The Relationships between Personal Cultural and Professional Values and Marketing Ethics among the Academicians

The main purpose of this research is to determine the relationship between personal cultural and professional values and the academicians marketing ethics. Marketing ethics is about moral evaluations of decisions and actions as right or wrong on the basis of commonly accepted principles of behaviour in marketing. A survey of academicians was conducted to determine the factors that are related to the academicians’ marketing ethics using these dimensions: Collectivism, Uncertainty Avoidance, Power Distance and Professional Values. Marketing ethics is assessed using Vittel Marketing norm scale. From 150 questionnaires distributed to the academicians in higher learning institutions in Malaysia, 124 respondents were collected. Data were analyzed using several methods such as descriptive statistics, correlation, and regression. The findings showed that uncertainty avoidance and professional values were the factors that influence academicians’ marketing ethics. Since the result of the study showed that uncertainty avoidance and professional values are the main factors that influence the marketing ethics of academicians, the management of the high learning institutions would perhaps look into methods and ways of cultivating the professionalism among the academicians in order for them to possess a good marketing ethics.