Question

1. The final territory design and assignment decisions typically incorporate factors beyond analytical considerations and may result in some decisions with ethical consequences. Discuss ethical considerations for the following situations:

• A sales manager reassigns a low performing salesperson to a poor territory as punishment rather than directly addressing the salesperson's performance problem or taking definitive action and terminating the salesperson

• A rookie salesperson is assigned an extremely difficult territory with little chance for him or her to be successful and no indication upon hire of how challenging and precarious the assignment is.

• A sales manager takes the easy way out in designing territories by giving each salesperson a state (or some other easily divisible area) without any consideration of differences in market potential or workload.

• A manufacturer's representative agency has done a terrific job in developing a territory. The company then takes the territory from the agency and hires direct salespeople to assume the sales responsibility.

Answer 1

The passage talks about 4 situations where decisions were taken not with pure logical reasoning, but taken randomly for various reasons.

1. A sales manager reassigns a low performing salesperson to a poor territory as punishment rather than directly addressing the salesperson's performance problem or taking definitive action and terminating the salesperson

   In this first situation, the sales manager is aware that the performance of the salesperson is low, but still refuses to take the hard step of confronting him and giving him feedback or a warning. The sales manager did not make an logically correct decision here, and made a consideration ethically by assigning him to a poor territory as punishment. Had the manager promptly addressed the issue directly with the salesperson instead of giving him a punishment assignment, he would have taken a wiser decision.

2. A rookie salesperson is assigned an extremely difficult territory with little chance for him or her to be successful and no indication upon hire of how challenging and precarious the assignment is.

   In this second situation, the manager hid the fact that the job would be precarious from the rookie salesperson. The manager then assigns him to a difficult territory, which could harm the rookie's confidence and in turn performance. The manager made an ethical consideration in this case, which should have been handled in a better and logical way.

3. A sales manager takes the easy way out in designing territories by giving each salesperson a state (or some other easily divisible area) without any consideration of differences in market potential or workload.

   Territories are ideally demarkated based on a variety of reasons like potential customers, accessability etc. In this third situation, the sales manager makes an ethical consideration and designs territories as per his/her convenience to provide each salesperson a state. The sales manager should have designed the territories taking facts from past data and demarkated territories based on the volume of sales expected in future. The sales manager made an ethical consideration here by not considering the market potential as the main factor for making decision.
4. A manufacturer's representative agency has done a terrific job in developing a territory. The company then takes the territory from the agency and hires direct salespeople to assume the sales responsibility

This fourth situation is more ideal and ethical consideration is not seen here. The company identifies and acknowledges that the representative agency did a good job in developing territories factoring all possible conditions. The company then hires salespeople to take up these territories, which is a logical decision and does not involve ethical considerations from the company's point of view.