Question

How can a top management team lower the chances that key managers will pursue their own self-interests at the expense of stockholders? At the expense of the employees? At the expense of other key stakeholders? Without compromising the identity of an individual or group of individuals, share examples you have witnessed where this type of behavior occurred. What action did senior management take to curb the behavior? If no action was taken, in your opinion what could have senior management done?

Answer 1

Exploiting power in an organization is not at all expected because corporates claim to be transparent but there are instances where individuals actually take the advantage of their power t enjoy a better position in the organization. Generally mid management and even senior management employees actually tend to display such behaviors but the organizations need to take care of such situations so that such situations do not arise. The senior management team needs to be very much active in order to curb such instances because it is believed that they actually has the power to do so and bring in the change. There are managers who pursue their self interests at the cost of the employees and stockholders and they actually exploit and use their power in order to fulfill their self interest which should not be expected from a manager of employees.

I have witnessed such a situation in my workplace when I had just joined the organization. My manager was a person who was involved in managerial work only, although he was assigned technical duties too because in our organization there is no purely managerial role and even the managers have to contribute on real work. The assigned work my manager used to have, he used to assign it to employees who worked under his hierarchy and due to this he developed a bias towards these employees and used to discriminate them based on these. This had a lot of negative impact because there were actually deserving employees who were not promoted but the employees who used to do his work were promoted and given recognition too. I was just a junior employee then and had nothing to do with all these things and used to focus on my work more. The employees who felt deprived actually escalated the matter to the HR department and they wanted the senior management to get involved because my manager was a senior resource in the organization. The senior management took the issue up with priority and after a secret research they understood what is going and show caused my manager for the complaints filed against him which was valid. He was also given a strict warning and he was also stripped off his powers to quite some extent.