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Examples Of Toshiba Scandal

Decent Essays

Toshiba Scandal – The power of context:
This section will discuss the role of context at different level contributing to the Toshiba’s scandal. The context can be classified into three broad types based on the way it contributes to the ethical blindness and the people it interacts and influences in causing ethical blindness. They are Individual Context, Organizational Context, and Societal context. Toshiba case is a typical example of how the context has influenced the ethical blindness.

Individual Context:
Toshiba was headed by Atsutoshi Nishida and then by his successors Norio Sasaki and Hisao Tanaka when the continuous inappropriate accounting treatments happened. From a ten thousand feet look at the case, three CEO’s were at the helm …show more content…

Tom Scott, a former executive of Toshiba US told, “He gave me targets that scared the hell out of me. Tough like nails, maybe a little like Patton in World War 2”, when asked by Reuters after Nishida’s resignation(Murai, A. R., Hamada, K., Uranaka, T., & Takenaka;, K. (2015, August 24). In Toshiba scandal, the 'tough as nails' target setter). His view was the common one among the employees in Toshiba. The CEO’s were ambitious and set challenging profit targets that were not possible to achieve with the regular means. The subordinates felt the pressure and were afraid of not being able to achieve the targets. On the other hand, the audit control within the organization was very relaxed. Internal auditing committee was dysfunctional and they did not raise any concerns at the meeting about the improper accounting practices employed by divisions to meet the targets. This encouraged the divisions that were struggling with the targets to fudge accounting data to achieve them. They started looking at it as something normal over a period of time. On an organizational level, loose internal control, the culture of fear, ambitious CEO, group conformity pressure were the major contributors to the

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