Dieselgate: How Hubris and Bad Leadership Caused the Biggest Scandal in Automotive History

C. G. Jung’s Thoughts on the Concepts of Leader and Leadership

“…At the relatively benign end of the range are organizational and political figures who, while demonstrating a lack of self-awareness no better or worse than that of their peers, engage in activities that stand in the shadowy margins of societally accepted behavior. Such behavior by leaders is dealt with, for example, in scholarship on the following: alleged anti-competitiveness activities in the "Big Tech" world (Popiel, 2018), cheating on environmental controls in the automotive industry (Mujkic & Klinger, 2019), and alleged private executive misconduct (Lin, 2020).…”

Deconstructing NPM: Public Service Values in a Global Public Administration

“…The Netherlands moved effectively from a top-down, centralized approach to public administration to a more decentralized one, where "corporatist" values are not that strong (Kickert 1997). However, while the Netherlands was moving toward this more decentralized system, the European Union (EU) was taking over more responsibilities and emphasized centralizing public administration as an attempt to encourage European "unity" (Mujkic and Klingner 2018). These conflicting approaches to the delivery of public services had unfortunate consequences.…”

“…At the same time, public officials are often blamed by the public or elected officials (for political reasons) if proprietary organizations are involved in activities that are presumed to be selfregulated by those same businesses. While regulatory oversight is more or less taken away from public officials compared to the period prior to NPM, public officials are still blamed when proprietary entities are involved in egregious breaches of trust (Mujkic and Klingner 2018). One example is the outsourcing of the prison and juvenile justice systems in the USA which, while very profitable for the owners and their private-sector suppliers, is bad business for US citizens with increased incarceration rates motivated by a desire for profit; outsourced inmate healthcare cost increases of 385% in the most recent period; and higher death rates for inmates of privatized prisons, to name but a few (Neate 2016).…”

“…This approach to regulating and enforcing harmful emissions came from an attempt to have the same regulations across all member countries, so that vehicle manufacturers do not have to make different versions of their products for different countries. Also, this kind of an approach was viewed as encouraging European "unity" (Mujkic and Klingner 2018). However, vehicle manufacturers, especially the most powerful ones from Germany, already exercised oversized influence over their own governments and this translated to influence in the European parliament and European Commission (Nesbit et al 2016).…”

“…However, vehicle manufacturers, especially the most powerful ones from Germany, already exercised oversized influence over their own governments and this translated to influence in the European parliament and European Commission (Nesbit et al 2016). In 2015, when the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that Volkswagen (VW) was defrauding its US customers by claiming that their diesel engines met the Environmental Protection Agency's and California's emission standards, it became clear that the self-regulatory environment in the EU, just like in the USA, had failed its constituency and obligations to the public (Nesbit et al 2016;Mujkic and Klingner 2018;Ewing 2017). After the initial shock, it became clear that VW is not the only company that misrepresented to regulators results that were skewed at best, and false at worst.…”