What is it about?
The study tries to uncover some ethically equivocal aspects of the medical representatives’ practices. It also attempts to identify the determinants of these unethical practices according to medical representatives themselves and to their direct customers, the physicians.
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Despite the bulk of research on ethical/unethical behavior 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), for example, “the sale of prescription drugs is not a simple act of trade between two key players, other players include the pharmacy, health providers, patients in general and government or private healthcare insurance companies” (Hsu et al., 2009, p. 164).
Perspectives
This paper addresses a very critical issue in the way marketing activities are performed by salespeople, considered as boundary-spanning agents (Sharma et al., 1999) they 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 and its image. These firms should be aware of these issues and have to consider particularly the factors that may foster such unethical practices.
Professor Hamida H.S Skandrani
High Institute of Accounting and Businesses Administration University of Manouba
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The dark side of the pharmaceutical industry, Marketing Intelligence & Planning, October 2016, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/mip-06-2015-0123.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
