The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions: The Paradox of Unethical Sales Behaviour

Abstract

The objective of this study is to shed further light on the occurrence of unethical behaviour within the salesforce. While it is accepted effective marketing fosters relationship building and added-value to customers, problems with unethical selling behaviour still concern managers and academics. The antecedents of ethical judgments and behaviour have been studied for decades, and several antecedents for unethical behaviour have been recognized. Salesperson-specific antecedents are for example personal moral philosophies (e.g. Tansey et al. 1994) and role stress (e.g. Yetmar and Eastman, 2000), while managerial antecedents include sales managers’ control behaviours (e.g. Robertson and Anderson, 1993) and sales managers’ personal moral philosophies (e.g. Cadogan et al., 2009). However, these studies all rely in the analysis of single-source data, which does not allow study of the possible interactions between salesperson-specific and managerial antecedents of unethical behaviour. Further, managerial antecedents have to date only been conceptualized as direct influences on salesperson unethical behaviour, whereas it is highly likely that there are critical mediating factors at work in such situations.