Building Ethical Environments from Top to Bottom

 John Steitz

js810618@ohio.edu

john.steitz.ou@gmail.com

Source: sloanreview.mit.edu

In a PRSA article titled Follow The Leader: Ethics and Responsibility, author Virgil Scudder dove into the 2011 ethics scandal that engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, News of The World.

Scudder’s main point is that the company’s culture and ethical practices start from the top down. In Scudder’s own words, “employees will almost always behave in the manner that management expects from them.” Part of the job of an executive is to establish and cultivate the organization’s culture. Therefore, what employees see as ethically acceptable and unacceptable depends on the expectations that have been established and upheld by the organization.

There are a number of internal and external influences originating from leadership that may encourage unethical behavior. Organizational pressure to succeed at all costs is a large contributing factor to ethical violations that take place. Being under a lot of pressure to meet unrealistic goals or outdo the competition may also push someone to break the rules. A willingness by management to look the other way regarding small breaches of ethics in favor of positive results may also influence employees to violate or continue to violate our codes of ethics. Fear of losing one’s job may also encourage an employee to stretch the limits of ethically acceptable behavior. 

All of these possible influences will come from organizational leadership, and it’s our job as ethically and morally upstanding PR professionals to rise above these factors. Terry Goodrich said it best in his 2013 article on facing ethical pressure in a professional environment. According to Goodrich, PR professionals who provide ethical council must be as fervent to serve the public interest as they are to with regards to their organizational responsibilities. A public relations professional must consider oneself to be an “organizational conscience” and view themselves as an independent voice within the organization without being mired by its perspective or politics. 

Part of our job as public relations professionals is to be an advocate for the public good, which I discussed in my previous blog post on ethics. An effective PR professional disagrees with their organization when they need to and holds it accountable for its actions. “Yes men” have virtually no value whatsoever in public relations because of this. A good public relations professional doesn’t just view their position as a marketing tool- they also consider themselves problem solvers. With access to an organization’s legal counsel and key decision-makers, public relations professionals can engage in what Goodrich refers to as “fire-prevention,” as opposed to engaging in damage control which is more akin to fire-fighting. Clearly, the best plan of action is to avoid starting fires in the first place.

It’s in this role that public relations professionals can most impactfully contribute to their organization’s culture of ethics. By taking a more traditional “watchdog” approach to public relations work, we as professionals can ensure that the organizations we serve abide by our codes of ethics and engage in ethically and morally upstanding practices. In this way, we can contribute to our organizational cultures and keep them from being established exclusively by organizational leaders, while simultaneously keeping the public interest firmly in mind.