Abstract:

Personal selling where applicable has been considered as an important mean of increasing the sales. However, the salespeople, who are expected to sell more, might show unethical behavior to satisfy these expectations and might find excuses for these ill mannered behaviors. This study was designed to investigate the differentiation of salespeople and their customers by their ethical judgements when they come across with ethically questionable situations in their personal selling process. A questionnaire with ethics related scenarios was given to the medical doctors (MDs) and to the medical representatives (MRs) working in a state hospital in Ankara and they were asked to express their own judgements on the same scenarios. The study revealed that judgements of MDs were more ethical than that of MRs. The opinion of the MDs about the judgement of the MRs was found to be less ethical than the MRs’ self-judgements. On the other hand, ethical judgements speculated by MRs about MDs was identical to the MDs’self- evaluations, except in two scenarios. In conclusion, ethical judgement was found to be statistically unrelated to gender, age,experience or marital status within the study groups.

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