Wells Fargo Case Study

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During the past year Wells Fargo, a well-recognized bank of the United States, has been trying to clean its name and the mess it got itself into, when it was brought to the public that the bank was involved in generating fraudulent checking and savings accounts for its clients without their knowledge or their authorization. “The way it worked was that employees moved funds from customers' existing accounts into newly-created ones without their knowledge or consent”
Wells Fargo set an unattainable goal for their employees and this caused that most of them enrolled in unpractical procedures in order to achieve the target that was set. in order to do that, employees used every resource they had and ended up creating fake paperwork and opening …show more content…

Fear of Conflict and Artificial Harmony
It appears that, when employees who were responsible for sales, could not achieved the desired goals, preferred not to say anything and instead, enroll in unethical behaviors such as opening accounts without the client’s approval. It seems that they decided to handle the situation the way they did because they did not feel comfortable about speaking up and addressed the problems to their supervisors. I looked like they kept silence because they did not want to create any problems or conflicts and preferred to maintained the artificial harmony established within the company. All this behavior led to believe that the whole problem started not with the fear of conflict but with one dysfunction lower, Absence of trust. How do we expect that the employees feel comfortable about speaking up about how they feel and the things they do not feel good about if they don’t trust their supervisors or even their …show more content…

The Bank also said that they are going to refund the money to all the customers that were affected by the fraud and that they are also willing to pay all the penalty fees. In my opinion, giving the clients, their money back is a good start good but that is only an external fixture. In order for them to fix the problem from the root, they need to work on it internally too. Obviously, the CEO had a very important part in the problem. He was supposed to keep track of everything and should have seen that something was not right a long time ago. Also, the company needs to come up with a new sale strategy and set S.M.A.R.T. goals for the long and short run and reevaluate these decisions based on the outcomes. Wells Fargo needs to implement a system in where employee's ideas can be heard. They need to feel comfortable enough to speak up their minds and give their opinions and that their opinions are going to be taken into consideration for future decisions.

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