Public Relations Ethics

Marlene S. Neill, Amy Oliver Barnes

• Editore: Business Expert Press
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781947098657
• Argomento: Business
• Categoria: Pubbliche relazioni

Many senior public relations executives consider ethics counsel to be one of their core responsibilities. Raising ethical concerns to more senior leaders can be quite intimidating as "speaking truth to power" can have serious consequences for someone's career, so senior public relations executives have mastered the art of using less confrontational strategies. This book ranks and describes these various strategies with specific examples of how public relations executives have used them. The insights are based on nearly 150 in-depth interviews as well as survey research. Learn about the process of gaining influence and the mistakes to avoid when navigating internal politics. Many of the lessons are applicable to public relations counsel generally.

CHAPTER 1

Why Does Ethics Matter in Public Relations?

Both public relations employers and educators rank ethics among the most essential competencies for aspiring professionals to master (DiStaso, Stacks, and Botan 2009; Todd 2009). Many senior public relations executives even describe ethics as the foundation of effective public relations. For Anthony D’Angelo, 2017 Chair-Elect for the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA), ethics are essential to the practice:

As the late Patrick Jackson wisely noted, the currency of public relations is relationships. I think, essential to that currency, in order to make it work, the bedrock has to be trust…built on an ethical foundation and once trust is broken, you can’t have effective public relations, nor can you have an effective organization. So it’s really a central, important, grave responsibility.

Part of the foundation of ethics in public relations is truthful communication. As a PRSA Fellow working in an agency setting noted:

It means that the communications we give…will be believable, it will be truthful, it will not be deceitful, it will be in the public interest, but it also will be in the clients’ interest too. But we will not sacrifice the standards of truth and good communications just to satisfy a client.

Most college students will learn about ethics while studying philosophy or professional codes of ethics. One or two ethics courses, however, does not begin to prepare public relations professionals for the responsibility many in the profession have called an “ethical conscience.” While many of us might recall a conscience illustrated by the fictional childhood character Jiminy Cricket as he tried to prevent Pinocchio from making mistakes, this example, would have been far too simple for moral development philosophers.

Developing a Conscience

Moral development begins in early childhood, primarily from interaction with our parents. As we mature, we advance to higher levels of moral development. Although Piaget (1997) identified four stages (e.g., ritualized schema, egocentric, cooperation, and codification of rules), Kohlberg (1969) focused on six potential stages of moral development (see Table 1.1). Kohlberg’s stages offer additional insight into moral development and are discussed below.

Table 1.1 Kohlberg’s stages of moral development

Basis of moral judgment	Stages of development	Motivation for moral behavior
Level 1: Moral value is external, in bad acts, rather than in persons	Stage 1: Obedience and punishment orientation Stage 2: Naively egoistic orientation—right action is one which satisfies the self’s needs and occasionally others’ needs	Stage 1: Avoiding punishment Stage 2: A desire for reward or benefit
Level 2: Moral value involves performing good or right roles, maintaining order and meeting the expectations of others	Stage 3: Good-boy orientation—focus is on approval and pleasing and helping others Stage 4: Authority and maintaining social-order orientation—focused on duty, showing respect to those in authority	Stage 3: Potential disapproval of others Stage 4: Potential disgrace or failure
Level 3: Moral value resides in conformity with shared standards such as codes of ethics, rights, or duties	Stage 5: Contractual legalistic orientation—duty defined in terms of contract, focused on protecting the rights of others Stage 5: Concerned with public interest and own self-respect	Stage 6: Conscience or principle orientation—appeal to universality, consistency, mutual respect and trust Stage 6: Concerned about violating one’s own principles

Several terms have been used to describe the first stage including compliance, obedience, and punishment orientations (Kelman 1961; Piaget 1997; Rest, Turiel, and Kohlberg 1969). This stage focuses on our willingness to obey others’ rules to avoid punishment or receive rewards. Obviously, this implies behavior is dependent on the presence of others (Kochanska and Aksan 2006), and because the rules are not part of the individual’s personal conscience, they do not fully influence behavior (Piaget 1997). This stage also has been referred to as primary socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1967).

