Agents’ Ethical Decision Making And Its Factors In Direct Selling Channel

China Direct Selling goes through many detours, resulting in many non-ethicalbehaviors in the direct selling channel. Direct selling agents diretly contact with theconsumers. Based on the evaluations about direct selling agents, consumers decide totrust the agents or not and form companies’ word of mouth.So with the Chinese culturalbackground, what factors restrict ethical decision-making behavior by agents in the directselling channel? How to enhance ethical improvement of direct selling companies andtheir team? These have become important research questions.With such a background，this research attempts to help both the academic andpractical communities to understand how moral intensity affects ethical decision making indirect selling business in China. The author of this research studies the influence of moralintensity on decision making in direct selling sector. Direct selling ethical scenarios wereutilized as situations for measuring moral intensity and ethical decision making. There are224valid questionnaires collected and the author uses SPSS18.0software for statisticalanalysis. The results showed that:(1) Ethical perception has a significant positive correlation to ethical judgment, ethicalperception has a significant negative correlation to ethical intention, and ethical judgmenthas a significant negative correlation to ethical intention.(2) Moral intensity has a positive correlation to ethical perception and ethicaljudgment, and moral intensity has a negative correlation to ethical intention. Magnitudesof consequence, social consensus and probability of effect in moral intensity havesignificant predictive effect to ethical perception, ethical judgment and ethical intention.Concentration of effect has significant predictive effect to ethical judgment in only one ofethics scenarios.(3) Reference group has a significant impact on ethical decision-making in threestages. In ethical perception stage,direct selling agents are more influenced by colleagueswithin the organization and competitors outside the organization.In ethical judgment stage,the leaders within the organization and outside the organization’s competitors have asignificant impact on agents.Leaders within the organization led the greatest impact onagents. In ethical intention stage, colleagues and leadership within the organization andcompetitors outside the organization tend to have a significant direct impact on the behavior of agents.From two aspects of theory and practice, some useful suggestions are put forwardaccording to the research results. Meanwhile, current limitations and future researchorientation are also discussed at the end of the dissertation．...