Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, and Ethical Public Relations

Strengthening Synergies with Human Resources

Donnalyn Pompper

• Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781787145863
• eBook ISBN: 9781787438408
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Ethics
• Index: Business

Nowhere is the study of workplace ethics more relevant today than in the context of empowering organizations to meet their goals in corporate social responsibility and sustainability (CSR/S). Aimed at helping organizations uphold their commitments to people and the planet as well as profit, these are core goals towards which both PR and HR departments now work. 

However one major stumbling block is the fact that while internal departments may regularly work closely when managing and communicating with employees, the communication flow tends to be top down. In order to create more socially responsible, sustainable, and ethical organizations, the communication flow must be more organic and bilateral. The question of how both teams could work together on a more even playing field has escaped scholarly inquiry for years. 

Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability, & Ethical Public Relations: Strengthening Synergies with Human Resources examines ways to make CSR/S an integrated ingredient and ethical hallmark for an organization's culture. Here authors from around the globe use a variety of research methods to offer practical, empirical findings, exploring opportunities for employees to serve as a conduit for organizations' CSR/S goals. This book shows how HR-PR department cooperation can fulfil the role of organizational conscience, helping for-profits and non-profits to navigate toward greater CSR/S.

CHAPTER
1

Picking at an Old Scab in a New Era: Public Relations and Human Resources Boundary Spanning for a Socially Responsible and Sustainable World

Donnalyn Pompper

ABSTRACT

The time is right for renewed and updated attention to the relationship between public relations (PR) and human resources (HR) departments in the context of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and sustainability. For too long, conflict between the two practice areas has obscured opportunities for collaboration which benefits organizations and stakeholders. This chapter offers theoretical underpinnings for examining an interdepartmental, cross-unit working relationship between HR and PR – and advances a vision for why it is needed now.

Keywords: Public relations; human resources; encroachment; turf battles; CSR; sustainability

Thirty years ago, US public relations (PR) managers noted they were struggling against attempts of organizations’ other internal departments to absorb and control the PR function – from legal, to marketing, to human resources (HR). Practitioners among the for-profit PR sector, in particular, worried that the assignment of non-PR personnel to manage the PR role or to take over PR tasks could diminish PR’s hard won battle for legitimacy and seriously damage its reputation (Lauzen, 1991, 1992). Hence, attention to encroachment effects, defensive development of new techniques for measuring PR results, and studies of internal and employee relations received widespread attention among PR scholars and practitioners during the last decades of the 20th century.

More recently, these specific foci more or less had fallen off the PR scholarship radar until internal communication served as theme for the 18th International Public Relations Symposium (aka Bledcom) in 2011 and Public Relations Review published a special issue on internal communication the following year. Researchers examining relationship building among employees concurred that organizations must continue to support the important stakeholder group of internal publics or employee publics. Yet, formal attention in PR research to its own relationship with the HR function seems to attract little scholarly attention. Researchers published in this current edited collection focus on this important connection by considering the larger goal of PR supporting organizations’ Corporate Social Responsibility/Sustainability (CSR/S) goals – and what PR can do to build important synergies with employees in conjunction with the HR department.

As a management function, PR must be central to organizations’ relationship building efforts in using communication to advance people, planet, and profit goals consistent with Elkington’s (1999) triple bottom line approach. Employees are a highly valuable stakeholder group – a social capital talent pool – for enabling organizations to create, maintain, and use relationships as building blocks toward achieving organizational goals (Kennan & Hazleton, 2006). For example, when organizations desire to build a more diverse employee workforce along multiple social identity dimensions (e.g., age, culture, ethnicity, faith/spirituality, gender, physical ability, socioeconomic status, and more), PR practitioners use communication to “foster a livable work environment where diversity is embraced, conflict is minimized, and employees are interconnected and free to form relationships in the course of addressing organizational goals and achieving their maximum potential” (Pompper, 2012, p. 101). Indeed, PR teams are accomplished boundary spanners and relationship builders (Ledingham, 2003), linking individuals within internal departments, interdepartmentally across organizational functions, and even traversing geographic boundaries to connect with employees and other stakeholder groups located around the globe. Where our understanding falls short, however, is in exploring the fine-grained means by which PR and HR personnel work together – united by an organization’s meta goals of social responsibility and sustainability.

