Excellent Public Relations and Effective Organizations

A Study of Communication Management in Three Countries

James E. Grunig,David M. Dozier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135692872
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Public Relations
• Index: Business

This book is the final product of the "excellence project"--a comprehensive research effort commissioned by the International Association of Business Communicators (IABC) Research Foundation. Going well beyond any of the previously published reports on the Excellence study, this book contains many new statistical analyses of the survey data and more details from the case studies. Discussing theory and data related to several ongoing discussions in the communication profession, this book answers the following questions:
*How can we show the value of public relations?
*What is the value of relationships?
*How do relationships affect reputation?
*What does it mean to practice communication strategically?
*How can we measure and evaluate the effects of public relations programs?
*Should communication programs be integrated?
*How does the new female majority in the profession affect communication Excellence? This book, as well as the research it reports, is the product of symmetrical communication and collaboration. As such, it is intended for scholars, applied researchers, students, and informed professionals who understand the value of research in developing a profession, such as public relations. Knowledge of quantitative and qualitative research methods will make it easier to understand the book; however, the results are interpreted in a way that makes the analyses understandable even to those with little or no knowledge of statistics and research methods.

CHAPTER ONE

Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management: A Review of the Theory and Results

Organizations are effective when they have the expertise needed to respond to threats and opportunities in their environment. Although the necessary knowledge varies from situation to situation, organizations typically maintain expertise in several crucial management functions. For example, a perusal of the courses offered in a typical MBA program suggests that corporations need competence in accounting, finance, marketing, human resources, logistics, strategic management, manufacturing, transportation, information systems, and operations research. Most MBA programs also require courses in business and public policy, and a few require courses in communication. Few, if any, however, require courses in public relations—even though communication and public policy are essential components of the public relations function.

Some management theorists such as Hammer and Champy (1993) believe that functional categories of expertise, such as in marketing or public relations, will be less relevant in reengineered or reinvented organizations in which people work in teams to solve problems and to produce products and services. Nevertheless, cross-functional teams still will require different types of expertise even though the people holding that expertise no longer are segregated into departments.

At different times and circumstances, certain types of expertise have been more important than others for the survival and success of organizations—for example, manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution, finance when a takeover is threatened, marketing for new companies, or human resources during downsizing. Mintzberg (1983) pointed out that individuals gain power in and over an organization because of “some dependency that [the organization] has—some gap in its own power as a system … the organization needs something, and it can get it only from the few people who have it” (p. 24). Today, more and more organizations seem to depend on public relations.

Organizations are bombarded by demands from stakeholders both inside the organization and in their environments—employees, governments, communities, consumers, stockholders, and organized activists. As a result, organizations increasingly depend on someone who has the expertise to communicate with and build relationships with these stakeholder groups. The public relations profession has or should have the expertise to fulfill that organizational dependency. The purpose of public relations is to help organizations build relationships with the publics found within several categories of stakeholders.¹ Public relations professionals help to build relationships by facilitating communication between subsystems of the organization and publics in and around the organization. Public relations is communication management, the “management of communication between an organization and its publics” (J. Grunig, 1992a, p. 4). As a result of good public relations, both management and publics should behave in ways that minimize conflict or manage conflict effectively. To facilitate a good behavioral relationship, public relations must affect organizational policy, strategy, and decisions as well as the behavior of publics.

The fact that MBA programs are beginning to offer courses in communication and that most require a course in policy provides evidence of the gradual recognition of the need for public relations expertise in management, because public relations is about communication and about policy. Too often, though, both management educators and professional managers equate communication with techniques such as the writing of reports or letters, interpersonal communication, or publicity and media relations. Likewise, they divorce public relations from policy and create new titles for the function, such as public affairs, issues management, corporate communication, or external relations. In Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (J. Grunig, 1992a), we described the relationship between the management of communication and formulation of policy in this way:

Public relations/communication management is broader than communication technique and broader than specialized public relations programs such as media relations or publicity. Public relations and communication management describe the overall planning, execution, and evaluation of an organization’s communication with both external and internal publics—groups that affect the ability of an organization to meet its goals. …

[P]ublic relations managers should be involved in decision making by the group of senior managers who control an organization, which we call the dominant coalition throughout this book. Although public relations managers often vote in policy decisions made by the dominant coalition, we argue that their specialized role in the process of making those decisions is as communicators.

Public relations managers who are part of the dominant coalition communicate the views of publics to other senior managers, and they must communicate with publics to be able to do so. They also communicate to other senior managers the likely consequences of policy decisions after communicating with publics affected by the potential policy. (pp. 4–5)

Although expertise in public relations may seem essential for organizations, organizations and their managers vary greatly in the extent to which they recognize and empower the function. Two reasons seem to explain why: (a) Senior managers with the most power in an organization—the dominant coalition—often fail to recognize and appreciate their dependency on the public relations function, and (b) public relations practitioners often lack the expertise needed to meet that dependency even if the dominant coalition recognizes it. A preliminary understanding of these two reasons for the uneven status of public relations, especially the lack of management understanding, motivated the members of the IABC Research Foundation in 1984 to issue the call for research proposals that eventually led to the study whose results are reported in this book. In addition, these two reasons together emerged in the study as sets of variables that distinguished excellent public relations programs from those that are less excellent.

This book is the last of three produced by the research team awarded a $400,000 grant by the IABC Foundation in 1985. The first book, Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (J. Grunig, 1992b), presented the results of an extensive literature review that led to the conceptual framework for the 10-year study reported in this book. The IABC Research Foundation has published preliminary reports of the results of that research.

