Bernard Ebber Analysis

1 Bernard Ebbers leadership is charismatic and transactional leadership. Charismatic leadership style you can see how colleague/staff feel about him “When he enters a room, he is like a rock star,” one WorldCom employee said. “People wanted to touch him, shake his hand. He created tremendous wealth, at least on paper. People revered him.” (Bernard Ebbers: Innovative Leader or Reckless Risk Taker, p90) Murray Waldron, one of Ebbers’s original partners, described him as “the most focused leader I’d ever seen.” “He is absolutely one of the most incredible human beings I have come in contact with,” said Diana Day, who worked with Ebbers for nearly 20 years. “The Lord was his CEO, as (He) is all of ours.” (Bernard Ebbers: Innovative Leader or Reckless

“After you do enough of them, it kind of becomes part of your culture.” (Bernard Ebbers: Innovative Leader or Reckless Risk Taker, 2004,p91)

Ethical manager leadership: As his industry status increased, Ebbers was viewed by colleagues and members of the local community in Mississippi as a responsible business leader who was willing to give back to the community. He taught Sunday school at his local Baptist church, served meals to the needy at a Jackson restaurant, and lived modestly in a prefabricated home. He invested most of his wealth in company stock. (Bernard Ebbers: Innovative Leader or Reckless Risk Taker, 2004,p92)

The destructive behavior of regulatory problems, deflated stock and disgrace. He focused obsessively on keeping down costs. He questioned why expensive bagels, rather than cheaper food, were served at company meetings He keep the company revenue as high as Wall Street predict to keep stock price with fake financial report; U.S. regulatory agencies stepped in, claiming that WorldCom was attempting to monopolize the industry. (Bernard Ebbers: Innovative Leader or Reckless Risk Taker,2004,

Those individuals look outside themselves to rules and laws and to the expectations of significant others in their environments for guidance when determining the ethically right thing to do. Because these conventional-level individuals represent the large majority of workers, immediate supervisors should be among the most important sources of moral guidance for these employees, and we can expect that they will look to leaders for cues about what behavior is appropriate and inappropriate. Bernard kept the company culture as deviant and unethical by managing the supervisor and those have reward and punishment system to manage staff. So WorldCom became no tolerance of error and required all the staff behave as what they asked to do. That resulted in fraud financial report and bad stocks