In addition to serving as relationship builders who maximize social capital assets, PR managers also are empowered to fulfill an ethics and social responsibility social role (Molleda & Ferguson, 2004) and an insider activist role (Holtzhausen & Voto, 2002; Pompper, 2015). Both roles may be conjoined as PR managers support organizations toward greater sustainability and social responsibility – especially in nations and regions where socioeconomic status inequality and negative effects of unregulated industry provide for-profit corporations with opportunities to partner with employees and other stakeholders such as NGOs and government groups alike in order to rid communities of pollution, waste, and blight. PR managers are uniquely positioned to support organizations toward social responsibility and sustainability, given their expertise in harnessing social capital – or positive energies among employees – as volunteers who connect organizations with external communities (Pompper, 2013). Hence, I have argued for shifting diversity management out of the HR arena and into the PR function – making it an integral component of CSR/S with its own budget and power to make decisions (Pompper, 2015).

This chapter critically explores the interplay between PR, HR, and CSR/Sustainability as viewed through lenses of theoretical underpinnings for examining interdepartmental relationships, PR and internal communications and its challenges, PR departments and CSR, PR and HR relationship building, encroachment and turf battles, envisioning the HR–PR cross-unit working relationship, and summary/discussion.

Theoretical Underpinnings for Examining Interdepartmental Relationships

Theorists consistently seek new ways to deepen understanding of the PR profession and phenomena central to its practice. For example, senior scholars have urged for PR theory building as organizational standard bearer for ethics and social good – with PR practitioners being responsible for communication processes (Roper, 2005) and consequently sharing responsibility for organizations’ morality (e.g., Pratt, Im, & Montague, 1994). Toth (2009) has advocated for integration of critical theory with PR excellence theory. I enjoin these threads and other meta perspectives for a multidisciplinary look at some means for building internal communication theory. While researchers have directed significant attention toward the impact of social networks and media within organizations, internal communication theory and assessment have lagged (Ruck & Welch, 2012). Next, I address several important literature subsets to support my proposition that PR and HR must work together to support CSR/S.

First, early organizational science researchers and the scientific management movement have advocated for intradepartmental and interfunctional cooperation in organizations. Frederick Taylor, an early 20th century American mechanical engineer driven to maximize industrial efficiency, is attributed with inspiring the personnel management field as part of scientific organizational management (Kaufman, 2002) and Henri Fayol, a French late 19th/early 20th century industrialist, is considered the father of modern operational-management theory (Koontz & O’Donnell, 1976). Fayol posited that employees must work together in structured harmony through organizing, coordination, and control of goals and activities – along a vertical hierarchical chain. Both prescriptions for theorizing about a well-managed organization offer antecedents to cross-functional knowledge building in organizations (Foss, Laursen, & Pedersen, 2011). Moreover, boundary-spanning long has been a useful strategy in PR as managers work to facilitate two-way communication and relationship building among organizations and stakeholders both internally and externally. Interdepartmental relations within a social system require consistent monitoring and development – such as when the marketing function links with sales (Ruekert & Walker, 1987).

Second, by the mid-20th century, systems theory emerged to explain how an organizational system may best be scrutinized in terms of relationships among its parts. By the 1970s, systems theory enabled PR researchers like Larissa (nee Schneider) Grunig (1985) to explain information flow among an organization’s departments – and ways these dynamics impact the PR function. More recently, Plowman (2013) posited that even though social systems may tend toward independence, economic and political conditions propel systems toward interdependence to ensure shared survival. For example, two-way symmetrical communication wherein internal departments achieve mutual respect promotes complementary engagements for “sustainable relationship[s]” (Plowman, 2013, p. 908). In addition, cross-organizational synergies rely on intraorganizational channels of communication, shared and integrated knowledge, with efficiencies that ultimately lead to superior innovation performance (Aoki, 1986) and competitive advantage (Tsai, 2001).

