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Customer orientation, social consensus and insurance salespeople's tolerance of customer insurance frauds

Lu‐Ming Tseng (Department of Risk Management and Insurance, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan)
Wen‐Pin Su (Graduate Institute of Insurance, Chaoyang University of Technology, Taichung, Taiwan)

International Journal of Bank Marketing

ISSN: 0265-2323

Article publication date: 25 January 2013

2397

Abstract

Purpose

The idea of customer orientation is widely recognized by service people. However, there has been a lack of investigation into how the recognition of customer orientation may affect the service people's attitudes toward customer misconducts. As a result, our knowledge about the potential impacts of customer orientation philosophy on the ethical decisions made by service people could be insufficient. Hence, by using the life insurance salespeople in Taiwan as an example, the purpose of this paper is to investigate service people's tolerance of two types of customer misconduct (opportunistic frauds and planned frauds) and how those service people would react to the customer misconduct based on their marketing philosophy (customer orientation), perceived fraud size and perceived social consensus.

Design/methodology/approach

The sample of this study comes from life insurance companies in Taiwan. Questionnaires have been used as a data gathering instrument.

Findings

The results showed that customer orientation of the responders is negatively associated with the responders’ tolerance of the customer claim frauds. The responders’ unethical decision is most significantly influenced by perceived fraud size and social consensus.

Originality/value

The duties of insurance salespeople include helping customers settle insurance claims. However, insurance salespeople's tolerance of customer claim frauds is less mentioned in the insurance literature. Few studies have examined the relationship among customer orientation, social consensus and insurance salespeople's tolerance of customer claim frauds.

Keywords

Citation

Tseng, L. and Su, W. (2013), "Customer orientation, social consensus and insurance salespeople's tolerance of customer insurance frauds", International Journal of Bank Marketing, Vol. 31 No. 1, pp. 38-55. https://doi.org/10.1108/02652321311292047

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2013, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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