Engaged at work? An employee engagement model in public relations

ABSTRACT

Engagement has emerged as an important concept in public relations scholarship. Yet a theoretically informed model with a clear and coherent explication of the construct is still lacking. By situating our study in the internal organizational context, we provided an updated conceptualization and operationalization of employee engagement, proposing a strategy-engagement-behavior three-step employee engagement model. Results from an employee survey (n = 568) supported our conceptual model, showing that organizational engagement strategies positively predicted employee engagement, which in turn accounted for employees’ positive and negative messaging behavior, as well as their contextual performance behavior. After controlling for significant demographic variables such as gender, age, organizational size, number of subordinates, and level of management position, we identified a complete mediation effect of employee engagement in our two-step structural equation modeling analysis.     

Reputation management: the new face of corporate public relations?

An empirical study of Fortune 500 companies suggests that “reputation management” is gaining ground as a driving philosophy behind corporate public relations. Whether the phenomenon is a trend or a fad is not clear, given the lack of consensus in defining reputation, the instability and questionable validity of reputation measures, and unanswered questions about when and how (or even whether) reputation can be “managed.” Besides reputation management, corporate public relations departments in the study embraced a wide variety of other definitions of their function, suggesting that public relations continues to have great difficulty in defining itself. While the study did not find a strong correlation between reputation and overall spending on corporate communication activities, as had a similar study the prior year, it did find some interesting correlations between reputation and specific categories of spending.     

Do public relations practitioners perceptually share ingroup affiliation with journalists?

Upwards of 200 studies over the past hundred years have reported on the relationship between public relations practitioners and journalists. However, no experiment has compared the group members’ perceptions when seeing their roles in action. Inspired by frameworks of social identity theory, intergroup deception, and the black sheep effect, we test how public relations practitioners and journalists respond to a crisis communication media interview. In our experiment, a company spokesperson either answers questions or engages in stereotypical “spin,” which journalists historically consider one of the most offensive public relations strategies. Results indicate that public relations practitioners align with journalists in their perceptions of a spokesperson’s trustworthiness and the organization’s trustworthiness across treatment conditions. Practitioners also manifest the black sheep effect, disliking their group representative engaging in deception. Furthermore, we explore whether the effects on perceptions of trustworthiness are moderated by psychological identification with their respective industry. Discussion concerns the theoretical and practical ramifications of the groups sharing ingroup affiliation, contrary to prevailing notions of acrimony.     

An integrated model of consumer materialism: Can economic socialization and maternal values predict materialistic attitudes in adolescents?

In this study, an integrated model of materialism was attempted. Based on questionnaire data from 246 adolescents, this study showed that materialism in adolescents is positively related to peer influence and is negatively related to satisfaction with one’s mother, religious service attendance, and economic socialization. Within a sample of 82 adolescents for which their mothers’ materialism scores were also available, maternal materialism correlated with adolescents’ materialism. With maternal materialism taken into account, adolescents’ materialism correlated with peer influence and religious service attendance, but economic socialization did not have an impact, although neuroticism did. Contrary to previous research, family structure was not related to adolescents’ materialism, although family environments were very important predictors of the adolescents’ materialism to the extent that their mother’s materialism level and their mother’s report of the family communication style alone could reliably predict her child’s level of materialism. Implications of the findings for the study of materialism are discussed, and ideas for future investigation are offered.     

Can old age be given a public meaning?

Anti-ageism has done much to eliminate bias and stereotyping, but it has given us no positive vision of what old age might be. A shared interpretation of the physical and social realities of the elderly can enhance the lives of aging people and provide the foundations for public policy.     

What counts amid contention? Measuring perceived intractable problems in public relations

Existing public relations measurement and evaluation frameworks may struggle to adequately capture (1) organizational engagement regarding contentious or intractable issues, and (2) external or publics-centered outcomes beyond the realm of organizational objectives and interests. In this research, qualitative, semi-structured interviews (41) with experienced U.S. public relations practitioners examined measurement and evaluation in the context of managing perceived intractable issues. In order to capture public relations engagement and potential impact on such issues, the paper presents a new measurement framework to encourage metrics for issues, communities, and societies—not just organizational priorities. This approach ensures a wider scope of levels of analysis (from message-level metrics to societal and global levels) as well as recognition of the potential value of dissensus, agonism, and agonistic metrics (Davidson & Motion, 2018) for more nuanced understandings of the work of public relations practitioners in contentious contexts.     

