Just 31/2 years ago, Glenn “Doc” Rivers was the hottest young coach in the National Basketball Association. He had just finished his first season coaching the Orlando Magic, during which he had taken a star-deprived team widely expected to finish last in its division to within one game of making the NBA playoffs.

Rivers, then 38, was named the NBA’s coach of the year, an honor unusual for rookie coaches and unprecedented for a coach of a nonplayoff team.

In November, the same Doc Rivers was fired after the Magic lost 10 straight games. It wasn’t because his coaching skills had eroded. “We’re going in another direction,” is the way Magic General Manager John Gabriel diplomatically explained it when he told Rivers he was terminated.

Or as Magic Chief Operating Officer John Weisbrod told reporters: “We came to the conclusion that we weren’t getting the most out of our players.”

What really happened is a phenomenon that isn’t unique to sports. The Magic needed a scapegoat, and Doc Rivers appears to have been it.

“Scapegoats are common in sports, business, the political and social world – they’re common everywhere,” said Eduardo Salas, who teaches organizational psychology at the University of Central Florida.

Salas said there hasn’t been much scientific study on the subject, but he’s pretty sure why scapegoating is popular in the business world: It’s a lot easier to get rid of individuals or groups of people than it is to solve the underlying problems.

Who becomes the scapegoat depends on where the pressure is coming from, Salas said. “If it’s from the outside or from the shareholders, it’s the top guy. If it’s internal to the company, it won’t be the top guy. It will be somebody in the middle.”

Ed Gubman, a Chicago leadership consultant and author of “The Engaging Leader” (Dearborn, 2003) takes a more cynical view. He sees a troubling trend of the work force dividing into three categories:

n A small number of high-paid elites at the top.

n A second group comprising “the people who make you money, such as skilled production workers, salespeople, basketball players.”

n And a third group of lower-level workers – clerks, customer service representatives, maintenance people, ushers at stadiums – “that you get away with as few as you can, and outsource them if possible.”

Gubman said scapegoating is often a case of elites protecting elites by scapegoating those in the groups below them. Contrary to the popular conception, Gubman believes that “the higher you go (in work force hierarchies), the less accountability there is. Elites are covered in Teflon, and nothing seems to bother them.”

But Gina Hall, an Orlando managing consultant for DBM, an international human resources consulting company, said scapegoating isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

“In today’s environment, businesses are looking for outcomes and successes,” Hall said. “Typically there’s a period of time during which they want to see results. If that doesn’t happen, something has to happen in the management ranks.”

In the business world, “people at the top don’t usually pay for problems, at least not initially, said University of Central Florida history Professor Richard Crepeau. “Instead, there are a lot of sacrificial lambs beneath them, like at the vice presidential level.”

When you coach a pro or college sports team, “what you are doing is put on display in full public view once or several times a week. Your work is judged by everybody,” said Crepeau, a sports historian. “In business, you don’t have that. There’s a lot of cover. There’s no audience cheering or booing you.”

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t scapegoats in the workplace. In fact, said Crepeau, scapegoats are “a basic staple of management. When things go wrong, somebody has got to take the blame.”

But even if things go right over the long haul, leaders and managers eventually wear out their welcome. The rule of thumb in universities, Crepeau said, is that administrators have an effective span of no more than seven to 10 years. “I suspect the time limit may be shorter in some businesses.”

But wearing out one’s welcome and moving on isn’t the same thing as being scapegoated and fired.

Scapegoating is more likely to take place if a company’s climate fosters it, said Salas, the UCF organizational psychologist. If the climate is cutthroat, with everyone out for himself or herself, scapegoating will thrive, he said.

On the other hand, Salas added, “if you have an organization that tolerates and learns from mistakes with a climate where people are not afraid to do things and talk about problems, (scapegoating) is minimized.”