67 A STUDY ON THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION, BUSINESS ETHICS AND CERTAIN RELATED VARIABLES M. M. Sulphey, PhD, Professor Department of Human Resource Management Saji George, PhD, Assistant Professor Department of Marketing, College of Business Administration Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Introduction Acquiring, maintaining and enhancing existing market shares, and furthering customer loyalty in the present competitive environment is of prime importance to any business organization. Towards this, they have to put in their best efforts and to develop sustainable competitive advantages. One aspect that is capable of providing competitive advantage is all round ethics of the organization. In the present day business, organizations are facing myriad ethical issues that involve moral judgments, standards to be followed, rules of conduct as well as conflicting perceptions as to what is right or wrong. Experiences show that even a minor unethical behavior from the part of the organization is likely to dent and hurt customer satisfaction and trust. Such attitudes of dissatisfaction and distrust will induce customers to take appropriate actions to protect themselves. The end result is the loss of customer loyalty. That the customer is supreme is an undoubted fact. He is the final decision maker regarding maintaining a relationship with an organization. Any organization should, as such, accord prime importance in creating and maintaining a solid relationship with the customer, and that too from his perspective. Any customer expects to obtain certain benefits through establishing a firm relationship with an organization. Some of his expectations include a customized personal service, ethical conduct, etc. This has been proved empirically (Strout, 2002; Wray et al., 1994). Consumers engage in transactions because they perceive that the benefits acquired from an organization will be greater than the monitory value they pay (Jones and Sasser, 2002). Review of Literature There is at present no dearth of literature regarding the concepts of ethics, as well as customer behavior. The volume of literature is getting enriched day by day. Chonko and Hunt (1985) identified a host of ethical issues that creates problems to business managers. Some of them include problems related to corruption, fairness, honesty, price, product, staff, confidentiality, advertising, data manipulation, etc. Ethics is one aspect that is capable of enhancing customer satisfaction, trust and the consequent loyalty. Customer satisfaction Though the concept of customer satisfaction (Florin, 2014) was first introduced by Peter Drucker in 1954, serious studies emerged only in the mid-1970s (Biabani and Asadbeigi, 2013). Customer satisfaction is now recognized as an important part of corporate strategy (Fornell et al., 2006), and a key driver of long-term profitability and market value of the firm (Oh et al., 2013). Customer satisfaction has been defined in