Rational, emotional and normative factors in the ethical decision-making process: An investigation on sales professionals

Ethical behaviors of professionals have a critical role both in fulfilling moral responsibilities to society and for the marketing success of the business. In this regard, increasing the ethical behaviors of sales professionals who represent the business in interaction with customers is of great importance. The developments in the decision-making literature that reveal the underestimated importance of emotions in decision-making make us believe that emotions are essential determinants in moral decisions. Moreover, the role of emotions in the rationalitynormativity trade-off is undetermined. This study aims to determine how and to what extent anticipated emotions, classified as positive and negative emotions, affect the ethical decisionmaking of sales professionals. Further, the role of deontology and teleology in this relationship has also been inquired. In this research, an experimental design was adopted. Hence, scenarios with a 2*2 factorial design were created. Online data were collected from 303 sales professionals across Turkiye. Findings revealed that the anticipated emotions have strengthened the ethical decision-making of sales professionals in most cases and weakened it in some cases only. Moreover, deontology affected the relationship between anticipated emotions and ethical decision-making significantly and had a strong partial mediating role in this relationship. However, teleology did not significantly affect the anticipated emotions and ethical decision-making relationship but had weak partial mediating and moderating roles in this relationship. Keywords: Anticipated Emotions, Ethical Decision-Making, Teleological Evaluation, Deontological Evaluation, Sales Ethics