Legal and ethical offenses and the scandal at Wells Fargo

Exercise five
Name
Institution/ Affiliation
Question One
What legal and ethical offenses did managers and staff commit related to the scandal at wells Fargo?
Ethical and legal standards are vital elements that guide a person's behavior in any organization. These moral standards are usually informed by social norms, cultural practices as well as religious influences. Most company’s policy requires officers, employees, business partners, directors, and other associates to maintain the highest standards of honesty and ethical conduct when conducting affairs of the organization (Barnett & Johnson, 2015). Similarly, it is the personal responsibility of any employee to observe ethical standards whether enforced by law or by business codes when performing his or her duties and responsibilities.
Despite the importance of the ethical and legal standards in promoting an effective business environment, employees often violate these values. Wells Fargo employees, for example, violated the ethical and legal standards by creating Fake emails and application of credit cards without customer's consent. By doing so, the employees infringed ethical principles of honesty as well as customer rights to confidentiality. Consequently, this led to the bank paying $285 million in fines to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
To minimize the incidence of corporate abuses, how should the firm prioritize stakeholders?
Incidences of corporate abuses can be in different forms but not limited to discrimination, harassment, unexplained demotion, unrealistic business targets, overwork, withholding of resources, arbitrary manipulation, increased surveillance, lack of support, penny-pinching, and systematic humiliation. These abuses not only interfere with organization goals and objectives but also damage employee’s morale to work. To minimize the incidence of corporate abuse, organizations should align their stakeholders effectively to allow peaceful coexistence in the workplace. Ethical decision making and prioritizing the stakeholders helps in communicating stakeholder’s expectation to a business. D’Cruz & Lutgen-Sandvik (2018), argued that every stakeholder in any ...