performance has been dead last for years, and decides: "He won't sell well even after training anyway. Let's not waste company resources."

Consequently, all other sales staff receive the notice, while Zhao A-min remains completely uninformed.

On the day of the training, Zhao A-min notices the office is practically empty and asks the manager: "Where is everyone?"

The manager surprisingly replies: "They all took leave to travel abroad on their own!"

A few days later, when colleagues begin selling the new product, Zhao A-min learns that everyone was not abroad, but attending company-arranged new product training.

What is most noteworthy in this case is not merely that Zhao A-min "missed a trip to headquarters" or "lost two days of class." The crucial issue is whether the manager utilized managerial authority to deliberately deprive an already underperforming employee of information, resources, and improvement opportunities—only to subsequently issue a negative performance evaluation or even dismiss him on grounds of incompetence by demanding "why are you still underperforming?"

Article 2 of the Regulations Governing Measures for Preventing Workplace Bullying explicitly lists "disrupting or intentionally obstructing work, creating hardship through managerial authority, deliberately withholding information, or providing false information to a specific person" as typical behavioral patterns to be holistically considered when determining workplace bullying. Companies can no longer write off such management tactics simply as "a manager's personal management style."

For labor law compliance training, board member continuing education credits, external committee members for workplace harassment/bullying, and litigation mediation representation, please contact Yesin Law Firm (Tel: +886-2-25156822; Website: https://www.yesinlaw.com).

1. Deliberately withholding necessary work information can constitute an abuse of power.

A manager cannot set traps by stripping away essential work information and resources to guarantee an employee fails their targets, and then punish them for failing.

Workplace bullying does not always require aggressive yelling or overt verbal abuse.

Sometimes, the most insidious form of bullying occurs silently.

The manager doesn't yell at you or humiliate you; they simply withhold critical information.

Leaving you off meeting notices, delaying client information by a day, "accidentally" omitting product details in emails, stalling system access approvals, or sharing key decisions only with other colleagues—only to ask when things go wrong, "Why are you the only one in the company who didn't know?"

This represents job interference (work obstruction) that companies must guard against when preventing workplace bullying.

In the Blue Ocean Company example, if the new product training was mandated by headquarters for all sales personnel and directly impacted subsequent sales performance, the branch manager's intentional omission of Zhao A-min moves beyond routine training scheduling—it involves deliberately withholding information and obstructing work.

Even worse, when Zhao A-min explicitly asked, the manager fabricated the false claim that "others took leave to travel abroad."

This is no longer a mere administrative oversight like forgetting to forward a meeting invite. "Intentionally withholding information and fabricating lies to cover it up" can serve as critical evidence when establishing the perpetrator's subjective motivation.

When an investigation committee maps out a timeline connecting headquarters' notice, the manager's receipt timestamp, participant lists, Zhao A-min's inquiry records, and the manager's response, "why was he the only one kept in the dark?" becomes a pivotal question in the investigation.

2. Poor performance is never a justification for stripping resources to "prove" incompetence.

This tactic was once a common management bad habit, but in today's labor compliance landscape, it no longer holds water.

If Zhao A-min's performance ranks dead last long-term, the manager certainly has the right to conduct reasonable performance management and establish concrete improvement targets.

In fact, precisely because his performance is poor, the manager ought to investigate whether the root cause is skill, effort, product knowledge, client allocation, training deficiencies, or other factors.

However, if the manager's logic becomes: "Because your performance is poor, I won't let you receive training; because you weren't trained, you failed to sell the new product; and because you failed to sell the new product, it proves your performance is terrible," it creates a vicious cycle of spiraling performance.

Under these circumstances, future records of low performance brought forth by the company may be challenged: Does this record prove employee incompetence, or does it prove that the manager used power dynamics to deny the employee a fair opportunity to achieve work targets?

Managers possess management authority to reasonably allocate limited resources.

If a course has only two slots and the company selects candidates based on objective criteria such as job requirements, product lines, territories, or client segments, employees who are not selected cannot automatically claim bullying.

However, this case is different.

Assuming headquarters directed all sales reps to attend, but the manager singled out the lowest performer without legitimate business grounds and lied to conceal it, "resource allocation" transforms into creating deliberate hardship through authority.

Thus, the boundary between reasonable management and bullying isn't just "does the manager have the authority to decide?"

It also requires asking: "Is the manager's decision reasonable and necessary within legitimate business scope?"

3. Investigation panels must look beyond the single missing notification to examine if a broader pattern of "forced failure" exists.

If Zhao A-min files a complaint, the worst thing HR can do is merely ask Manager Wu: "Did you say everyone was traveling abroad?" and close the case when Wu replies: "I was just joking."

The Regulations Governing Measures for Preventing Workplace Bullying mandate a holistic assessment of background, frequency, location, motivation, and purpose. Therefore, a professional workplace bullying investigation must construct a complete timeline extending before and after the incident.

Is this training notice the only instance where Zhao A-min was kept in the dark? Or over the past six months:

• Were client leads always handed to him last?

  
  

• Was he consistently omitted from key meetings?

  
  

• Were his system access requests uniquely stalled?

  
  

• Was he the only one omitted from product updates?

  
  

• Did the manager accompany other sales reps to visit major clients, but never him?

  
  

And then, the annual evaluation records: "Lacks product knowledge, demonstrates poor information acquisition, and failed to meet targets."

If these occurrences recur, seemingly isolated events merge into a continuous pattern of job interference.

The investigation team must rigorously ensure evidence preservation—including headquarters' training notices, email delivery/receipt logs, forwarding records, participant lists, digital messages, course qualifications, subsequent sales targets, and performance review data.

The goal is not merely uncovering whether the manager lied, but determining whether the manager exploited control over information and resources to make it impossible for a specific employee to perform.

This marks the critical distinction between true labor compliance and mere HR intuition.

Advice from Attorney Chen Ye-xin

Does a manager failing to notify an employee about a single training session automatically constitute workplace bullying?

Certainly, such a hasty conclusion cannot be made.

Determinations must still return to the complete statutory elements of workplace bullying—holistically evaluating whether duties were performed in the workplace, duty or power dynamics, necessary and reasonable business scope, continuity or severe single instances, and physical or mental health harm.

However, Article 2 of the Regulations Governing Measures for Preventing Workplace Bullying explicitly highlights disrupting or obstructing work, creating hardship through managerial authority, withholding information, and providing false information. This serves as a vital warning to all managers:

Information is a weapon of workplace power.

A manager exercising reasonable management authority tells an underperforming employee: "Your product knowledge is lacking, so I've scheduled you for training, hoping to see improvement in three months."

A problematic manager thinks: "I'm intentionally keeping you in the dark so I can penalize you once you make a mistake."

The former resolves performance issues; the latter actively creates them.

Mature corporate HR governance does not demand that managers blindly share every piece of information with everyone. It requires companies to ensure that employees are provided with the information, tools, authorization, and training reasonably necessary to fulfill their roles. You cannot pull the ladder out from under an employee and then berate them for failing to reach the roof.

When the next manager prepares to quietly remove a low performer from a training roster—or lies to ensure they never know the session exists—will your investigation panel be able to distinguish whether this is legitimate management of an underperforming employee, or an abuse of information asymmetry breeding the next workplace bullying complaint?