Objectives should be difficult but achievable. However, Wells Fargo & Co. is considered to have created objectives that were too difficult and led to bank employees feeling pressured by the quotas and managers’ pressure to meet the objective. The pressure resulted in employees creating new accounts that customers never asked for to either keep their jobs or to get more sales commissions that resulted in overdraft fees for customers. The government imposed a fine of $185 million, and CEO John Stumpf retired.

Mary Mack, Head of Community Banking, was charged with coming up with a new incentive system that didn’t result in unethical or illegal activities of its 100,000 retail-bank employees at around 6,000 U.S. branches. Mack said Wells Fargo won’t abandon cross-selling, or efforts to sell multiple products to individual households, which was seen as contributing to the misconduct.

1. If you were a manager at Wells Fargo, would you pressure employees?

2. Would you fire employees who didn’t meet the difficult quotas?

3. As an employee, would you give in to the pressure and use unethical/illegal practices to meet the quotas in order to keep your job?

4. As an employee, would you use unethical practices to exceed the quotas in order to make more money?

5. Would your answers to questions 3 and 4 change if you knew it was common practice of your coworkers to use these techniques and encourage you to do the same things? How about if there was peer pressure to also use the tactics?