The following is an excerpt from a story published by the GroundFloor Media’s Gil Rudawsky at Ragan’s PR Daily.
Public relations professionals are known as advocates for their clients or companies, but when faced with sensitive ethical issues, most of us are uncompromising advocates for truth and honesty.
“Yes men” and “yes women” we are not, and now a study affirms that assertion.
In a study aptly titled “PR Professionals Are Not ‘Yes Men,’” researchers at Baylor University found that senior PR executives would rather get demoted or lose their jobs than give in to pressure to be unethical. True to form, many of the executives interviewed for the study had in fact lost their jobs by not caving in to questionable or dishonest PR strategies.
Baylor researchers found in 30 in-depth interviews with senior public relations professionals in the United States and Australia, with an average of 27 years of experience, that they often found themselves in the “kill the messenger” predicament. This made it hard to give criticism to people who outranked them and to persuade those people to agree with them.
Read more about the report here.
