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Life insurance salespeople are hired to pursue the best interests of life insurers on the one hand, the salespeople are also expected to pursue the best interests of customers on the other hand. However, the best interests of life insurers are not necessarily consistent with the best interests of customers. This study aims to investigate the influences of interest conflicts on the life insurance salespeople’s ethical attitude and ethical intention by focusing on the role of ethical leadership and ethical training.

Four types of interest conflicts are studied. Questionnaires are administered to a total of 757 full-time life insurance salespeople. Data analysis is performed by using analysis of variance tests and partial least squares regression.

The main results indicate that the types of interest conflicts change the life insurance salespeople’s ethical attitude and ethical intention. Moreover, ethical training could make the life insurance salespeople become more concerned about the interests of customers, but not the interests of life insurers. The results also challenge a belief that ethical leadership and ethical training will often have direct, consistent and significant impacts on the ethical attitude and ethical intention of life insurance salespeople.

Interest conflict is an important issue in the literature on financial regulation. The potential for life insurance salespeople to behave unethically has also received extensive attention by researchers. This study provides clarification of the relationships among interest conflicts, ethical leadership, ethical training and ethical decision-making of life insurance salespeople. This is the first study that analyzes the relationships. The results of this study may provide some contributions to the relevant literature.

In the insurance industry, it is common for the insurance salespeople to sell insurance products to friends, relatives and associates. However, permitting (or encouraging) salespeople to sell insurance through personal relationships may result in some ethical conflicts. For example, some insurance salespeople may help relatives or friends with pre-existing medical conditions buy the health insurance. Previous studies on insurance fraud have rarely focused on this problem. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effects of guanxi (guanxi refers to the durable social connections and relationships a Chinese person uses to exchange favors for a specific purpose) on the salespeople’s acceptance of customer–salesperson collusions. Two types of guanxi are discussed in the research. The author further focuses on how the ethical attitudes and intentions are affected by the salespeople’s guanxi considerations, consequence evaluations, perception of peers’ attitudes, perceived harm to other policyholders and perceived probability of being caught.

Full-time life insurance salespeople from Taiwan were surveyed, and partial least squares method was used in the study.

The results showed that the types of guanxi, guanxi considerations, consequence evaluations, perception of peers’ attitudes and perceived harm to other policyholders were important in forming the salespeople’s ethical decision-making in the customer–salesperson collusions.

This is the first time that guanxi has been studied as the factor influencing collusive behaviors in the problems of insurance fraud. The results challenged an established belief that the insurance salespeople should first target close relations as they build their portfolio of customers.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate guilt proneness as a prosocial salesperson trait and its impact on outcomes important to the firm, the customer as well as the salesperson. Specifically, the authors look at how this variable relates to job effort and the indirect effects on customer satisfaction. The corollary purpose is to uncover how managers influence these constructs through positive outcome feedback.

Prosocial motivation theory grounds the conceptual model which the authors test through survey implementation. The final sample consisted of 129 business-to-business (B2B) salespeople working across multiple industries in India. Latent moderated structural equation modeling was utilized to test the proposed model.

The results suggest that guilt proneness positively influences the likelihood that a salesperson adopts a relational orientation, which has a direct effect on individual effort and an indirect effect on customer satisfaction. Supervisors have the ability to amplify this effort through positive outcome feedback, but only when relational orientation is low. Their support had no effect on salespeople with a high relational orientation.

The study is unique in that it combines an overlooked prosocial trait with a B2B Indian dataset. We provide value for firms because our results show that guilt-prone salespeople put more effort into their job – ”something universally desirable among sales managers” – through the development of a relational orientation. The authors also give practical implications on how to support salespeople given their level of relational orientation.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the theory of planned behavior (TPB) can be used to explain financial salespeople ' s ethical selling intentions and behaviour in developing countries. Understanding salespeople ' s ethical intentions and behaviour is important as consumers in developing countries are more at risk of ethical abuse arising from higher information asymmetry, their lower levels of financial literacy and less effective services regulation relating to ethical sales practices. Developing countries also have fewer governmental social support mechanisms, making the purchase of insurance more important for protecting consumers ' financial well-being.

The paper examines 205 Bangladeshi financial salespeople ' s ethical selling intentions and behaviour using the TPB. Structural equation modeling is used to analyze the constructs and overall model.

