Educational Needs Analysis of Sellers Developing an Ethical Assessment Scale

  The way dealers and sellers behave can lead to satisfaction, trust, and customer loyalty while meeting customers' needs in the purchasing process. The sales staff behavior affects the marketing activities of stores due to the role they play in introducing products to customers. This feature should be taken into consideration in attracting and hiring, as well as creating awareness and training for the vendors. In this research, we try to identify some of the educational needs of sales staff in the field of professional ethics. In other words, the main issue of the research is to determine the educational needs of retailers in the home appliance section in Etka Supply Chain on sales ethics which measures the extent of vendors' compliance with ethics in the sales profession through the creation, validation and utilization of the final scale of the research, and educational needs are recommended following prioritization.

The present survey research is applied in nature and is mainly based mixed method research. Using the mixed approach, the personal sales ethics assessment scale was extracted as the basic conceptual model, localization, and real ethical examples for evaluation of the ethical behavior of vendors. At first, using a data-oriented theorizing strategy, eight interviews were conducted with managers and sellers of the home appliance section of Etka supply chain in Tehran. The model criteria were moderated and published after reviewing by two coders. In these interviews, real ethical examples were set for each of the model's criteria, extracted, and then the content of the questionnaire were set. Quantitative and final scale confirmation was carried out by a survey among 169 employees in this section of the stores and the reliability of the five criteria from the total nine criteria was obtained using Cronbach’s alpha index.

Prioritizing educational needs based on the average scores of scales according to Shannon entropy, four criteria for promotion, and three criteria for maintaining the current ethical status of the current Etka sales chain were identified. The final scale of ethical evaluation as the innovation of this research, helped make the needs analysis possible by identifying the real ethical criteria of: proper and appropriate behavior, providing customers with accurate information, observing the store's instructions, clarifying the goods, helping to resolve the actual customers’ needs, veracity and using non-degrading comments against the competitors and their market.

Compared to similar local and international researches, it can be said that the PSE and PSE-2 scales have used ethical scenarios to measure the morality, and their response to different ethical schools can be different and time consuming as well. But, there are no local studies using such an approach so far. Therefore, the moral assessment of vendors is one of the innovations of this research. Local investigations in this field mainly deal with the relationship between variables. In summing up the two approaches, based on the average criteria and results of weighting proposed by Shannon Entropy, the following four criteria were proposed: 1. No degrading comment against competitors and their market, 2. Veracity, 3. Helping to resolve the actual customer's needs, and 4. Transparency about the goods for the customer to enhance the status quo. In addition, present condition for the following three criteria of 1. Compliance with the store's instructions, 2. Providing the correct information to the customer, and 3. Having fit and proper behavior should be maintained. To do this, one can use the ethical examples specified in each criterion to develop the necessary educational courses. Due to the presence of different companies in the home appliance section, firms apply different policies for vendors and how they interact with customers. Therefore, it is necessary for Etka supply chain stores to rely on set their ethical code and charter to apply homogeneous professional ethics in the stores. According to the researcher, the assignment of the last rank to the sixth criterion, which indicates that the rival and its market should not be demolished, partly reflects the problems resulting from the differences in policy making of the various companies present in the store.