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The main purpose of this research was to investigate whether there is a relationship between religiosity and ethical behavior of salespeople.

To investigate this association, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used; also, both exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were undertaken to examine a scale measuring salespeople's ethical behaviors. The context in which the study was conducted was in Iranian retail specialty stores.

The results revealed for the first time the impact of religiosity on ethical behavior of the seller, a key entity in the buyer-seller dyad, that had been virtually ignored in extant empirical work.

The study focused solely on retail salespeople in Iran. Future research should examine the religiosity-ethical behavior nexus using other kinds of sales personnel and those practicing other kinds of religion than the Shia Muslim faith investigated here. The investigation examined the association between religiosity and ethical behavior. Future work could include additional measures of religion (e.g. religious orientation) as well other individual, cultural, and organizational factors that may have an influence on salespeople's ethical conduct.

Sales managers should try to convince salespeople to behave ethically. Also, sales managers should not establish unachievable sales objectives for salespeople and try to employ more religious individuals as salespeople. Multinational corporations (MNCs) should treat Shia Muslim salespersons with the utmost of respect, relying on their word. Similarly, MNCs should incorporate ethical guidelines into their training classes in order to be able to communicate conveniently with local salespeople and persuade them to act more ethically.

The authors believe that this research can arouse managers in retail stores to set specific plans for evaluating their ethical behaviors. This research also has managerial and research implications for designing and formulating operations strategy in providing ethical standards for sales force.

Portraying sex in advertisements is a widely used technique by many marketers in their promotional programmes. Some previous research has explored the relationship between attitudes toward advertising and effectiveness of sexy advertisements. However, there are gaps in this research and the authors describe an investigation which attempts to fill these gaps.

The purpose of the article is to present and test a model regarding important factors that may help reduce unethical behavior (i.e. misselling) of salespeople in the financial services industry.

To test the hypotheses, telemarketers from the life insurance industry in South Korea were surveyed (n=204).

Using structural equation modeling, the results indicate that: ethics training is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; ethical climate is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; selling pressure is unrelated to ethical attitude; competitive intensity is positively related to salesperson ethical attitude; competitive intensity is unrelated to misselling; and misselling is inversely related to salesperson ethical attitude, positively associated with product complexity, and positively related to product variety.

Future empirical work could: investigate different variables from those utilized in this study; consider inter‐country and gender differences; use alternate sources of data to examine stability of the findings; and employ samples of firms in other industries and other marketing channels. Limitations include a limited number of study variables, use of solely the telemarketing channel for life insurance, a preponderance of female respondents, and potential for socially desirable responses.

Management should seek to maintain a high ethical attitude among sales agents to help foster a reduction in unethical behavior. Sales personnel should receive extensive ethics training to help enhance their ethical attitude in the job. Salespeople should also seek to establish and maintain long‐term relationships with their customers and to pursue long‐term profitability. Sales managers should seek to educate consumers about the various types of financial products, their respective strengths and weaknesses, and the appropriate conditions under which they should be purchased.

The potential for financial services industry salespeople to behave unethically has received extensive research attention. A key area, though, which has been virtually ignored is antecedents of misselling of financial services. The article seeks to address partially this gap in the literature.

Given the limited empirical work investigating personal characteristics of industrial sales people as related to their reward valences and the limitation of measuring valences at a single level, previous research is extended by examining the relationships between industrial sales people′s personal characteristics and their valences for multiple levels of various rewards. A conceptual framework is presented, previous studies reviewed, hypotheses offered, the methodology explained, and the results and implications of the study discussed.

As the influx of women entering sales positions is increasing, a growing (albeit relatively small) number of saleswomen have been promoted into first‐line sales management positions. A key question facing these managers is what kind of leadership style they should use with their sales staffs. Answers to this question are presently ambiguous. This paper reports the results of an investigation which focussed on which of four leadership approaches enhances performance of female sales managers’ sales personnel. Findings imply that women sales supervisors should give serious consideration to adopting a “contingent reward” leadership style. Also offers managerial implications.

An increasing number of small firms are moving into export operations. This paper reports the results of a study that examined the influence of market distance on managers’ choosing between use of in‐house expertise (integration) or external sources to obtain foreign market information. Market distance is defined as the sum of factors that affect the flow of information from and to the foreign market. Findings indicate that increased market distance leads to greater reliance on external sources (less integration) for market information.

States that researchers in marketing have called for investigations concerning personal selling and sales management in the international arena. Examines the influence of organizational formalization on work alienation through role stress and organizational commitment in industrial salesforces in the USA, Japan and Korea. From surveys of salesforces selling electronic products and components, reveals inter‐country differences and highlights the importance of conducting cross‐national studies on salesforce issues.

This study empirically explores one of the important channel issues – the relationship between various channel support given to channel partners and the perceived (by managers) goal‐orientation of a firm. Results from an emerging market, India, indicate that perceived orientation towards both profitability and market share is not associated with any of the channel support considered. Growth orientation however is strongly associated with most of the channel support activities – both business (e.g., business advice, pricing and ordering assistance, and personnel training) as well as marketing (advertising support, sales promotional material, and inventory management assistance) oriented activities. In contrast, perceived sales volume orientation is only associated with advertising support and business advice, however, the relationship is negative. These findings have interesting implications for channel management and channel motivation.

The primary intent of this research was to determine whether the perceived importance of various rewards is influenced by the career stage of sales managers. This study found that sales managers in different career stages have distinct intrinsic and extrinsic reward preferences that may ultimately affect motivation and productivity. Although several statistically significant differences in intrinsic and extrinsic reward preferences were discerned, some reward perceptions were found to be uniform regardless of sales manager career stage. Sales management implications, limitations, and directions for future research are offered.

Customer relationship management (CRM) is considered a means to create competitive advantage for a company, as well as influence organizational performance. Much research has explored CRM users' point of view vis‐à‐vis successful CRM implementation, yet little concern has been shown regarding customers' viewpoints toward these same actions. This is surprising given that one of the beneficiaries of CRM is the customer. This paper aims to report the results of a study that explored the gap between actual bank CRM actions and customers' expectations of those actions in relation to CRM customers' intention to remain in the relationship.

This study explores the gap between actual bank CRM implementation and customers' expectations of those actions in relation to customer retention using a survey method. A research model is presented to illustrate the theoretical relationships of the research.

The findings indicate that an incompatibility exists between the interval of actual CRM implementation activities and customers' expectations of the interval and that this incompatibility has an adverse effect on customers' willingness to remain in the relationship. Additionally, customers and CRM personnel hold different perceptions regarding the frequency with which CRM implementation activities should be executed.

Implementing CRM service efforts should be compatible with customers' expectations. Therefore, companies should pay keen attention when selecting the optimal frequency of CRM implementation so that it meets customers' expectations. Also, firms may be having too frequent CRM contact with customers, thus creating inefficient use of CRM resources.

This paper explores selected variables that may influence CRM performance vis‐à‐vis its implementation. The research provides the unique perspective of the customer as a major factor to consider for successful CRM implementation.