Bad apples or poisonous tree? Corporate culture’s role in the Wells Fargo scandal
ISSN: 1544-9106
Publication date: 8 June 2023
Issue publication date: 7 November 2023
Case summary
Research methodology
This case investigation used firsthand statements, reports, testimony and regulatory records. While widely publicized in the popular press, this case is based on primary documents. On their website, many documents were obtained from Wells Fargo’s Corporate newsroom, such as the internal audit report shared with shareholders and press releases. Most other sources were from US regulatory websites (.gov) or congressional testimony. In a few places, quotes and comments came from reliable journalistic sites that cite their sources and follow a journalist’s code of ethics and conduct, ensuring that the reported remarks and data were verified.
Case overview/synopsis
Since 2016, Wells Fargo Bank has faced multiple customer mistreatment investigations and resultant fines. Public outcry and distrust resulted from Wells Fargo employees creating hidden accounts and enrolling people in bank services without their knowledge to meet desired levels of sustained shareholder growth. Over the past five years, Wells Fargo has been fined and returned to customers and stockholders over $3bn. Wells Fargo executives spent the first year of the scandal citing improper behavior by employees. Leadership did not take responsibility for setting the organizational goals, which led to employee misbehavior. Even after admitting some culpability in creating the extreme sales culture, executives and the Board of Directors tried to distance themselves from blame for the unethical behavior. They cited the organizations’ decentralized structure as a reason the board was not quicker in seeing and correcting the negative behaviors of these ‘bad apple’ employees. Wells Fargo faced multiple concurrent scandals, such as upselling services to retirees, inappropriately repossessing service members’ vehicles, adding insurance and extra fees to mortgages and other accounts and engaging in securities fraud. As time has passed, the early versions of a handful of “bad apples” seem to be only a part of the overall “poison tree.”The dilemma, in this case, is who is responsible for the misbehavior and the inappropriate sales of products and services (often without the customer’s knowledge)? Is strategic growth year-over-year with no allowances for environmental and economic factors a realistic and reasonable goal for corporations? This case is appropriate for undergraduates and graduate students in finance, human resources, management, accounting and investments.
Complexity academic level
An active case-based learning pedagogical approach is suggested. The materials include a short podcast, video and other materials to allow the faculty to assign pre-class work or to use in the classroom before a case discussion.
Keywords
Citation
Mullen, D.M., Wheatley, K. and Lamb, N. (2023), "Bad apples or poisonous tree? Corporate culture’s role in the Wells Fargo scandal", The CASE Journal, Vol. 19 No. 6, pp. 878-895. https://doi.org/10.1108/TCJ-01-2022-0002Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
“The recent discovery that Wells Fargo & Company fleeced its customers by opening fraudulent accounts […] demonstrates, at best, a reckless lack of institutional control, and, at worst, a culture which actively promotes wanton greed.”– (California State Treasurer John Chiang in a letter to the Wells Fargo Board, 2016d)
Introduction
On September 8, 2016, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced a $185m fine for Wells Fargo due to their creation of 1,500,000 checking and 500,000 credit card accounts without the consumers' consent (CFPB, 2016). The announcement shocked the financial industry. In the year before the scandal, investors voted the company as the seventh most respected in the USA – the highest of any bank (Racinelli, 2015).
Wells Fargo & Company (WFC), founded in 1852, is a publicly traded corporation with over a hundred bank-holding and financial holding wholly owned subsidiaries (Wells Fargo & Company, 2022). In 2017, the holding company operated in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, as well as outside the USA, selling business and consumer services, including “wholesale banking, mortgage banking, consumer finance, equipment leasing, agricultural finance, commercial finance, securities brokerage and investment banking, insurance agency and brokerage services, computer and data processing services, trust services, investment advisory services, mortgage-backed securities servicing and venture capital investment” under three divisions: wealth and investment management, community banking and wholesale banking (SEC, 2017). WFC, commonly called Wells Fargo, merged with Norwest Bank in 1998, each with $93m in assets. Then in 2019, Wells Fargo merged with Wachovia Corporation, which had $812bn in assets, while WFC had $575bn (Wells Fargo History, 2022). Wells Fargo’s mission, “Helping customers succeed financially,” and vision statement, “Satisfy our customers’ financial needs and help them succeed financially,” reference their customer focus (Wells Fargo & Company, 2022). Wells Fargo saw their past, present and future core values as focusing on customer financial success, so what went wrong?