The findings identify that attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behaviour control (PBC) affect ethical selling intentions which, in turn, predict salespeople ' s ethical sales behaviour. However, PBC does not directly relate to ethical sales behaviour.

Understanding of the determinants of financial salespeople ' s ethical selling intentions and behaviour is important for firms in developing countries and identifies that they need to develop effective management systems and foster organisational cultures that engender ethical behaviour. This is important in developing countries where ethical abuses and lapses will result in harm to consumers who have limited financial resources.

The results identify that the TPB applies to the selling of financial services in developing countries and, thus, broadens the applications and contexts of the TPB model. It also provides some managerial guidance as to how potential ethical breaches might be limited.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how sales compensation disclosure, salespeople’s perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) toward customers (i.e. customer-focused CSR), regulatory knowledge and coworkers’ ethical behavior may influence life insurance salespeople’s moral intensity and intentions to engage in misleading sales behaviors.

The hypotheses are analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) regression with the data gathered from full-time life insurance salespeople in Taiwan.

The main findings indicate that disclosing sales compensations will alter the ethical decision-making process of life insurance salespeople. The findings further point out that customer-focused CSR is an important variable affecting moral intensity and ethical intentions.

There has not been any research on the effects of compensation disclosure on moral intensity and misleading sales behavior. The literature gap has led to a poor understanding of the relationship between the compensation disclosure policy and ethical sales behavior. Moreover, previous studies indicate that specific factors (such as moral intensity and ethical intention) are directly associated, while the research shows that as long as a regulatory policy (e.g. the policy of compensation disclosure) changes, the correlation between these variables may shift from significant to nonsignificant (or vice versa). The results are interesting enough to warrant more research, and they also show that the direct link between variables mentioned in previous research is not always stable or universal.

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to better understand the relationship between organizational ethical climate, the internalization of ethical codes (INT), perceived control and business-to-business (B2B) and retail salesperson job performance. This research develops and tests a model that examines these relationships to better understand the relationship of these variables to salesperson job performance.

Using the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 2002) as the theoretical lens and survey data from 307 salespeople in the USA, this study examines the relationship between organizational ethical climate, salesperson perceived control and salesperson job performance. This study examines whether this relationship may change with the presence of intervening variables related to a strengthened organizational ethical climate, and examines the relationship between these variables in two different analyses. First, this study examines the differences among retail salespeople as compared to B2B salespeople. Then this study examines the total dataset of salespeople as one sample.

The findings show that the positive effect of organizational ethical climate on the job performance of salespeople was reduced significantly when salespersons’ INT and salesperson perceived controllability, were examined in this relationship.

Organizational controls, such as an ethical climate within a firm, can impact salesperson job performance, especially if the firm’s ethical climate causes the salesteam to feel that it lessens their perceived control. This study found that if the ethical climate reduces the salespeople’s feelings of self-efficacy, that the ethical climate changes can intervene and can significantly reduce the otherwise positive effect of the organizational ethical climate on salesperson job performance.

From a theoretical perspective, the research is distinctive in its endeavor to better understand the relationship between the role of salespersons’ ethical code internalization and their feelings of self-efficacy and perceived control. This paper then examines how these variables can be influential to the direct effect of organizational ethical control and can impact the job performance of salespeople. The findings contribute to research by advancing our knowledge of how we can enhance the responses of salespeople to an organization’s ethical control, leading to higher customer satisfaction and improved sales performance.

The purpose of this paper is to attempts to better understand the role of ethical leadership in the business-to-business customer value creation process. Drawing on job demands-resources theory (Bakker and Demerouti, 2007; Demerouti et al., 2001), this paper develops and tests a model that examines the relationships among ethical leadership, customer orientation, commitment to providing superior customer value and job stress in the salesforce.

The sample includes 408 business-to-business salespeople. Structural equation modeling is used to test the study’s hypotheses.

Findings suggest that ethical leadership directly and indirectly (via customer orientation) influences commitment to providing superior customer value. Furthermore, both ethical leadership and salesperson commitment to providing value directly influence salesperson job stress.

This paper develops and tests a model that examines the relationships among constructs not previously examined, as they relate to business customer value creation.