“In-awareness” approach to international public relations

The skill of cultural “in-awareness” developed within the field of intercultural communication is applied to international public relations to understand culture’s influence on the communication function of public relations. The goal of the in-awareness approach is to expose hidden cultural assumptions and expectations that plague international public relations and allow one to explore national and cultural differences between clients and practitioners in a systematic and nonthreatening manner. A three-tiered framework is presented based on a country profile, cultural profile, and communication profile. The country profile provides a broad outline of what may be feasible within a particular country, while the cultural profile speaks to what may be effective in that country. The communication profile further refines cultural generalities by delineating culturally-based communication behaviors that underlie common public relations practices. By examining the communication profiles of both the practitioner and client, one can see how cultural communication differences translate into culturally-defined expectations and assumptions about specific public relations activities.     

Vision and state health department public relations practitioners: Prepared to lead?

Visions are important to organizational effectiveness. Although providing vision has been identified as one of the behaviors that best captures organization-wide public relations leadership, little public relations research has focused on vision. Similarly, state health departments have drawn little interest among public relations scholars even though states are a central part of the nation's public health system. This study addressed the perceptions of the top public relations professionals at state health departments concerning vision and their involvement in the visioning process. The practitioners were nearly unanimous in their belief that organizational visions are important. However, results indicate that some top public relations practitioners at state health departments are not prepared to make optimal contributions to the visioning process. In order to take full advantage of opportunities to serve as organization-wide leaders, public relations practitioners should seek out information about visioning in order help chart their organization's future and enhance their careers.     

What do we know about government public relations (GPR)? A systematic review of GPR in public relations literature

Despite the importance of public relations within local, national, and international government organizations, government public relations (GPR) is still an understudied field in public relations research when compared to its corporate and nonprofit counterparts and has been critiqued for lacking theoretical development (Liu & Horsley, 2007). To present the accumulated knowledge about GPR, this study used content analysis and bibliometric network analysis to systematically review 155 articles published in key public relations journals from 1976 to 2021. Our findings illustrate the status of GPR scholarship in terms of publication trends, authorship, research contexts, research topics, theoretical knowledge structure, methodological approaches, and ethical considerations. Findings suggest that GPR is a fast-growing field attracting international and multidisciplinary scholarly interests; yet has not been clearly defined and theorized. With strong theoretical roots in relationship management, GPR has the potential to develop context-relevant theories capturing the distinctive relational dynamics in various government communication situations. This study proposes a work-in-progress definition of GPR, identifies critical research gaps, and suggests future research directions to assist GPR in developing into a distinct and promising subfield of public relations research.     

Does public relations scholarship need better PR? practitioners’ perspectives on academic research

Articles in academic public relations journals often provide recommendations for public relations practitioners. The purpose of this study is to gain a practitioner perspective on that work and to determine if a potential disconnect between public relations practitioners and scholars exists. Through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with 22 public relations practitioners, this study examines knowledge, readership, and applicability of public relations scholarship in industry. Participants indicated they have a general awareness of and assigned value to academic scholarship; however, they do not actively consider it or use it in their professional lives due to issues of access, time, and relevance. Many appeals have been made within the academy to make scholars’ work more “public,” and these results reflect this need. Based on these findings, recommendations are made to increase the accessibility and relevance of scholarly work for professionals.     

Divided we stand: Defying hegemony in global public relations theory and practice?

The last decade has seen the world becoming increasingly complex. One way of dealing with complexity, according to Schwab (2010a), is to look for certainties or solutions that impose order by simplifying. The authors contend that this is a risk in public relations practice and the academy. While recognizing their benefits they warn against attempts to produce global models which also seek to impose hegemony and argue for maintaining a diversity that reflects reality. They take the cases of the UK and Singapore as respective exemplars where hegemony has arguably occurred and where it can still be resisted. They call for a professional and epistemological stand against hegemony.     

