The Importance of Ethical Marketing Leadership in an Organization
Description:
The purpose of our blog is to research the impact that enforcing ethical concerns within an organization has on employees, as well as the impact it has on marketing strategies utilized by the organization.
Celsi, M. W., & Gilly, M. C. (2009). Employees as internal audience: how advertising
affects employees’ customer focus. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 38(4), 520–529. doi: 10.1007/s11747-009-0173-x
Retrieved January 29, 2020, from
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11747-009-0173-x
This article discusses how organizational communication cannot be separated into two separate categories of internal and external communication. Messages of an organization affect both their consumers, and employees. This is directly related to organizational behavior and how marketing affects it. The consistency, or inconsistency, of organizational identity communicate to factors such as company pride, customer focus, and common values.
This article specifically shows the connection between organizational culture and employees customer focus. Customer focus and a business’s performance are closely correlated with a positive relationship. When employees believe in, and identify with, company advertising there is an increase in performance. Congruent advertising can be an important common goal for employees to foster an organization identity. This all relates to and is relevant to our research because this article proves a strong connection between how organizations advertise and internal employee identification. Therefore, it is important to evaluate marketing from an internal employee perspective, and external consumer perspective.
Mulki, J., Jaramillo, J., & Locander, W. (2009). Critical Role of Leadership on Ethical Climate and Salesperson Behaviors. Journal of Business Ethics, 86(2), 125– 141. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from
https://doi-org.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/10.1007/s10551-008-9839-4
This article presents how leaders play a critical role in setting the tone for ethical climate in organizations. It touches on when scandals arise within an organization, leaders are usually at blame because they didn’t take the lead of setting the ethical standards in the organization. When a workplace is not monitored and doesn’t set ethical standards, salespeople are more likely to have unethical practices. In the article it is stated that “leadership behavior is the critical determinant of an ethical climate in organizations.” This article will be beneficial for our blog post because we will be looking at how ethical marketing leadership is important in within a firm and how it affects the workers.
Naeem, R. M., Weng, Q. (D., Hameed, Z., & Rasheed, M. I. (2019). Ethical leadership and work engagement: A moderated mediation model. Ethics & Behavior, 30(1), 63–82. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from
https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/doi/full/10.1080/10508422.2019.1604232
This article is relevant to our research, as it shows the significant impacts the effects of ethical actions in higher-ups can have on the employee populous as a whole. Research has shown that based on social cognitive theory, ethical leadership directly and indirectly relates to an increase in self-efficacy and work engagement among subordinates, presenting a strong case for the importance of ethical leadership and action in the field of marketing. The research heavily focuses on the individual actions of specific leaders and answers the question of why and why it affects followers’ behaviors positively. This article will further support the claim that ethical behavior at the top has implications throughout the organization as a whole.
Stewart, D. W. (2019). The Accountability Crisis In Advertising and Marketing. Journal of
Advertising Research, 59(4), 385–390. doi: 10.2501/jar-2019-042
Retrieved January 27, 2020, from
This article discusses how often companies fall into advertising fraud and how much money is involved in this process as well. Even worse, some companies have incentives to ignore advertising fraud rules in favor of monitoring the amount of traffic the company’s ads invoke. Obviously this creates a toxic culture within businesses to value employee performance over their ethical standards, but it also erodes the company’s brand trust, which is demoralizing to employees.
The article also comments on the value of intangible assets (ie. knowledge, data, information, etc.) and how dominant this new type of asset has become in the workplace. When an asset grows to such an importance among large corporations, it can become a dangerous motivator, especially when there are sleazy ways to operate under the table to acquire such information without the knowledge from one’s competitors.
Van Quaquebeke, N., Becker, J. U., Goretzki, N., & Barrot, C. (2019, May). Perceived Ethical Leadership Affects Customer Purchasing Intentions Beyond Ethical Marketing in Advertising Due to Moral Identity Self-Congruence Concerns. Retrieved January 29, 2020, from http://ezproxy.library.wwu.edu/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=136098537&site=ehost-live
This article is relevant to our research objective because we’re studying the importance of ethical marketing leadership within an organization. This article touches on combining the organizational behaviour ethical leadership approaches with today’s current marketing strategies. This study matters to our topic because it displays the findings that ethical marketing leadership has a positive correlation to consumer purchase because consumers have shown they prefer to purchase from companies with higher ethical standards. It concludes that ethical leadership isn’t only an issue of morality, but critical to organizations that wish to build a positive rapport with consumers. The article itself does a great job at furthering research on this particular topic, however it lacks in the sense that it does not go into depth about what is expected of ethical marketing strategies.
Olivia Romanelli, Emily Lewis, Alina Moroz, Drew Vidano, James Hill