The first research report presented some of the results from the quantitative study of 327 organizations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom (J. Grunig et al., 1991). In the quantitative segment of the Excellence study, 407 senior communication officers (some organizations had more than one public relations department), 292 CEOs or other executive managers, and 4,631 employees (an average of 14 per organization) completed separate questionnaires that measured different critical success factors for public relations. The organizations included corporations, government agencies, nonprofit organizations, and trade and professional associations.

The second report presented in-depth descriptions from qualitative research on 25 of these organizations with the highest and lowest scores on a scale of excellence produced by the quantitative research (L. Grunig, Dozier, & J. Grunig, 1994). In addition, the second book, Manager’s Guide to Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (Dozier with L. Grunig & J. Grunig, 1995), presented a user-friendly review and explanation of the theory and results of both parts of the study, written mostly for public relations practitioners.

This book presents the complete results of both the quantitative and qualitative segments of the study. Sufficient detail is provided on the methods, results, data and observations, and statistics and qualitative analysis so that scholars of public relations and related fields can evaluate and interpret the study and use it to generate new research. At the same time, we have attempted to explain the study and our methods as clearly as possible so that public relations professionals and students can use its results to understand excellence in public relations and explain it to those who use and work with public relations. As a result of this extensive program of research, we believe we have constructed, modified, and confirmed an explanation of why organizations depend on public relations for their success, along with other critical success factors, and why public relations is among the most important management functions for a 21st-century organization.

This first chapter reviews the theoretical foundation for the Excellence study developed in Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management. It should provide enough background so that readers who have not read that first book can understand the results presented here. Readers who want a complete understanding of the theory and the literature that supports it should read the first volume as well. This chapter ends with an overview of the results reported throughout the book and suggestions for how to read the book if one wants details only from parts of the study.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

In its request for proposals in August 1984, the IABC Foundation asked researchers to address the question:

How, why, and to what extent does communication affect the achievement of organizational objectives?

Most public relations professionals probably are interested only in the third part of this research question: To what extent does communication affect the achievement of organizational objectives? That is, professionals most want to learn or prove how much value public relations has to an organization. By including three questions in the sentence, however, the IABC Foundation called for research that made it possible not only to show that public relations does have value to an organization but also to explain why it has value and how to organize the communication function so that it can provide this value.

Two major research questions, therefore, guided the Excellence study. We have called these questions the “Effectiveness Question” and the “Excellence Question.” The Effectiveness Question incorporates the questions of why and to what extent public relations increases organizational effectiveness:

How does public relations make an organization more effective, and how much is that contribution worth economically?

The Excellence Question asks how public relations must be organized and managed to be able to make the contribution to organizational effectiveness identified in the answer to the Effectiveness Question:

What are the characteristics of a public relations function that are most likely to make an organization effective?

A number of excellence studies have been conducted for management practices in general, the most famous of which was Peters and Waterman’s (1982) study, In Search of Excellence. We reviewed this study and similar ones and integrated the results in the chapter, “What Is Excellence in Management?” of Excellence in Public Relations and Communication Management (J. Grunig, 1992c). Most previous studies of excellence, however, addressed only the how question of the three questions posed in the IABC Foundation’s research question. Previous excellence researchers typically chose what they thought were excellent organizations using arbitrary criteria, such as six financial measures used by Peters and Waterman, and then searched for management practices that these excellent organizations shared. Generally, though, these researchers could not explain why the shared practices produced the financial results. That problem became especially acute when many of the excellent companies suffered financial declines or went out of business even though the management practices had not changed (“Who’s Excellent Now,” 1984).

In developing our study of excellence in public relations and communication management, by contrast, we began by reviewing the literature on the nature of organizational effectiveness, the nature of public relations, and the relationship between the two (L. Grunig, J. Grunig, & Ehling, 1992). That literature allowed us to answer the why question: For what reason does public relations contribute to organizational effectiveness?

With the answer to that question in mind, we then searched literature in public relations, communication, management, organizational sociology and psychology, social and cognitive psychology, feminist studies, political science, operations research, and culture to identify characteristics of public relations programs and departments and of the organizations in which they are found that answer the how question: By what means do excellent public relations departments make organizations more effective?

Finally, we searched the literature for concepts that would explain the value of individual public relations programs and the value of the overall public relations function to an organization—the to what extent question (Ehling, 1992a; L. Grunig et al., 1992). With measures of the effects and value of public relations in hand, we then conducted the quantitative and qualitative segments of our study to look for evidence that excellent public relations programs had these effects more than did less excellent functions.

The result was a comprehensive, general theory of public relations. That general theory began with a premise of why public relations has value to an organization. We could use that premise to identify and connect attributes of the public relations function and of the organization that logically would be most likely to make the organization effective. Then we could link the outcomes of communication programs that make organizations more effective to the characteristics of a public relations function that theoretically contributes the most to organizational effectiveness. After completing the conceptualization, we submitted the general theory and the several middle-range theories and variables incorporated into it to empirical test—our extensive quantitative study of 327 organizations in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom and our qualitative study of 25 of the organizations with the most and least excellent public relations departments emerging from our study.

The result of 10 years of literature review, theory construction, and empirical research is a benchmarking study that identifies and describes critical success factors and best practices in public relations. We go well beyond typical benchmarking studies, however, which usually are empirical but not explanatory. Typically, these studies identify organizations that are believed to be leaders in an area of practice and then describe how they practice public relations or some other management function. Such studies answer the how question (how do the benchmarked companies practice public relations?), but not the why or to what extent questions. In his book on public affairs benchmarking, Fleisher (1995) said that it is important to measure what public relations units do, but that “It is just as important to discover the qualitative factors—the how’s and why’s behind the numbers—associated with the attainment of the numbers” (p. 15).

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