An Investigation of the Relationship Between Salesperson's Personal Moral Philosophy and their Ethical Decision Making Process

The purpose of this descriptive - correlational research is to study the relationship between the salespersons’ personal moral philosophy and their ethical decision making process. It tries to find answers to two main questions: 1) what are the surveyed salespersons’ personal moral philosophy? 2) How this moral philosophy will influence their decision making process? Our Research population, whose opinions were collected using a questionnaire, consisted of the salespersons taking part in the sales training courses offered by the Research Center of Iran Ministry of Commerce. The statistical population size was 300 and according to Morgan and Krejcie’ table (1970), a sample size of 169 was chosen. 137 questionnaires out of 142 were proper to be analyzed. Descriptive analysis of the data indicated that the majority of the respondents were working in industries like food, tourism, insurance, publications and engineering services, as salespersons. In addition, Path analysis, employed for the inferential statistics, showed that the respondents’ main moral principle was idealism, and although idealism directly influenced their moral judgment, relativism was more influential on their moral intention (final step in the ethical decision making process) than idealism.