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Introduction
Ethics in general and business ethics in particular, have been the subject matter of a large philosophical debate across cultures (Kulshreshtha, 2005) and in the many fields of social and business sciences. In marketing, ethical issues have gained a growing interest particularly in the 1980s with the seminal article by Hunt and Vitell (1986) and many other related works (Ferrell and Gresham, 1985; Vitell and Muncy, 1992). Currently, such a topic has become even more central (Marta et al. , 2008) particularly in the face of the many organizational malpractices (Enron, WorldCom, Servier, etc.) that the business community has known.
Accordingly, many marketing scholars recognize the growing interest for firms to take decisions and to adopt courses of actions that are ethically embedded and that are likely to satisfy clients, customers, stakeholders, and society at large (Marketing News , 2008, p. 28). Consequently, a utilitarian view of ethics is advocated. Indeed, this view implies that an action is considered as ethical if it achieves the greatest good for the greatest number of people (Robertson and Anderson, 1989). Authors also acknowledge the need and the value for firms to develop strategies based on a long-term relationship orientation with their stakeholders (Carrigan et al. , 2005), and with ethical principles as their cornerstone (McDevitt et al. , 2007). Such recognition has led some marketing scholars to devote a specific interest to the factors that may influence the ethical behaviour of salespeople, in particular (Chonko et al. , 1996). Indeed, salespeople as boundary-spanning agents (Sharma et al. , 1999) have to deal with their firms' and customers' multiple expectations (McClaren, 2000). As a result, unethical behaviour may occur resulting in negative consequences for the firm.
It is noteworthy that despite the bulk of research on ethical/unethical behaviour among salespeople, studies have been mainly carried out in developed countries and little interest has been devoted to the ethical/unethical behaviour of salespeople in emerging economies, particularly in the medical and pharmaceutical sector.
Moreover, studies on this topic have mainly addressed the employees' perceptions of the ethical issues (Al-Khatib et al. , 2002) and, at the best of our knowledge, few, if not any, of these studies have taken into account other actors. In the pharmaceutical industry (PI),...