Exploring the roles of Australian communication practitioners in organizational value setting: agents of conscience, control, and/or compliance?

This study examined whether Australian public relations and communication practitioners enact an organizational conscience role through their involvement in the organizational value-setting process. Thirty communication practitioners from 26 large organizations in Melbourne and Sydney were interviewed between May 2004 and May 2005 to ascertain and discuss their involvement in organizational value setting. Using semi-structured in-depth interviews to gather data and then applying a multiple perspective approach in its thematic data analysis, the research found that most respondents were involved in organizational value setting albeit at different stages of the process. In analysing the nature of the respondent’s involvement in the process along with individual and organizational factors, three roles emerged namely, the agent of critical conscience, the agent of concertive control, and the agent of corporate compliance. However the results suggest that most respondents enacted primarily the concertive control and corporate compliance agency roles. The study also found that the predominant managerial/functionalist perspective constrains practitioners from enacting the conscience leadership role.

In exploring the practitioners’ ability to influence organizational members, findings support recent studies that membership in the dominant coalition does not necessarily give public relations/communication practitioners power and influence. Rather, direct access to the CEO, expertise, performance and personality were found to be the key ingredients to the individual communication practitioners’ organizational influence. Findings also reveal that public relations/communication practitioners preferred to participate but not drive the organizational value-setting process.

In using a multiple perspective approach to study public relations roles, this study provides empirical basis for identifying potential leadership roles for public relations/communication practitioners and for suggesting an extension of the manager-technician role typology. The study calls for public relations/communication practitioners to enact a critical conscience agent role as part of finding a meaningful, ethical and socially responsible practice. This study proposes that critical thought and dialectical inquiry be embedded within the public relations/communication practitioner’s role and public relations education.