The next stage is identification, when an individual adopts behavior to build and maintain relationships with another person or group (Kelman 1961); a process called secondary socialization (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Kohlberg (1969) wrote that identification applies across a variety of situations and behaviors. He also found it to be persistent, occurring when others are not around, and even without reinforcement. This stage represents Kohlberg’s (1969) egoistic orientation (stage 2) and good-boy orientation (stage 3). Egoistic orientation focuses on compliance in order to receive rewards or benefits, while the good-boy orientation seeks approval through pleasing and helping others (Kohlberg 1969). Similarly, Piaget (1997) referred to these stages as egocentric and cooperation. From a child’s perspective, rules are regarded as sacred and untouchable and as a form of loyalty.

Kohlberg’s (1969) fourth stage, the authority and maintaining social-order orientation stage, focuses on duty and respect for authority. Similarly, Piaget (1997) calls this stage codification of rules. It is at this stage that concepts such as social norms and descriptive norms become important for predicting behavior. Social norms are “rules and standards that are understood by members of a group and that guide and/or constrain social behavior without the force of laws” (Cialdini and Trost 1998, p. 152). Industry codes of ethics would be a good example of social norms. Descriptive norms (i.e., what is actually done) motivate us to imitate the behavior of those who have visible signs of success such as wealth, power, or status (Cialdini and Trost 1998).

Eventually some rules are internalized as personal norms (Cialdini and Trost 1998), becoming part of our values system (Kelman 1961). This would be consistent with Kohlberg’s (1969) fifth and sixth stages of development, when a person considers issues such as duty, rights of others, and universal principles. This is the level of moral development that we refer to as a conscience, that which is “embedded in the self so as to become an internal guideline for the necessary personal decisions of social life…what gives us the courage of our convictions” (Miltch and Orange 2004, p. 207). These convictions can be referred to as the values or guiding principles in our lives (Schwartz 1996). Values represent “enduring notions of goodness and badness that guide behavior in a variety of contexts,” and are usually resistant to change (Burgoon 1989, p. 132). While some people may think the conscience plays a role in most decision making, Rest et al. (1969) suggest that the majority of U.S. adults make moral judgments at the Kohlberg’s conventional (stages 3 and 4) levels, based on the good-boy orientation and maintaining social order.

In contrast to the more self-centered motivations for ethical behavior, we found some professionals who are accredited in public relations (i.e., hold the “APR” designation) and have internalized the PRSA Code of Ethics (https://prsa.org/ethics/code-of-ethics/) to the point that the principles and values of the code are consistent with their own values. As a PRSA Fellow, who was a principal in an agency explained, the code was part of the agency’s normal business practices:

There was only three partners—one left I became the third partner. And from day one, because I was APR, I insisted on putting in our proposals and in our letters of agreement with the clients, that we published the PRSA Code of Ethics and each of the partners would sign to have this—this is how we’re running business with you and for you. So that minimized the number of (ethics) discussions we ever had to have.

Further evidence of internalization and identification with the PRSA Code of Ethics was obvious in an interview with a female senior executive, an APR, who recalled the time her boss asked her to share false information in a news release to counter damaging information about the company:

I gave her four different choices…let’s reword the press release, let’s leave out the information that she perceived was damaging, although, I didn’t perceive it that way, but anyway, a number of choices…She wanted to issue it that way…So in that instance… my final option to her was let’s take my name off of this one and put your name on it and that was met with a red face and I think what she said was, “Are you refusing to do the job for which we hired you?” And I said, “I wouldn’t say that I’m refusing to do the job for which you hired me because…you hired me knowing I was an APR, that’s the job.” (Neill and Drumwright 2012)

Cruising on Autopilot

History has unfortunately given us too many examples of instances when ethics played a minor, if any, role in an executive’s decisions or actions. Scholars suggest Schema theory might have been at work in those instances. Schema are those subconscious routines that allow us to function every day, and Schema theory proposes that sometimes scripts or action rules, or “cruising on automatic pilot,” guide our behavior (Ableson 1982). By using scripts, “a decision maker need not actively think about each new presentation of information, situations, or problems; the mode of handling such problems has already been worked out in advance” (Gioia 1992, p. 386). In fact, Schwartz (1996) wrote that “values may play little role in behavior except when there is a value conflict,” otherwise “habitual, scripted responses may suffice” (p. 2).

