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Abstract
The following article will discuss the failure of the organization known as WorldCom. It will determine the reason for the fall of the company failure comparing and contrasting what could have been done by management and leadership. The organizational theories that could have predicted the failure of management and the impact of the company’s structure

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The company knows as WorldCom was one the leading telecommunication giants of its day. WorldCom achieved its position as a significant player in the telecommunications industry through the successful completion of 65 acquisitions. Between 1991 and 1997, WorldCom spent almost $60 billion in the acquisition of many of these companies and accumulated $41 billion in debt. Two of these acquisitions were particularly significant. The MFS Communications acquisition enabled WorldCom to obtain UUNet, a major supplier of Internet services to business, and MCI Communications gave WorldCom one of the largest providers of business and consumer telephone service. By 1997, WorldCom's stock had risen from pennies per share to over $60 a share. Through what appeared to be a prescient and successful business strategy at the height of the Internet boom, WorldCom became a darling of Wall Street. In the heady days of the technology bubble Wall Street took notice of WorldCom and its then visionary CEO, Bernie Ebbers (Moberg, Romar, 2003). Acquisition after acquisition led to started to warrant a suspicion into the dealings of the WorldCom organization. The company hit rock bottom when it declared bankruptcy after its merger with MCI. This is where the proverbial ball of yarn starts to come unraveled for the company. The company manipulated the account books and reported false gains and increases to continue to make it appear as a hot item on the stock market. In actuality the company was in a black hole of debt that it couldn’t recover from without declaring bankruptcy. WorldCom made major accounting misstatements that hid the increasingly perilous financial condition of the company. The Report described the accounting shenanigans as follows: "... As enormous as the fraud was, it was accomplished in a relatively mundane way: more than $9 billion in false or

EBF 3 unsupported accounting entries were made in WorldCom's financial systems in order to achieve desired reported financial results ...” (di Stefano 2005). A manager or any manager is supposed to get his staff, or team of employees to do what it takes to accomplish the task set before them. Managers get things done through people. They make decisions, allocate resources, and direct the activities of others to attain goals (Robbins, Judge, 2007). The WorldCom CEO Bernie Ebbers convinced his staff of accounts to do what was morally wrong. Another major factor driving this fraud was Bernie Ebbers' very apparent desire to build and protect his personal financial condition. For this reason, he had to show continually growing net worth in order to avoid margin calls on his own WorldCom stock that he had pledged to secure loans (di Stefano, 2005).
If all direction comes from the top and the subordinates are to follow that lead. Then the lack of ethics was present from the beginning with Mr. Ebbers for the financial gain he sought out weighed the goals of the company. This type of unethical behavior was based on to the employees that overlooked the accounting errors, or those who participated and making the errors for whatever gain were promised them. The belief that if Mr. Ebbers would have done what was right in the beginning his staff would have followed his lead. The contingency variables is summed up by saying one fact has an influence on more than one thing. The influence Mr. Ebbers had over his employees to do what was wrong lead to the decline of WorldCom.