Third, critical theorists have advocated for horizontal management with permeable departmental boundaries to support social justice goals. Senior PR scholar, Larissa Grunig (1989), enjoined systems theory with contingency theory to advocate for interconnectedness or gestalt of organizations; a holistic and dynamic means for coordination across managerial subsystems. This view supports organizations’ internal departments working together to address the meta challenges of building a company or nonprofit organization that is socially responsible and sustainable both inside and out (Jung & Pompper, 2014; Pompper, 2015). The PR field must support idealistic values and collaborate for society’s benefit (Grunig, 2000) – and revitalize our notion of the common good (Brunner, 2017) by centering on professional ethics and “moral life as a whole” (Christians, 2008, p. 3).

Beyond the obvious benefits of nurturing collegiality, harmony, and trust in the workplace, social identity theorists have advocated for organizations to support exchange relationships between an employee and immediate supervisor, as well as between the employee and the organization (more broadly) so that each employee feels oneness with the organization – for maximum job satisfaction and engagement in order to reduce employee churn (Sluss, Klimchak, & Holmes, 2008). Employees who do not identify with the organization tend to experience increased burnout, stress, sickness, and withdrawal (Knight & Haslam, 2010). Important employee engagement factors include sharing views with management, feeling informed about the organization, and perceiving that one’s boss is committed to the organization, too (Truss et al., 2006). In particular, younger employees seek employers with whom they can identify – as an extension of their own identity – for a “greater sense of meaning and purpose in their extending work lives” because individual employees want to promote organizational characteristics that they also want ascribed to themselves (Cartwright & Holmes, 2006, p. 200).

Finally, theorists have advanced our understanding of corporations’ for-profit motives and effects on PR practice and employee relations. One corporation’s monitoring of employee opinions on internal communication over a course of 70 years suggested that fewer than half seem satisfied with management’s willingness to listen to employees’ perspective and so Broom and Sha (2013) recommended greater attention to upward, two-way communication for mutually beneficial relationship building. Corporations exist with society’s support, and therefore corporations are responsible to society (Buchholz, 1991; Manheim & Pratt, 1986). Hence, reform wherein corporate power is used to remedy social problems must happen concurrently with ethical and moral operations (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton, 1991). PR’s role is to serve as organizational conscience working on behalf of employers as well as stakeholders – especially in matters involving negotiation of profit with ethics (Holtzhausen & Voto, 2002; Pompper, 2015). Outcomes include corporations’ hiring of ethics officers and ombudsmen as liaisons between management and stakeholders (Brunner, 2017). Such actions also benefit the PR profession in shedding a poor reputation for unethical behavior – which endures since its early days. Indeed, there are multiple theoretical underpinnings for further enhancing understanding of how best to nurture interdepartmental relationships.

Development of the HR Function within Organizations

Formally managing employees in the U.S. emerged as a task early in the 20th century and has been called many things: labor/personnel/employment management, employee relations, and then in the 1980s – HR management (HRM) (Strauss, 2001). Regardless of label, the function is charged with attracting, developing, motivating, retaining, and using people as labor, or social capital. Relationships between employers a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Chapter 1 Picking at an Old Scab in a New Era: Public Relations and Human Resources Boundary Spanning for a Socially Responsible and Sustainable World
• Chapter 2 Organizations, HR, CSR, and Their Social Networks: “Sustainability” on Twitter
• Chapter 3 Nonprofit Social Responsibility and Sustainability: Engaging Urban Youth through Empowerment
• Chapter 4 Overcoming Regional Retention Issues: How Some Michigan Organizations Use CSR to Attract and Engage Top Talent
• Chapter 5 Corporate Social Responsibility, Volunteerism, and Social Identity: A Case Study of Cotopaxi
• Chapter 6 A Study of University Social Responsibility (USR) Practices at Rwanda’s Institut Catholique de Kabgayi
• Chapter 7 Corporate Social Responsibility: Johnson & Johnson Creating Community Relations and Value through Open Social Innovation and Partnership across Sub-Saharan Africa
• Chapter 8 Examining Public Relations’ Role in Shaping Organizational Culture, with Implications for PR, HR, and CSR/Sustainability
• Chapter 9 Hiring Programs for Military Veterans and Athletes Use HR and PR to Demonstrate Human Dimension of Corporate Social Responsibility
• Chapter 10 Failure to Activate: EpiPen, Legitimacy Challenges, and the Importance of Employee CSR
• Chapter 11 Inspiring Employees through CSR: Lessons from a Gambling Giant
• About the Authors
• Index