Those habitual, autopilot responses were a fear for one senior public relations executive working in an agency setting:

I think the greatest concern I have is just…in the midst of all the things that you do in your professional life, are your ethical antennas up sufficiently high to see a potential concern and then place it on the table for review, debate, discussion. (Neill and Drumwright 2012)

The Process of Ethical Decision Making

Just as it is helpful to understand how a conscience is formed, it is also beneficial to examine the steps involved in making an ethical decision. Ethics have been described as “a systematic attempt to make sense of our individual and social moral experience, to determine the rules that ought to govern human conduct, the values worth pursuing, and the character traits deserving development in life” (DeGeorge 2009, p. 13). In practice, ethical decision making “involves making rational choices between what is good and bad, between what is morally justifiable action and what is not” (Patterson and Wilkins 2005, p. 4). Public relations professionals can draw upon ethical principles based on fundamental values to help them “judge the rightness of decisions” and to resolve conflicting duties to the public and key stakeholders (Fitzpatrick and Gauthier 2001, p. 201). They may consider principles and values drawn from their family and religious upbringing, as well as industry and employer’s codes of ethics (Fitzpatrick 2002; Halff 2010; Lee and Cheng 2011; Wright 1993) to lead them to a decision. Examples of core values that are foundational to the PRSA Code of Ethics are honesty, loyalty, and fairness. One PRSA Fellow said, “Joe Truncale [CEO of PRSA] had mentioned them at the Leadership Assembly in 2015, and I wrote them down, because they were like just wonderful guidelines to live by.” Another PRSA Fellow described the progression of training he has received that guides his ethical decision making:

I went to a Jesuit university, I was raised a Catholic…I think my mom made sure that I had the understanding of what a moral and ethical lifestyle was all about. And then essentially with teachings of the Catholic church that combined with you know the Jesuit tradition: five philosophy courses, three theology courses and what I would consider a super liberal arts education…set me up for it and then after I got into the profession and joined PRSA back in ‘78 or whatever…and going for APR…put me in a sequence that had at least some memorization of the [PRSA] Code of Ethics… So I think that was an overall sort of lifestyle understanding and training from home to university…basically innate stuff that’s in your head that says what’s right and what’s wrong.

To understand the process we might go through when putting those ethical principles from industry codes of ethics or our upbringing into practice, Rest (1986) developed a four-step model. During the first stage, moral recognition, a person identifies a moral or ethical issue based on his or her awareness of industry codes of ethics or ethics training. Jones (1991) pointed out, however, that “a person who fails to recognize a moral issue will fail to employ moral decision-making schemata” and will instead make the decision based on other factors (p. 380). This is what Denny Gioia (1992), Ford Motors’ recall coordinator during the Pinto fire crisis of the early 1970s, described when explaining why he chose not to issue a recall after buyers reported a million-and-a-half Pintos with faulty gas tanks. Gioia explained that he was forced to let challenges such as time pressures, production limits, and the market (e.g., oil crisis, layoffs), rather than ethical considerations, guide his decision.

Once someone recognizes an issue as an ethical one, he or she would then use moral reasoning to make a decision. It is at this stage that some people are able to use moral imagination, which Jacobs (1991) described as “articulating and examining alternatives, weighing them and their probable implications, considering their effects on one’s other plans and interests, and considering their effects on the interests and feelings of others” (p. 25). Some public relations professionals’ have demonstrated moral imagination by using creative approaches to raise ethical concerns. One male senior executive staged a mock news conference to demonstrate why it was a bad idea to use an uninformed spokesperson. The...