Investigating the Impact of Ethical Leadership, Accountability, and Fair Behaviors on Attracting and Retaining Customers in Shared Businesses

Researchers have called the new century the century of communication and expansion of new businesses, in which users communicate with each other and share their products through social media platforms. In shared businesses, economic activities have different definitions. Respecting ethics and maintaining moral values is one of the essential issues in new businesses. Shared businesses have been welcomed by customers due to their non-face-to-face nature and virtual sales of products, and their ability to offer diverse and cheap products through sharing on the Internet. This research was conducted to investigate the effect of ethical leadership, responsibility, and fair behaviors on attracting and retaining customers in shared businesses.
 
The research is applied in terms of purpose. Its statistical population included all consumers of goods, services, and ideas in shared businesses, who used sharing platforms in the past year. A researcher-made questionnaire was used to collect the required data. The reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed using Cronbach's alpha coefficient. It stood at 0.83. Due to the large size of the community, the sample size was determined to be 384 people through Cochran's formula for indeterminate communities. The questionnaire was randomly distributed among 384 customers of shared businesses in Tehran. To test the main hypotheses of the research, the structural equation model was used in the Lisrel software. To measure the compatibility of the proposed model and the data, model fitting was done. Also, the average, the standard deviation, and other required statistics were used for descriptive statistics.
Among the total of nine proposed hypotheses, three main hypotheses and six sub-hypotheses were confirmed. Also, the mediating role of satisfaction and purchase intention variables was proved.
 
According to the results, the customers of shared businesses buy the products of shared businesses in person and without physically observing the goods. These customers bear more risk compared to traditional business customers. Further studies about the ethical components of attracting and retaining customers in new shared businesses are needed. Ethical responsibility for respecting the rights of customers is a binding principle in shared businesses. Ethical behaviors in practice reflect the ethical and governance values of that company. Making ethical decisions when sharing products to attract and retain customers is more than a choice. The results of the research conducted in Tehran investigating the components of ethical leadership, responsibility, and fair behavior in attracting and retaining customers in shared businesses showed that ethical leadership has a positive effect on attracting and retaining customers in shared businesses. It seems that the nature of moral behavior can be seen in virtual environments as well.