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Factors predicting unethical marketing research practices

Unethical employee behaviour was identified as a root cause for the global banking and financial mess of 2008–9. If companies want ethical employees, then they themselves must conform to high ethical standards. This also applies to the marketing research industry. In order to identify organisational variables that are determinants of the incidence of unethical marketing research practices, a sample of 420 marketing professionals was surveyed. These marketing professionals were asked to provide responses on several scales, and to provide evaluations of incidence of 15 research practices that have been found to pose research ethics problems. One of these scales included 11 items pertaining to the extent that ethical problems plagued the organisation, and what top management’s actions were towards ethical situations. A principal components analysis with varimax rotation indicated that the data could be represented by two factors. These two factors were then used in a multiple regression, along with four other predictor variables. They were found to be the two best predictors of unethical marketing research practices.

To simplify the table, only varimax rotated loadings of 0.40 or greater are reported. Each was rated on a five-point scale, with 1 = ‘strongly agree’ and 5 = ‘strongly disagree’.