The banking and financial services industry standards prohibit “unfair, deceptive, or abusive acts or practices” of customers such as individual account holders and businesses (CFPB, 2010). US federal regulations and policies regarding banking and financial services include oversight and specifications regarding the fair treatment of customers (individuals and businesses) for loans, investments and deposits (FDIC, 2022). The National Bank Act of 1863, which established a US national banking system, required bank officers of the newly chartered banks, including Wells Fargo, to pledge an oath that they would “diligently and honestly administer the affairs of such associations [banks],” and not “knowingly violate” or “permit violation” of federal regulations and records, with the Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller providing the necessary oversight (FDIC, 2022). The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act in 2010 created the CFPB, strengthening banking requirements for honest and fair business practices with individual customers (CFPB, 2010; FDIC, 2022). Banking and finance professionals are held to a “fiduciary duty” of care, loyalty, good faith, confidentiality and prudence when making decisions on behalf of others; they are to act as a “prudent” lay person would and put the interests of the customer before their own (LII, 2022). By ethical, moral and legal standards and norms, banking and finance professionals are expected to make fair, honest choices and act as fiduciaries for the customer’s benefit.
As a for-profit corporation, Wells Fargo professional managers (C suite) and the Board of Directors have responsibility for governance and strategic decision-making on behalf of the stockholder owners. The strategic aims of Wells Fargo in 1997 were to grow through horizontal integration (mergers and acquisitions) and concentration strategies of product development, market development and market penetration (Wells Fargo History, 2022). Under the guidance of CEO Dick Kovacevich, Wells Fargo’s market penetration growth strategies were refined into a new model called “8 is great.” New products like online banking and new financial services expanded their customer appeal. Market development added branches throughout the western US with goals of spreading across North America. WFC’s strategies sought to expand stockholder returns to optimize their growth potential and gain momentum to provide “a great investment that delivers returns among the highest in our industry” (Wells Fargo History, 2022).
While none of these strategies is uncommon for a corporation seeking growth and sustained earnings for shareholders, Wells Fargo expected growth regardless of economic downturns or constraints. As the 1998 annual report CEO letter stated, “There are hundreds of thousands of words in this annual report. You need to remember only three. They sum up the future of our company. Brand – New – Opportunities.” (Wells Fargo History, 2022). These opportunities came from new customers and a deeper relationship with existing customers.
The corporate culture of cross-selling
At the center of Wells Fargo’s remarkable growth and the accounts scandal was a corporate sales strategy of cross-selling. Cross-selling for Wells Fargo meant its employees would vigorously attempt to sell more banks’ products and services to its current customers, for example, adding a savings account, credit card or loan for existing customers with only a checking account (Smith, 2011). The strategy first implemented by Dick Kovacevich, John Stumpf’s predecessor as CEO, treated bank services as products to be sold like any other consumer good. An early version of his cross-selling campaign launched in 1997 encouraged sales staff to attempt to get customers to sign up for eight different bank products, referred to as “8 is great.”
Under the “8 is great” incentive program, Well Fargo’s key performance indicators dramatically increased. In the first five years of the program, the average year-end stock price tripled from $6.02 (1991–1995) to $19.66 (1996–2000; Wells Fargo History, 2022). During the two decades of sales performance expectations (1996–2016), stock prices, income, EPS, securities, loans, assets, deposits and stockholder equity increased even during economic downturns such as the 2008 housing crisis (Table 1) (Wells Fargo History, 2022).
In the years leading up to the accounts scandal, the cross-selling strategy promoted by Kovacevich and continued by Stumpf led Wells Fargo to unprecedented growth. While other banks stagnated or contracted, Wells Fargo grew from the ninth largest US bank ($87bn in assets) in 1998 to the fifth largest ($489bn in assets) in 2008 when Kovacevich retired (FDIC, 2021). Under Stumpf's continuation of the cross-selling platform, Wells Fargo became the second largest bank in America, with $1.7tn in total assets by 2016 (FDIC, 2021). Wells Fargo noted in their 2016 Annual Report that the most significant financial risk was the heavy industry-wide competition for market share (SEC, 2017). The report bemoaned that nonbank competitors “enjoy fewer regulatory constraints,” resulting in lower costs and anticipated technological innovations, allowing new entrants and increasing competition for profits (SEC, 2017).
