Impact of Organizational Factors on Sales Force Unethical Behavior in the Sri Lankan Life Insurance Industry

Abstract

As a service providing company the image and the success of the insurance industry vastly depend on the ethical behavior patterns of their salesperson as they are the persons who have direct relationships with customers which in turn build up the customer’s satisfaction and trust towards the organization. Therefore, the managers must have the knowledge of the key determinant of the unethical behavior of their salespersons if they want to ensure the ethical behavior among the salespersons. Different factors contribute to these behavior patterns and organizational factors are more important among them. The main purpose of this research was to identify the organizational factors affecting the unethical behavior patterns of salespersons in the Sri Lankan life insurance industry. An extensive literature review was conducted, and five organizational factors were identified as impacting on unethical behaviour of salespersons in the Sri Lankan life insurance industry. Namely, they were supervisory role, sales targets, organizational culture, code of ethics and a rewarding system. Data were collected from 200 individual salespersons from 10 life insurance companies through structured questionnaires. The stratified random sampling method was used for the selection of the respondents to the sample and data were analyzed using multiple regression. The findings of the research indicated that the supervisory role, sales targets and rewarding system significantly predict the unethical behavior of salespersons. Further, it revealed that sales targets predicted unethical behavior strongly, compared to the rewarding system and the supervisory role. Findings of this research also gave some implications on the code of ethics. It was found that there is no code of ethics in the companies or if exists they are not practiced or enforced. Accordingly, the research provides recommendations that can be used to minimize the unethical behavior patterns of the salespersons. To improve the generalization of the findings, future research should broaden the sample by including general insurance companies and finance companies. Continuing research is needed to analyze the other factors in addition to organizational factors and future research could also look at the customer perspective rather than the salesperson perspective.