Managers’ Organizational Values and Ethical Attitudes in the Direct Marketing Industry

Abstract

Increased unethical practices (Rieck, 1998), cyberspace crimes (Rothfeder, 1996) , and security threats (Pfleeger, 1997) in the emerging Internet-based global economy persistently raise more public concerns regarding the business conduct of direct marketing (DM) organizations. Violation of citizens' privacy (Charters, 2002), deceptive or misleading product offers, unsolicited offers, telemarketing scams, unauthorized sharing of customer lists, cyberspace's ethical vulnerability, and the lack of privacy and security of customer databases (Culnane, 1993; Rothfeder, 1997) are among these fears. The question arises as to how the environment of an organization affects practices that could be interpreted as unethical or socially irrespon sible. This research project studies the effect of the organizational values on the ethical attitudes and practices of DM managers. A similar study was previously conducted on MIS professionals (Vitell and Davis, 1990). In some other studies (Howard, 1990; Vitell and Festervant, 1987; Kaku, 1997) , organizational values, as a normative environmental factor, were used as an independent variable in their relationship to the dependent variable, such as members' decision-making behavior. Finegan (2000)