Week 8: Public Relations Management In Organization

I agree with what Ms. Tanya always stress, public relations practitioner needs to establish good working relationships and maintain important ties.

As mentioned by Bruning & Ledingham (2000), relationships between an organization and its public audiences have been the focal interest in public relations research and practice.

After having done some research on public relations management, I came across OPR (Organization Public Relationships). So, what is this all about?

Broom, Casey, and Ritchey (1997) define that organization public relationships are represented by the patterns of interaction, transaction, exchange, and linkage between an organization and its publics. So, organization-public relationship is a connection or association between an organization and a public that results from behavioral consequences an organization. Organization Public relationships refer to relationships between the organization and its external publics.

And, EPR (Employee Public Relationships) simply mean that the individual level relationships that develop between employees and external publics. Quoting Hon and J. Grunig’s (1999) perspective and conceptualize EPR as an employee-public relationship is a connection or association between an employee and a member of the public mainly resulting from interpersonal communication that occurs because of behavioral consequences an organization or the public has on the other. Relating this to J. Grunig and Huang’s (2000), dimensions of relationships of trust, satisfaction, and commitment, defined cultivation strategies as “communication methods that public relations people use to develop new relationships with publics and to deal with the stresses and conflicts that occur in all relationships” In this case, employees play a vital role in communicating with customers and, I have come across a selective set of symmetrical communication strategies that are likely to produce relationship outcomes. Several strategies were adopted from interpersonal relationships and conflict resolution theories:

• Access—members of publics or opinion leaders provide access to public relations people. Public relations representatives or senior managers provide representatives of publics similar access to organizational decision-making processes.

• Positivity—anything the organization or public does to make the relationship more enjoyable for the parties involved.

• Openness—of thoughts and feelings among parties involved.

• Assurances—attempts by parties in the relationship to assure the other parties that they and their concerns are legitimate.

• Networking—organizations’ building networks or coalitions with the same groups that their publics do, such as environmentalists, unions, or community groups.

• Sharing of tasks—organizations’ and publics’ sharing in solving joint or separate problems.

These conflict management theories are both 1) integrative as because all parties in a relationship benefit by searching out common or complementary interests and solving problems together through discussion and decision making and, 2) cooperative as the organization and the public work together to reconcile their interests and to reach a mutually beneficial relationship. In general, I think that it in order for an organization to effectively build long-term relationships with customers, it must first develop positive, long-term relationships with employees who interact those customers. Hence, in conclusion, within the relationship management paradigm, public relations is a critical strategic communication management function which will lead to a certain relationship outcome.