ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a study of immoral mismanagement by intelligent, educated, and experienced but mostly job-ignorant managers and executives, who advanced careers by “jumping” between organizations. Ethnographers’ findings concerning managers’ bluffs, power abuses, scapegoating, and other such subterfuges, suggest that by these immoral means they defended authority and jobs, concealing mistakes, ignorance, and incompetence. However, managers’ morality was not grasped as a personal strategic choice that affected ignorance handling, and the finding that managers used immoral means was rarely related to covertly concealed managerial ignorance (CCMI). Observations exposed serious mismanagement due to managers’ and executives’ use of CCMI, emphasizing the literature’s neglect of this harmful phenomenon even when exposing managerial ego defensiveness. The findings explained the job survival of outsider executives and managers by use of CCMI despite consequent dysfunction and failures, which included failed selection, promotion, and retention of managers and senior staff, missing or ignoring their wrongs and mistakes, concealed or camouflaged by immoral self-serving information abuses.
