Tiptoeing With Green Promotions

I know of a public relations agency that had a client that did secret CSR. The client had a bad history with a particular issue and gave the PR agency funds to do awareness prevention campaigns that were related to the issue, and it never wanted itself to be identified as the sponsor.

I don’t know why the client decided to keep its identity a secret, but one possible reason is that news stories about the CSR efforts could publicize the bad things the company used to do – things that most people probably don’t associate with the company today.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were many professional communicators today who avoid publicizing their companies’ green efforts, and of course we know from research that companies get substantially better results when their stakeholders are aware of their CSR efforts (Bhattacharya & Sen, 2004; Sen, Bhattacharya, & Korschun, 2006).

Some practitioners might avoid promoting their green efforts because they are concerned about being accused of greenwashing. As identified by scholars such as Bivins (2009), companies take a risk when they promote their CSR efforts because the act of promoting the efforts can make the efforts look disingenuous.

As you probably know, “greenwashing” refers to misleading environmental communication, and the term developed as people identified inconsistencies between companies’ actual behavior and claims about being green.

The term was coined in the 1980s by Jay Westerveld who saw the inconsistency in hotels that didn’t have recycling programs but encouraged the reuse of towels (Romero, 2008).

Through my research, which is available in the current issue of PRSA’s Public Relations Journal (vol. 5, No. 3), I investigated the fairness of online greenwashing accusations against Starbucks.

Highlights From the Study
In summary, most of the reactions to Starbucks’ environmental communication efforts that I analyzed were positive. Even the critical public tended to applaud Starbucks’ green initiatives while asking for more change, asking critical questions, or making a jab about Starbucks’ environmental impact.

When Starbucks was criticized, the arguments used were nearly always based on facts, observations, the need for more information, and requests for change, as opposed to deep-seated cynicism against corporate America.

Nevertheless, most of the criticisms I analyzed were technically unfair because they asked Starbucks to do things that Starbucks is already doing or they criticized Starbucks for advertisements that were actually student ad projects that had been posted to YouTube.

Starbucks did not post any comments to the criticisms I analyzed, not even to the greenwashing site where its efforts had been labeled as greenwashing.

This illustrates a drawback to Starbucks’ strategy for online engagement. A Starbucks representative explained that the company focuses on the zeitgeist of conversation on its own website. There is a benefit to driving conversations to your home turf; however, organizations should also consider participating in vibrant conversations about themselves on other sites, especially given the results of a study by Lariscy, Avery, Sweetser, and Howes (2009). In their survey of public relations practitioners, most respondents reported that they had found inaccurate information about their organizations in online chatrooms.  Starbucks is missing out on vibrant conversations that are regularly occurring on Starbucks fan blogs. There are many Starbucks employees and former employees who anonymously participate on these blogs who offer both vigorous defense of the company’s practices and behind-the-scenes criticism about environmental practices.

Given the lack of trust in companies and traditional media today, these informal word-of-mouth online channels should not be overlooked. The study I conducted points to the importance of building on Jeong-Nam Kim and Yunna Rhee’s (2011) recent study in the Journal of Public Relations Research about megaphoning, scouting, and microboundary spanning.

Their concept of megaphoning refers to employees’ positive or negative communication about their organization to external audiences.

They defined scouting as employees’ voluntary communication efforts to bring relevant information to the organization.

The term microboundary spanning refers to “employees’ voluntary communication behaviors to

(a) disperse positive information for one’s organization,

(b) search and obtain valuable organization-related information from internal and external constituencies, and

(c) disseminate acquired information internally with relevant internal personnel and groups” (p. 249).

It would be interesting for future research to investigate the perceived credibility of online comments that are posted by people claiming to be employees and former employees.

References

Bhattacharya, C. B., & Sen, S. (2004). Doing better at doing good: When, why, and how consumers respond to corporate social initiatives. California Marketing Review, 47(1), 9-24.

Bivins, T. (2009). Mixed media: Moral distinctions in advertising, public relations, and journalism (2nd ed.). New York: Routledge.

Kim, J-N., & Rhee, Y. (2011). Strategic thinking about employee communication behavior in public relations: Testing the models of megaphoning and scouting effects in Korea. Journal of Public Relations Research, 23(3), 243-268. doi:10.1080/1062726X.2011.582204

Lariscy, R. W., Avery, E. J., Sweetser, K. D., & Howes, P. (2009). Monitoring public opinion in cyberspace: How corporate public relations is facing the challenge. Public Relations Journal, 3(4), 1-17.

Romero, P. (2008, September 17). Beware of Green Marketing, Warns Greenpeace Exec. Retrieved from https://abs-cbnnews.com/special-report/09/16/08/beware-green-marketing-warns-greenpeace-exec

Sen, S., Bhattacharya, C. B., & Korschun, D. (2006). The role of corporate social responsibility in strengthening multiple stakeholder relationships: A field experiment. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 34(2), 158-166. doi:10.1177/0092070305284978

 

Top Student Blog Posts From Fall 2011

It was wonderful getting to work with my J452 class. All class members featured above gave permission to have a class photo used on this blog; however, only a few students chose to have their blogs highlighted.

Anna Reilly, an avid Pinterest user, presents five best practices for using Pinterest. As she explains, “Pinterest is a website where you can create theme-based image collections through social photo sharing. …In terms of PR, Pinterest can be a great curation tool for visual thinkers to express their plans and ideas for customers and clients.”

Jerica Pitts, who is passionate about health communication, discusses the Pink Ribbon Sundays Program as a model for effective health outreach programs that are designed for African-American and Hispanic women. This is a must-read post for anyone interested in health communication who does not know about the pink Sundays case study.

Shannon August, who is committed to using public relations to make a difference in people’s lives, shares tips for creating an outstanding organizational culture. She provides concrete examples from her summer internship at AMN Healthcare.

