Assessing the Relationship between Sales Quotas and Moral Judgement of Insurance Salespersons: The Moderating Effects of Personal Moral Values, Quota Failure Consequences, and Corporate Ethical Climate.
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Date
2013
Authors
Ojikutu, R.K.
Obalola, M.A
Omoteso, K
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Abstract
There is an increasing call for managers in the Nigerian insurance industry to espouse higher level of ethical
behaviour to earn the trust of customers, regulatory agencies, and other stakeholders. Arguably, this will
enhance market penetration, increase patronage and higher level of profit. Theoretically however, ethical
behaviour can be institutionalized in organizations if the top management support ethical behaviour through
punishment and reward (high ethical climate). Other than corporate ethical values, managers’ beliefs about the
rightness and wrongness of an action in a particular situation could also be a function of his/her personal moral
philosophy. With respect to financial services, one aspect of marketing which have been empirically shown to
have influence ethical judgement and behaviours of managers is sales quotas. When salespersons are assigned
higher sales quotas, which are perceived as difficult, the tendency to engage in unethical behaviour to achieve
this target becomes higher. In this study, we assess and extend the theoretical relationship between moral
judgement of salespersons and perceived quota difficulty in the insurance industry. The study also explores the
moderating effects of salesperson’s ethical values (idealism and relativism), corporate ethical climate, and quota
failure consequences on the proposed relationship. With a structured questionnaire, data was collected from
respondents in the target industry through a multi-stage sampling strategy. Exploratory factor analysis was
performed to assess the factorial structure of the measures used in the study, their reliability and validity. Using
correlation and regression analysis, the results were presented and discussed with managerial implications for
the Nigerian insurance industry.
Description
Staff publication
Keywords
Sales quota , Idealism , Rrelativism , Self-efficacy
Citation
Ojikutu, R.K, Obalola, M.A, Omoteso, K (2013), Assessing the Relationship between Sales Quotas and Moral Judgement of Insurance Salespersons: The Moderating Effects of Personal Moral Values, Quota Failure Consequences, and Corporate Ethical Climate. Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences, vol.4 (2).