Out-of-Control Executives -What Trumps Smart?

With many apparent strengths, some of the most successful organizational leaders ultimately fail and often cause significant damage to their organizations, their families, and themselves. This paper questions what motivates executives to make bad decisions and take unethical and/or illegal actions. From studying various executive scandals, questions were developed that relate to greed, power, Narcissistic personalities, values and ethics, status differentiation and social isolation, and sex. In addition, demographics of the executives and types of scandals were analyzed. Since executive scandals impact society as well as individuals and organizations, this paper offers suggestions of ways that these executives could help others avoid unethical and illegal actions. Future considerations include the issue of time theft since executives involved in scandals spend time in unethical and illegal scenarios instead of spending time productively in ethical, legal scenarios for themselves, their families, their organizations, and society.