Wells Fargo’s aggressive cross-sales remained central to its strategy throughout the next decade. A Wall Street Journal article noted that the average number of services bought by a Wells customer was presented at the board of directors meeting as an important metric of the company’s growth and progress (Smith, 2011). Wells Fargo said that cross-selling was “the foundation of our business model […] cornerstone of [its] business model and key to [its] ability to grow revenue and earnings.” (DOJ, 2020c). Key performance indicators for the cross-selling program were managed assets, loans, securities and deposits, which grew 8–10 times in the 20-year period (Figure 1; Wells Fargo History, 2022). Other banks, trying to emulate Wells Fargo’s success, also began ramping up their cross-sales.
However, even as Wells Fargo continued to gain in both profit and reputation, accounts of the highly stressful environment caused by Wells Fargo’s cross-selling system began to emerge. As early as 1997, when Kovacevich was first experimenting with cross-sales, an employee noted the tense atmosphere in meetings with sales directors if sales quotas were not met (McLean, 2017). In 2013, the Los Angeles Times published an article highlighting the stressful atmosphere created by Wells Fargo’s sales strategy (Reckard, 2013). Many former employees mentioned similar patterns – unattainable sales goals, acceptance and encouragement for the creation of fraudulent accounts to meet sales goals and ignored ethics violation reports. McLean (2017) notes that in 2002, Wells Fargo’s internal affairs department had been concerned that there was an uptick in fraudulent accounts opened by employees who were afraid of losing their job if they could not make a sales quota. The company never followed up on these concerns.
Deviance theory
Outsiders described WFC’s ethical lapses as a bad culture (organizational deviance), but insiders described the acts as being committed by bad apples (individual deviance). Theoretical discussions of deviance focus on the departure from social norms by individuals or groups (organizations) in either a positive or negative behavior (Martin, Lopez, Roscigno, Hodson, 2013). Organizational culture is “a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.” From this, we can infer that if these ethical lapses were cultural deviance, we would see widespread enculturation of employees into a negative unethical norm (Schein, 2010). Incentive structures at Wells Fargo reinforced this shared expectation of annual growth, embedding it into employee performance rating systems that offered rewards up to 15% above an employee’s base salary for exceeding these goals (SEC, 2002). Incentive structures with absolute thresholds for performance, such as the “8 is great” program, are more likely to induce unethical behaviors than piece-meal or ranked incentives, as they cause greater stress, create identity threats that lead employees to leave the organization, and in this extreme “win at all costs,” can incentivize employees to compromise their morals to survive (Park et al., 2022; Piening et al., 2020). This win-at-all-costs approach can also lead to exploitive management, which leads to employee feelings of self-shame and guilt and feelings of anger and hostility toward the organization, as was voiced by Wells Fargo employees (Morris, 2016: Livne-Ofer, Coyle-Shapiro, & Pierce, 2019). Those not meeting sales performance thresholds (approximately 2,000 products per year; 50 weeks/year/5 days/8 products) faced threats of job and career loss through black marks on their permanent federal financial services records, which would end their career not only at Wells Fargo but at all other banks (McGrath, 2016).
The CFPB consent order detailed various breaches of consumer trust and fraud committed by Wells Fargo. Wells Fargo employees had opened new accounts, transferred funds between accounts, activated debit cards and opened credit cards for customers without their knowledge, using falsified contact information to ensure customers were unaware of the transactions (CFPB, 2016). CFPB cited Wells Fargo’s sales program goals and employee incentives as contributing to their improper behavior (CFPB, 2016).
Initially, Wells Fargo’s leaders placed the responsibility for the misbehavior on individual bank employees rather than management. While testifying to the U.S. Senate, CEO John Stumpf (Wells Fargo, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d) condemned the actions of those employees, stating:
[…] there was no orchestrated effort, or scheme as some have called it, by the company. We never directed nor wanted our employees, whom we refer to as team members, to provide products and services to customers they did not want or need.” “Wrongful sales practice behavior goes entirely against our values, ethics, and culture and runs counter to our business strategy […].
