662
Syllabus
magnitude and constitutional significance of the risks of erroneous punishment of protected speech and of erroneous exculpation of unprotected speech that the procedure involves. In evaluating these factors here, the key is the government employer's interest in achieving its goals as effectively and efficiently as possible. Pp. 668-675. (b) The Court of Appeals' approach gives insufficient weight to this interest, since it would force the government employer to come to its factual conclusions through procedures that substantially mirror the evidentiary rules used in court, whereas employment decisions are frequently and properly based on hearsay, past similar conduct, personal knowledge of people's credibility, and other factors that the judicial process ignores. Pp. 675-677. (c) On the other hand, courts must not apply the Connick test only to the facts as the employer thought them to be, without considering the reasonableness of the employer's conclusions. It is necessary that the decisionmaker reach its conclusion about what was said in good faith, rather than as a pretext; but it does not follow that good faith alone is sufficient under the First Amendment. Mt. Healthy City Bd. of Ed. v. Doyle, 429 U. S. 274, and Pickering v. Board of Ed. of Township High School Dist. 205, Will Cty., 391 U. S. 563, distinguished. P. 677. (d) Thus, if an employment action is based on what an employee supposedly said, and a reasonable supervisor would recognize that there is a substantial likelihood that what was actually said was protected, the First Amendment requires that the manager proceed with the care that a reasonable manager would use before making an employment decision of the sort involved in the particular case. In situations in which reasonable employers would disagree about who is to be believed, or how much investigation needs to be done, or how much evidence is needed to come to a particular conclusion, many different courses of action will necessarily be reasonable, and only procedures outside the range of what a reasonable manager would use may be condemned as unreasonable. Pp. 677-678. 2. Applying the foregoing to this case demonstrates that petitioners must win if they really did believe Perkins-Graham's and Ballew's story, and fired Churchill because of it. That belief, based on the investigation petitioners conducted, would have been entirely reasonable. Moreover, as a matter of law, the potential disruptiveness of Churchill's speech would have rendered it unprotected under the Connick test. Nonetheless, the District Court erred in granting petitioners summary judgment, since Churchill has produced enough evidence to create a material issue of disputed fact about whether she was actually fired because of disruptive statements, or because of nondisruptive state-
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