Thanks for reading, and best wishes for the new year.

An Exception to the Literature About Organizational Structure

Photo from Richard Seamon: http://www.richard-seaman.com/Aircraft/AirShows/PointMugu2004/Highlights/index.html

When I taught the principles class at UMUC during a summer of graduate school, I partnered with Teresa Heisler (who was an exceptional undergraduate student at the time) to study the effects of organizational structure on relationship outcomes. Our manuscript, titled “Relationship Outcomes in an Organisation With a Mechanical Structure,” is  available in PRism. Teresa starts graduate school at Johns Hopkins next spring.

Background

An organic structure, as opposed to a mechanical structure, enables employees to personally influence an organization’s decisions and policies, and it provides them with the autonomy to make decisions about their work that don’t need to be cleared with people at higher levels of the organization (L. A. Grunig, J. E. Grunig, & Dozier, 2002).

Research supports the importance of establishing an organic structure for effective internal relations (e.g., Boshoff & Mels, 1995; J. E. Grunig, 1992; Kim, 2007; Schminke, Ambrose, & Cropanzano, 2000).

Our Question

We wanted to find out if effective employee relations was possible in the context of an organization that has a mechanical structure.

Method

• Study of a rural Air Force base located in the South Central region of the United States
• 18 in-person interviews with military members, spouses who were stationed on the base, public affairs officers and the medical commander
• Four-person focus group with military members and spouses
• Follow-up interviews with seven military members to explore emerging conclusions

Key Findings

• This study demonstrated that contrary to previous theorizing (e.g., Kim, 2007), a mechanical structure alone does not result in low control mutuality, trust, commitment or satisfaction among employees in every context.
• Although previous theorizing about organizational structure held true for family members’ relationship with the Air Force base, military members were satisfied with the military’s mechanical structure.
• Most military members who were interviewed thought they had little influence in decisions affecting them and did not think that decisions were made with their individual interests in mind; however, they were supportive of this arrangement due to the significant normative commitment they experienced with regard to their moral motivation to serve in the organization.
• Although Boshoff and Mels (1995) found that participation in decisions increases commitment to an employer, the desire to participate in decisions was not an issue for participants, aside from problems with the healthcare facility.
• Likewise, although job satisfaction is associated with an organic structure where employees are empowered with significant responsibility (Hage, 1980; Peters, 1987), the extent to which the military members in this study were satisfied with their jobs had nothing to do with the amount of autonomy they had in their roles.
• The study provides empirical evidence to support J. E. Grunig’s (2002) statement that control mutuality can be high despite a low amount of control in the relationship when trust is high.
• The study also provides evidence for symbolic interaction theory (Blumer, 1969) by showing a case in which people tended to view occurrences that could affect the relationship through the lens of what they already thought about the organization.

The study can be read here.

References

Blumer, H. (1969). Symbolic interactionism: Perspective and method, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Boshoff, C., & Mels, G. (1995). A causal model to evaluate the relationship among supervision, role stress, organizational commitment and internal service quality. European Journal of Marketing, 29(2), 23-35.

Grunig, J. E. (2002). Qualitative methods for assessing relationships between organizations and publics. Retrieved from http://www.instituteforpr.org/research_single/qualitative_methods_assessing

Grunig, L. A., Grunig, J. E., & Dozier, D. M. (2002). Excellent public relations and effective organizations: A study of communication management in three countries. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Hage, J. (1980). Theories of organizations: Form, process, and transformation, New York: Wiley.

Kim, H-S. (2007). A multilevel study of antecedents and a mediator of employee-organization relationships. Journal of Public Relations Research, 19(2), 167-197. doi:10.1080/10627260701290695

Peters, T. (1987). Thriving on chaos. New York: Knopf.

Schminke, M., Ambrose, A. L., & Cropanzano, R. S. (2000). The effect of organizational structure on perceptions of procedural fairness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 85(2), 294-304.

Survey Reveals Insights About Millennial PR Agency Employees’ Ethics

Pat Curtin, Kelli Matthews and I conducted a survey of the Millennial generation of employees who work at public relations agencies.

We explored our participants’ opinions about the usefulness of Shannon Bowen’s model of ethical decision making. Here is the model we explored:

This Kantian model and an explanation of it can be found in the following source:

Bowen, S. (2005). A practical model of ethical decision making in issues management and public relations. Journal of Public Relations Research, 17(3), 191-216. doi:10.1207/s1532754xjprr1703_1

Highlights From the Study

• We found through our pretest that we needed to update some of the language used in the model so it would resonate with Millennials. You can see the updated wording in our study.
• Most Millennials found the revised six questions in the model to be very useful. The next step in this research is to explore the actual use of the model by an organization. If your organization is interested in adopting the model and engaging in further testing of it with us, please contact me at derville(at)uoregon(dot)edu.
• Minorities reported significantly more constraints from job security and personal ambition than did non-minorities, which suggests that employers can do a better job of relationship building with minority employees. More research is needed to parse out differences among races and ethnicities to avoid broad dichotomies of minority versus non-minority.
• Millennials expressed that they have far better relationships with their agencies when they are empowered to make their own decisions regarding ethical dilemmas.
• About 75 percent of participants disagreed with the model’s assumption that job security, personal ambition and workplace politics would interfere with their ability to make ethical decisions. Qualitative research is needed to explore why participants answered in this way.
• For more findings, you can read our study in PRSA’s PR Journal (volume five, issue two).

This research was supported by the Public Relations Society of America Foundation and the University of Oregon. This study won the Jackson-Sharpe Award, sponsored by Jackson, Jackson & Wagner and Likely Communication Strategies, at the 13th annual International Public Relations Research Conference. We thank Shannon Bowen for her feedback on this study.