Wells Fargo admitted that it had fired about 5,300 employees (branch bankers, branch managers and regional managers) due to their fraudulent account practices between January 1, 2011 and March 7, 2016; approximately 1% of their annual workforce (Wattles et al., 2018; Wells Fargo, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). CFO John Shrewsberry attributed the fraudulent accounts to low performers struggling to reach their minimum sales quota in a few community bank retail locations saying, “These bad practices were not a revenue-generating activity. It was really more at the lower end of the performance scale, where people apparently were making bad choices to hang on to their job.” (Marino, 2106).
As Stumpf and Wells Fargo publicly stated regret over the situation, they repeatedly disagreed with “regulators” assessments that its corporate culture had played any role in the fraudulent behavior. Former employees and journalists countered this narrative, pointing out years of previous media coverage and “employees” public statements that Wells Fargo’s sales practices were organization-wide, not localized to a few problem branches or employees. A Forbes article accused Wells Fargo of scapegoating its employees rather than acknowledging and dealing with the systemic corporate culture that caused the problem (Agnes, 2016). A former employee who had opened fraudulent accounts reflected on the CFPB’s findings that bonuses and extra financial compensation caused employees to commit sales fraud, saying that employees were “pressured to commit fraud to meet minimum sales quotas to keep their jobs” and not for lucrative bonuses (McGrath, 2016).
If, as Wells Fargo’s leadership suggested, these unethical practices resulted from a few individuals betraying the corporate culture to gain personal incentive bonuses, then how did 1% of employees (5,300 “bad apples”) cause this much damage to the organization? Individual rule-breaking and unethical behavior are voluntary actions motivated by personal benefit and causing harm to the organization (Martin, Lopez, Roscigno, Hodson, 2013). In cases of individual deviance, behavior correction or employee termination is common. However, in cases of overall organizational deviance, rule-breaking is “incentivized, required, or encouraged by top managers or organizational leadership with respect to rules that would otherwise be actively enforced.” (Martin, Lopez, Roscigno, Hodson, 2013). In this case, Wells Fargo codified their aggressive cross-sales expectations across the organization (performance management systems, CEO comments and mottos), all artifacts of an organization-wide cultural norm of sales regardless of the customer’s needs or wants and in opposition to WFC’s fiduciary responsibilities and a sign of organizational deviance.
The independent audit – real regret and change?
Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors hired Shearman & Sterling, LLP, to conduct an independent audit of sales practices in mid-September 2016 (Wells Fargo, 2016b). At the same time, Stumpf announced that by January 1, 2017, all sales incentive goals would be removed from the community bank branches (Wells Fargo, 2016b). Stumpf retired by mid-October of 2106 (Wells Fargo, 2016c). In his July 2019 testimony to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) and Congress that after hearing the evidence presented, Stumpf now agreed that the sales fraud was inherent in the business model of the company and placed “significant blame” on the head of the community bank, Carrie Tolstedt, and the Risk Office for that division, Claudia Russ Anderson (Wells Fargo, 2016d). By the end of 2016, not only was Stumpf out, but Tolstedt, Anderson, along with Wells Fargo’s general counsel, chief auditor and executive audit director, retired without severance due to the scandal (Wells Fargo, 2016d).
In reaction to the April 2017 Independent Report, Tim Sloan, COO, who succeeded Stumpf as CEO, said:
The Board's report is a necessary examination of what went wrong in our culture, operations, and governance. It's clear from the Board's review that we had an incentive program and high-pressure sales culture in our Community Bank that over time drove behavior that in many cases was inappropriate and inconsistent with our values. Because of our decentralized operating model, our corporate leadership took too long to understand the seriousness and scope of the problem, and, as a result the actions we took over the years to address it weren't adequate. (Wells Fargo, 2016d)
Sloan assured the Board of Directors, banking regulators, Congress and stockholders that Wells Fargo had made changes in their auditing, personnel, leadership and compensation, adding more feedback opportunities, outside accountability and centralization of control features noting: “Our intent is clear: the practices and pressures that harmed our customers, our team members, and our brand and reputation will never be allowed to occur again” (Wells Fargo, 2016d).
