How Does Bernard Ebbers Influence Unethical Behavior

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1. Bernard Ebbers showed a lot of leadership because he had a lot of followers. His reputation and charisma created trust and loyalty. Bernard’s deviant behaviors came from him being obsessed with maintaining an unsustainable growth (The Role of Leaders in Influencing Unethical Behavior in the Workplace 2005). This lead to him and his subordinates doing unethical business practices. He showed leadership by cutting operating costs and investing most of his money back into the company stock. His deviant behaviors included giving personal loans for people to invest in WorldCom, not keeping an email record of conversations, and doing creative accounting to meet stock projections each quarter (The Role of Leaders in Influencing Unethical Behavior …show more content…
From those quotes I gather that he had a lot of good leadership qualities. There was a combination of a social contract theory and stakeholder theory. The social contract theory was in place because WorldCom employed over 80,000 people and did charitable work in the community (Ebbers Is Sentenced to 25 Years For $11 Billion WorldCom Fraud 2005). Employees want to work for viable and profitable businesses. There’s a level of comfort in knowing that you job will be there tomorrow, and your paycheck will arrive on time. The business also had a lot of stakeholder theory qualities. The stakeholders are the 20 million consumers and 80,000 employees as well as the communities in which WorldCom served (The Role of Leaders in Influencing Unethical Behavior in the Workplace 2005). These people were depending on WorldCom to be a sustainable company. He used social learning to model how he wanted his employees to behave. There seems to be some level of liking and affection for him. I don’t know if that was genuine or because he was making them a lot of money. There was some degree of organizational citizenship as least among the …show more content…
Bernard did a lot of the things necessary to inspire others to follow him. He did a lot of social modeling to let his employees know what was expected of them. An example of this is him personally turning off lights. He also appears to have created a culture of frugalness. He saves money every chance he gets which lets employees know that they’re expected to cut costs when possible. The company was viable, and he could have been successful without defrauding millions of people. They had a 5-10% growth each year. Stocks do not have to constantly go up, he could have continued to be frugal and continued that growth trajectory and the company would have been successful (The Role of Leaders in Influencing Unethical Behavior in the Workplace 2005).

References
Searcey, D., Young, S., and Scannell, K (2005). Ebbers Is Sentenced to 25 Years For $11 Billion
WorldCom Fraud. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB112126001526184427
Trevino, L. and Brown, M. (2005). The Role of Leaders in Influencing Unethical Behavior in the
Workplace. In R.E. Kidwell and C.L. Martin (Eds.) Managing Organizational Deviance (pp. 69-96). California: Sage

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