Trends in public relations roles: 1990–1995

This study reported trend data on the roles of national Public Relations Society of America members. The authors posited that roles are constantly in process and illustrated this through analyses of activities within the broad manager and technician categories. The authors argued also that professional experience as a predictor of manager enactment should be defined not as number of years in the field but by looking at the kinds of experiences received on the job.Study results suggested that for this sample of PRSA members an agency role emerged in 1995 in addition to the manager and technician roleso found in 1990. There was still cross-over in the activities performed in each of the role profiles, indicating that public relations people do an assortment of activities. The agency role could be a result of the economic downturn that occurred in this five-year period. Women still seemed to be doing “it all” for less money. They did not carry out the same activities as the male role profiles that emerged and enacted a less pronounced agency role.     

Understanding public relations in the ‘sharing economy’

In spite of the macro-economic impact of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ there is a nearly complete dearth of contributions from the communication academy to its discourse. More attention is overdue, particularly for the conceptual pressure the ‘sharing economy’ is exerting on the public relations function. The authors propose a reconceptualization of public relations by identifying the constitutive aspects of the sharing economy and bringing together the explanatory concepts ‘circuits of commerce’ and ‘viable matches’ from economic sociology and communicative constitution of organizations theory to develop the notions of ‘deliberate disintermediation’ and ‘circuits of communication’ in public relations. The contention is that by doing this, communicative acts not only contribute meaning in the sharing economy, but have economic value. Furthermore, the sharing economy poses challenges to the traditional forms of organizing public relations functions, but offers opportunities to realize different potential when public relations facilitates circuits of communication and becomes a meta-communicative competence embedded within the organization.     

Breadth or depth? A content analysis of the use of public relations theory

In a 2003 content analysis of scholarly public relations journal articles, Sallot, Lyon, Acosta-Alzura and Jones stated that, although no dominant paradigms had yet emerged, scholarship and theory building in public relations was well on its way. Entering into this project, the authors expected to see public relations at a stage where the majority of public relations research and scholarly journal articles were focusing on a centralized body of theory as the field entered the first decade of the 21st century. The results of the study presented in this article, however, suggest that this expectation was unduly optimistic. The evidence demonstrates that, after more than three decades of scholarly efforts, it is still not the case that public relations has enough of a central focus in its research and theory building to be deemed a mature discipline.     

Can healthcare providers at a university health clinic predict patient satisfaction?

Patient satisfaction in university health settings has received little research attention, and it is unclear whether the issue is being addressed in college health clinics. Because providers may make their own evaluations of patient satisfaction in the absence of other information, the authors conducted a study to determine whether healthcare providers at a university health clinic could accurately assess patient satisfaction. Ten providers completed a 10-item questionnaire immediately following the medical encounter to rate their perceptions of selected patients' levels of satisfaction. After seeing a healthcare provider, 201 patients completed a comparable questionnaire indicating how satisfied they were with the experience. Responses of providers and patients were compared, using a paired-sample t test. The results showed that providers' ratings were significantly lower than patients' ratings, indicating that providers were unable to judge patient satisfaction accurately. The results suggest that formal evaluations of patient satisfaction should be included in college health services.     

Tweeting democracy? Examining Twitter as an online public relations strategy for congressional campaigns’

Considering the integral relationship between public relations and democracy (Martinelli, 2011) coupled with the growing use of social media for democratic aims (Smith, 2011) the current study examines the effectiveness of Twitter as a public relations communications tool for congressional campaigns. Specifically, as a means of testing Twitter's effectiveness in informing and engaging voters, congressional candidate and political party Twitter use for all 435 U.S. House of Representatives races (N = 1284) are compared with 2010 election outcomes. Results indicate that candidates’ Twitter use significantly increased their odds of winning, controlling for incumbency and Party ID. Additionally, significant differences between incumbents’ and challengers’ Twitter use during the election cycle emerged, which has important implications for public relations practices aimed at achieving democratic outcomes.     

“We Can Do It”: a study of the Women’s Field Army public relations efforts

This article examines the public relations activities of the Women’s Field Army (WFA)—a branch of the American Society for the Control of Cancer (now the American Cancer Society). The analysis of the WFA’s work suggests that non-profit organizations engaging in volunteer recruitment and public education should examine the current socio-economic climate, and explore using both media relations and interpersonal communications techniques to disseminate messages.