When corporate culture breeds

A positive corporate culture encourages employees to behave in responsible, ethical ways, resulting in a happy workplace, team collaboration and employee empowerment. Negative corporate cultures, on the other hand, can promote unethical behavior, causing a wide variety of problems.

Many of the corporate scandals in the past several years have been cases of wide-scale dishonesty:

• Wells Fargo – The cost of poor performance management – Wells Fargo’s pressure-cooker sales culture comes at a cost

• Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) – Total mismatch between the reality and the value statements

• Volkswagen – The cover up by Volkswagen of fake CO2 emissions data. A culture where performance was driven by fear and intimidation

• Deutsche Bank – The endless numbers of scandals at Deutsche Bank, continue to make headlines across the world. Pressure to make transformational change

It’s hard to fathom how lying and deceit permeated these organizations. The scandals have illustrated how the behaviors of managers can have devastating consequences for the entire organization and beyond.