This study examines the effects of ethical and unethical cues on customers’ evaluations of the ethics of a service provider and their subsequent satisfaction with the service. The results of a disguised, laboratory experiment are used to suggest that customers respond to unethical cues in the environment through lower ethical assessments and satisfaction ratings, but that ethical cues may not necessarily increase satisfaction scores when compared to a neutral situation. The implications suggest that ethical cues and an honest service provider may be the expected norm, and thus will lead to (or maintain) satisfaction with the service encounter, while unethical cues will create dissatisfaction.
Customers often evaluate retail service providers using intangible evidence, such as the cleanliness of the establishment, appearance of service personnel, or, perhaps, the ethical image and conduct of a firm. During the service encounter, the time of direct interaction with a firm’s personnel, customers make inferences about store quality and image (Baker, Grewal & Parasuraman, 1994). Since customers evaluate the entire service encounter, not just the initial interaction with the provider (Brown & Swartz, 1989), a failure in one aspect of that encounter may influence the extent that customers use criteria other than the service success in evaluating satisfaction with the overall service performance (Taylor & Claxton, 1994). Thus, many aspects of the service encounter may affect a customer’s level of satisfaction to a greater degree than just service success Wakefield and Blodgett 1994 and Mohr and Bitner 1995. While the specific salient criteria may vary, customers judge the ability of a service provider to comply with their subjective expectations relative to these criteria. That is, customers, search for evidence to judge the intangible qualities of a retail service provider, including the ethics of the service provider.
Definitions of ethical versus unethical behavior are based upon the degree to which a proposed act is perceived as right versus wrong, good versus evil, fair versus unfair or just versus unjust (Hunt & Vitell, 1986). Marketing ethics, more specifically, involve moral norms as they relate to fair and just exchange relations and concern marketing-related issues. Customer expectations concerning fair and just treatment by the seller within a given retail environment, such as a retail service setting, for example, involve marketing ethics issues. It is also important to note that ethics and legality are not necessarily the same. Certain behaviors may be legal (i.e., an advertising campaign that is offensive to certain minority groups), but still be questionable ethically.
A number of prior studies have emphasized the social perceptions of specific actions by comparing customer judgments of various marketing issues (Vitell & Muncy, 1992), judging retail personnel (Dubinsky & Levy, 1985) as ethical versus unethical or by differentiating ethical judgments based on demographic characteristics such as occupation (Glenn & Van Loo, 1993) or gender (Tsalikis & Ortiz-Buonafina, 1990). However, no research has examined whether household consumers use their perceptions of a retailer’s ethical behavior to form judgments of service performance. Our goal in this research, therefore, is to assess this issue by examining the extent to which (ethical vs. unethical cues may affect customers’ ethical assessments and overall satisfaction ratings during a retail service encounter.
Toward this end, we develop below testable hypotheses, present our research methodology including extensive manipulation checks and set forth the results of several different tests. We conclude with a discussion of the importance of ethical behavior in retail operations and to customer satisfaction.
