Ebbers Deviant Behavior

Leaders are those that other follows. In the business world, Bernard Ebbers demonstrated his leadership skills by growing his small-scale long-distance service company into a multi-billion telecommunication giant in the country. According to the Washington Post, the acquisition of MCI Communications Corp. in 1998 was the largest deal in history at the time (Washington Post, 2005). “Focused”, “mentor”, “incredible”, were some of the words used by his former employees to described Ebbers as a leader (Trevino, L. and Brown, M., 2005). On the contrary, some believe Ebbers displayed destructive deviant behavior, which was not accepted socially. Ebbers’ management philosophy was to aggressively grow while cutting cost down. Even after the 40 million dollar acquisition of MCI (Washington Post, 2005), the company announced a 2000 job cut (Trevino, L. and Brown, M., 2005), and such approach showed little to no concern over providing job security to its employees. The focus was on inflating company’s stock value rather than on the operation of the business itself. The effect of this irresponsible corporate behavior created widespread consequences beyond their own organization (Isaacs, 2002). In addition, Ebbers also paid no attention to his employee’s work environment; he bureaucratically cut off

In an interview by the New York Times, Susan Kalla (2002) said, “Bernie was endearing, but he didn’t even have a working knowledge of the business”. WorldCon’s newly acquired companies never consolidated into a single enterprise, which affects the day-to-day function of the company (Eichenwald, 2002). Without solid growth in the core business activities, accounting mishaps would be the only way to manipulate company earnings in order to meet those aggressive targets required to keep the company stock prices