The CEO of Activision Blizzard continues to lose internal and external support

 

 

The last few hours have reignited the controversy surrounding Activision Blizzard and the numerous allegations of labour and sexual harassment that have accumulated in the courts, with new information that has put the company’s top manager, Bobby Kotick, in the eye of the storm, who according to the Wall Street Journal has known about the cases of abuse for years.

Activision Blizzard’s long-serving CEO continues to come under fire internally for the company’s disastrous handling of sexual harassment allegations. Today, we learned of a petition signed by more than 1,300 employees, more than 10% of the company’s workforce, demanding Bobby Kotick’s resignation after losing all confidence to deal with the current challenges.

It is not an anonymous letter, but a document with names and surnames where different workers of Activision, Blizzard and King support a brief statement demanding the departure of the CEO and, they point out, his non-participation in the selection process of a new CEO. The employees recall that Kotick holds a substantial part of the shareholders’ voting rights.

Bobby Kotick is facing the most prominent leadership crisis in his nearly 30-year tenure. He is not only on the receiving end of complaints among employees or opinion articles against his management but also of pressure from PlayStation and Xbox. They are very concerned about the way the CEO is acting.

PlayStation expressed its concern about the situation at Activision, putting even more pressure on Bobby Kotick, who it believes is not responding appropriately. And now it has been the head of Xbox who has expressed his concern about the latest data related to the Activision crisis in an email to his employees.

Xbox is “disturbed and deeply concerned about the horrific events and actions” that have come to light with complaints from employees and the US authorities themselves. Based on this new information, Xbox is “evaluating all aspects of our relationship with Activision Blizzard and making proactive adjustments”.

Also, a large group of shareholders has begun to mobilise to provoke the dismissal or resignation of Bobby Kotick and other veteran executives for their failure to act on the aforementioned allegations. For the time being, however, Activision Blizzard’s board closed ranks around its CEO this week, in a move that seems to make it clear he still has several months left in the job.

On the stock market, Activision Blizzard has been down 19% in the last month. All this mounting pressure on Bobby Kotick began in the summer after an accusation surfaced about the company fostering a culture hostile to women, with harassment and firings that a Bloomberg report now says the company’s CEO had known about for several years.

Source: bloomberg