More accusations
Beyond the sales scandal, the OCC found Wells Fargo guilty of violating the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act and fined them $20m for repossessing autos while service members were on active-duty status, charging interest rates above the maximum allowed by law and not disclosing to the courts that the individuals were actively deployed when seeking court orders for repossession of the autos (OCC, 2016).
By March 2018, the Justice Department notified Wells Fargo of suspicions of “inappropriate referrals or recommendations” in its Wealth and Investment Management business after a Wall Street Journal story broke about upselling retirees’ inappropriate products (DOJ, 2020a, 2020b). In yet another piece of negative news for Wells Fargo, in April 2018, it reached a $1bn settlement for auto-loan and mortgage practices issues (Sweet, 2018a, 2018b). Wells Fargo admitted it had charged people with car loans for insurance without their knowledge, even if they already had insurance (Sweet, 2018a, 2018b). They had also charged customers for extending mortgage-rate locks, even when Wells Fargo was responsible for the delays (Sweet, 2018a, 2018b).
May 2018 brought even more bad publicity when the investors claimed securities fraud on Wells Fargo’s part, saying they knew about the fake account issues but failed to disclose them (SEC, 2018). Wells Fargo settled with their investors for $500m for harm caused (SEC, 2018). Again, in what had become a monthly occurrence, Wells Fargo found itself in hot water for sales-related issues – this time having encouraged investors to actively trade high-fee debt products in violation of SEC trading rules. The SEC fined Wells Fargo $35m and forced it to repay another $1m in gains and interest; it should not have gotten to individual small investors at Wells Fargo Advisors (SEC, 2020).
In July 2018, Wells Fargo had to refund tens of millions of dollars of fees to customer accounts due to added pet insurance and legal services without customers’ “full understanding” (Glazer, 2018a). Wells Fargo paid a $2.1bn fine in August 2018 because it had improperly represented mortgages sold to investors during the housing bubble (Sweet, 2018b). Wells Fargo, in 2018 found itself as the defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of 1,830 plaintiffs accusing them of denied mortgage loan modifications and errors in fee calculations resulting in overcharges and, in some cases, short sale or fore closured home losses for 3,000 customers due to a computer error (Ryder et al. v. Wells Fargo Bank, N.A., 2021). Finally, in September 2018, The Justice Department investigated Wells Fargo’s wholesale banking department for altering customer information and adding Social Security numbers and birth dates to accounts without customers’ knowledge (Glazer, 2018b).
Fundamentally changed or same as always?
During congressional testimony in March 2019, Sloan claimed that the organizational culture in the three years since the sales scandal broke had changed (more transparent, efficient, and accountable), saying they had:
[…] gone above and beyond what is required in disclosing these issues in our public filings, we have worked to remedy these issues, and, most importantly, we have worked to address root causes that allowed them to occur in the first place. As a result, Wells Fargo is a better bank than it was three years ago, and we are working every day to become even better. (Wells Fargo, 2019a)
Sloan admitted that internal audits had uncovered up to 3.5 million accounts that were opened without customer consent in the original scandal, far more than had been claimed initially (H. R. The Real Wells Fargo, 2019). At the time of the hearing, the CFPB had 14 separate federal consent orders against Wells Fargo, with Ranking Member McHenry countering that:
Each time a new scandal breaks, Wells Fargo promises to get to the bottom of it. It promises to make sure it doesn't happen again. But then a few months later, we hear about another case of dishonest sales practices or gross mismanagement. (Wells Fargo, 2019b)
OCC and the Federal Reserve interviews of employees reported that:
Since 2017, evidence of a toxic culture adversely affecting bank employees has persisted. Last year, four bank employees met with senior Federal Reserve officials asserting that little had changed with the Bank's culture since the Bank's misconduct had first come to light. (H. R. The Real Wells Fargo, 2019)
Sloan was replaced as CEO in October 2019 by Charlie Scharf, a Board Member and a previous VISA CEO (Moise and Schroeder, 2019). In his introductory speech, Scharf acknowledged, “At the time of the sales practice’s issues, the company did not have the appropriate people, structure, processes, controls, or culture to prevent the inappropriate conduct. This was inexcusable.” (Wells Fargo, 2020). To date, Wells Fargo has paid over 3 billion in fines and restitution (DOJ, 2020a, 2020b). In March 2020, the OCC issued a notice of charges against five former senior Wells Fargo executives (including Tolstedt and Anderson) (OCC, 2020). The OCC has suggested fines and a permanent ban from working in banking for these executives and had already agreed with Stumpf that he would never again work in banking (OCC, 2020). Wells Fargo remains under Federal Reserve consent order restrictions on its overall size (capped at $1.75tn in assets) (Federal Reserve, 2018 and 2020). Under Scharf, leaders throughout WFC have been replaced, and risk controls overhauled. At the same time, it continued to try and remedy organizational issues related to the sales scandal (Levitt, 2021). In September 2021, the OCC levied a new $250m fine against Wells Fargo, citing, “the Bank has failed to fully and timely implement effective and sustainable corrective actions required by the Order related to enterprise-wide compliance risk management and customer remediation and is thereby in violation of the 2018 Order” (OCC, 2021).
