Employee alcoholics in Nigeria often face termination of their
appointments for “gross misconduct.” Duty of care within Weberian
concept of corporate social responsibility obviously calls this practice
to question. This study investigated corporate handling of employee
alcoholics in Nigeria. It is hoped that the results will sensitize and
conscientize policy makers on the emerging debate that formal
organizations owe their employee alcoholics some elements of duty of
care. Twenty-nine (29) employees with problems of alcoholism were
purposively selected from 4 formal organizations in Delta State for the
study. Data were generated using a structured interview and a Focus
Group Discussion (FGD), involving personnel officers, alcoholics and
their families, as appropriate. Data analysis employed multidimensional
scaling method. The result shows that knowledge of
alcoholism was rated below average by both employee alcoholics and
their personnel officers (41.38% and 60%) respectively. Families of
alcoholics and personnel officers rated very low (89.65% and 40%)
respectively employee alcoholics’ work performance. And lastly,
corporate medical policy on employee alcoholics was rated very low
(80%) and very high (75.86%) by personnel officers and employee
alcoholics respectively. The paper concludes by suggesting that
employee alcoholics should be regarded as medically sick in
organizations corporate medical policy and, thus helped, rather than
being terminated.