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Employee Behavior In Wells Fargo

Good Essays

Wells Fargo was founded on March 18th, 1852 by Henry Wells and William Fargo to serve the West during the gold rush. The company offered Banking (buying gold and selling paper bank drafts as good as gold) and Express (rapid delivery of the gold and anything else valuable). They opened for business in San Francisco, and earned a reputation of trust by dealing rapidly and responsibly with people’s money. (History of Wells Fargo, n.d.) Today, Wells Fargo is a bank holding company that engages in the provision of banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance. Wells Fargo is #5 of the World’s largest Public Companies for 2017, according to Forbes. The company has a market value of $274.4 Billion with 269,100 employees. …show more content…

An individual’s conscious goals and intentions are the primary determinants of behavior. Once a person starts something, he or she pushes on until a goal is achieved. If a manager sets a difficult goal, and the person lacks the ability to accomplish it, there will not be an accomplishment and can instead encourage all sorts of undesired and unethical behavior. (Organizational Behavior & Management, 2016) Also the goals were set based on the bank’s objectives and not the customer’s financial needs. Another issue was low focus on behaviors. The organization asked for one set of behaviors, but rewarded another. In other words, they didn’t want their employees to open fake accounts, but gave them a bonus for doing just that. By focusing on the result of a number of accounts opened, they were communicating the message that behaviors didn’t matter, unless they were bad enough to get …show more content…

Wells Fargo has established their values as being committed to the best interests of its customers, but just posting them online or on an office wall wasn’t enough. Leaders need to live by those values every day because employees notice how they behave. If Wells Fargo is truly committed to the best interest of its customer’s, then employees should have goals that reflect that mission. Employees and the company could have benefitted from frequently reviewing their goals to ensure they kept up with the company’s mission and values. They need to set the right goals and have the right performance conversations. The high pressure and unrealistic goals was the primary issue that drove the employees to commit the fraud. If the managers had focused more on better motivational tactics, and reinforcing the values of the company rather than high pressure and scare tactics for performance goals not being met, there may have been a different outcome in how employees worked to meet their

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