Managerial Ethics In Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo has long had a “going for gr-eight” initiative where they encouraged customers to carry at least eight different Wells Fargo products (Whitehouse, 2015). Many speculate that this initiative is the reason Wells Fargo has been under heightened scrutiny and accused of fraudulent practices that resulted in a 2013 Times Investigation (Koren, 2015). At that time, employees and customers began to complain and file legal actions against the company related to the company’s reportedly aggressive sales culture. Regulators are estimating that Wells Fargo opened an estimated 2 million deposit and credit card accounts without customer’s knowledge (Koren, 2016). Former employees are now filing claims against the company because they claim that they were forced to forge customer signatures that were procedurally required to open up the ghost accounts that customers had never applied for, and order credit cards without the customer’s permission; all on the premise of meetings very strict sales quotas. Employees are also

The text states that managerial ethics is “an individual’s responsibility to make business decisions that is legal, honest, moral, and fair” (Parnell, 2014). Based on researching the case and reading the text; I believe that Wells Fargo was affected by an ethics problem to begin with. Parnell (2014), states that “managerial ethics pertains to individuals, not corporate behavior” and “organizations can foster ethic decision making in a number of ways”. I am of the opinion that the organization failed to foster ethical decision making because of the fact that they were pushing their employees to meet sales quotas that were unattainable. The employees that felt it was ok to engage in the opening of accounts, forging of signatures, and ruining of the lives of unsuspecting customers suffered from a lack of