Exploring ethical culture for internal stakeholders: Top-down authenticity and the role of the CCO

September 30, 2015

By Shannon A. Bowen, professor at the University of South Carolina

Read the full journal article:
https://www.prsa.org/Intelligence/PRJournal/Vol9/No1/index.html

Ethics is a central theme in public relations -- not only in ethics month, but also in the daily decision making processes of management in organizations of all sizes and industries, year in and year out. For the last 15 years, my research on ethics has pointed to the vital role of organizational culture in ethical decision making.

Therefore, the study I conducted for the Arthur W. Page Center took a close look at the inside of organizations, how management views both ethics and public relations, how it is understood and communicated by both the C-suite and public relations executive. Ethics and internal relations are inextricably connected and a close examination shows that ethics starts at home: inside an organization and its leadership is where ethics lives.

Organizational culture can embrace ethics or eschew it, and internal relations is a vital tool for reinforcing the mission, vision and values of an organization -- in essence, its character. Through 28 elite interviews with CEOs (6) and CCOs (22), this study examined the role of leadership and internal communication in building an ethical communication climate and ethical organizational culture. Internal communications is viewed as central to creating an ethical organizational culture that creates positive engagement for internal stakeholder or employees. How can internal relations be used to enhance and inform ethical decision making? 

Based upon a review of the literature and these original research findings, results of this 2015 study funded by the Page Center indicated that tone starts at the top. CEOs should use authentic leadership style rather than transactional or transformational leadership. An authentic leadership style means displaying ethical genuineness in terms of thoughtful integrity, the consistent application of moral frameworks and modeling ethical behavior with action. Although the role of ethics is extremely visible in the CEO, the top public relations executive (or CCO) has a crucial role to play.

Importantly, CCOs can enhance the role of ethics in the organization by enacting a conscience counselor role on ethics for the CEO and organizational leaders in the C-suite, and of issue-related functional areas. To enact that role, the public relations executive should represent the interests of external publics in strategic management sessions, play devil's advocate, and work to protect the reputational equity and relationships of the organization.

The chief communication executive should also work to keep ethics a viable and visible part of the organizational culture. Creating ethical discussion around the core values of the organization, conducting research into potential ethical issues, integrating ethical questions regularly and unabashedly, and injecting ethics into strategic decision making at the organizational level. By doing so, the character of the organization is well tended and the responsibility level of the public relations function is enhanced. 

One problematic area revealed in the study is that some PR professionals said that their organizations relegate ethical concerns to the legal counsel. The separation of ethical concerns from the reputation of the organization is an impossibility. Moral matters are guided by logic and principle, while legal matters are guided by statutes and precedents, as two different standards. Although the two may work in tandem, legal and ethical responsibilities are often at odds and should be considered in issue resolution. Although most public relations executives offered the perspective that ethics is an immutable part of what we do, those that simply sent ethical concerns to the legal department were a large enough portion of the interviews to offer real concern. If legal is making ethical decisions, moral factors can get discarded and the reputation and relationships of the enterprise can suffer.

Finally, the study also revealed other means for enhancing ethics in organizational culture such as creating stakeholder engagement in internal relations around ethics through discussion of ethics in a frequent and analytical manner, modeling exemplar ethical behavior, and instilling reward and incentive systems for ethical behavior. Attention to these activities helps to foster an organizational culture that is ethically engaged and proactive, rather than simply equating ethics with matters of legal compliance. Doing so will help the public relations function increase the ethical responsibility of the organization and value it offers to society, enhance employee commitment and retention, foster the value that internal relations adds to the workplace and enhance the stature of the communications function.

This project is supported by a Page Legacy Scholar Grant from The Arthur W. Page Center.

For further information on this study, please email me at sbowen@sc.edu.