Who is responsible?
How did the Wells Fargo CEO and executive leadership team allow these issues to happen? Was it a result of corporate greed, incompetence in their job or shareholder demands? One can only wonder how a company as big and well respected as Wells Fargo could have similar fraudulent issues across multiple business divisions (consumer banking, investments, mortgage services and auto loans) that cost the company so much money without leaders understanding that the culture and sales pressures were rotten. As Wells Fargo’s leaders suggested, do the individual bankers who were pressured to sell have any responsibility for the issues as “bad apples,” or were they good people in a bad place? During the 2016 Wells Fargo Senate Testimony, Senator Robert Menendez (New Jersey) said, “This isn't the work of 5,300 bad apples. This is the work of sowing seeds that rotted the entire orchard. You and your senior executives created an environment in which this culture of deception and deceit thrived.” (Wells Fargo, 2016a, 2016b, 2016c, 2016d). What role does the Board of Directors have on behalf of the stockholders for questioning aggressive growth plans based on new business from existing customers rather than market growth from new business? Is replacing leaders and removing sales goals enough to change an organization’s approach to ethical business?
Is constant strategic growth a reasonable goal?
Constant annual growth for KPIs is an aggressive goal for any company. Historically stocks, due to economic market pressures, on average, over time increase in value. The average growth over time means more “good” (increases/growth) than “bad” (decreases) or stagnant financial years. Wells Fargo planned to expand through mergers, acquisitions, new products and new markets and significantly increase their market penetration. “8 is great” assumed that customers had 15 banking and financial products per person and would want to have half of all their financial products with Wells Fargo. For the shareholders, dependable and consistent growth was a financially reliable return. The Board of Directors and the C-suite management team earned sizable rewards for these results. These goals failed to consider the point of market saturation and to examine the assumptions that customers needed or wanted these many products. With a vision and mission focused on the customers, was the strategic growth goal in service to those millions of Wells Fargo customers or instead to only the shareholders and executives?
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Figures
Figure 1
Key performance indicators by year
Annual report key performance metrics five-year averages
| Five-year averages | 1996–2000 | 2001–2005 | 2006–2010 | 2011–2015 | 2016–2020 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stock price | $19.66 | $27.43 | $30.64 | $43.22 | $49.17 |
| Net income | $3bn | $6bn | $9bn | $21bn | $18bn |
| EPS | $1.79 | $1.75 | $1.94 | $3.71 | $3.40 |
| Dividends | $0.71 | $0.75 | $0.83 | $1.07 | $1.57 |
| Securities available for sale | $37 | $35bn | $123bn | $277bn | $473bn |
| Loans | $129bn | $242bn | $621bn | $834bn | $945bn |
| Assets | $229bn | $391bn | $974bn | $1.5tn | $1.9tn |
| Core deposits | $142bn | $215bn | $585bn | $1tn | $1.3tn |
| Stockholder Equity | $23bn | $34bn | $86bn | $169bn | $195bn |
Source: Authors’ own creation
Acknowledgements
Disclaimer. This case is intended to be used as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of a management situation. The case was compiled from published sources.
Corresponding author
About the authors
Deborah M. Mullen is based at the Department of Management, Gary W. Rollins College of Business, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
Kathleen Wheatley is based at the Department of Management, Gary W. Rollins College of Business, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.
Nai Lamb is based at the Department of Management, Gary W. Rollins College of Business, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA.