"Ethical practice is the most important obligation of a PRSA member," states the code's Preamble. Yet that may be easier said than done, according to a growing body of evidence including a new survey [1] of senior practitioners conducted by Jim Lukaszewski, ABC, APR, Fellow PRSA.

The recent survey of some 100 senior public relations professionals paints a grim picture of the realities of the practice. 

• More than 40 percent reported being asked to do something unethical in the workplace, not just once or twice, but several times a year. 
• A handful even reported monthly and weekly pressure to do things they felt were not right.
• Close to half (49 percent) say they have been faced with an "uncomfortable situation" over ethics with senior executives.
• Forty percent say that ethical issues put them in adversarial relationships within their organization.

These pressures are taking a toll on practitioners, the survey suggests. 

• More than half say that they have experienced anxiety over being asked to do something unethical.  
• About one in four say that their single greatest source of workplace stress comes when co-workers perceive them as a barrier to business development because of their ethical advocacy.  
• Fully a third of respondents revealed that ethics issues cause them to feel isolated in their organization, "sometimes" or "often."

This isolation might explain why one in three practitioners never seek help inside his or her organization, preferring to keep it to themselves (7 percent) or go outside for advice 25 percent.  

• Of those who do feel comfortable asking for help, about 40 percent say they would go to either the CEO or to senior staff, with a small minority (5 percent) looking to Human Resources for advice. 
• One in five would go to a peer, rather than to a boss or another department in the organization.

Ethical issues may well be one of the biggest drivers of turnover in public relations. 

• The survey found that some 29 percent of public relations practitioners have considered leaving their company or position to get away from these issues.

Does reporting to the CEO make a difference?

Several years ago, Jim and Larissa Grunig and their colleagues on the IABC Excellence project suggested that for public relations to be truly excellent, the function needed (among other things) to report directly to the chief executive officer. Lukaszewski wondered if reporting to the CEO made any difference when it comes to dealing with ethical challenges -- either in the frequency of problems, or in how they are handled.

The results suggest that practitioners who report to the CEO are not very different from their peers who report to other senior executives. They experience about the same amount of ethical issues, encounter about the same level of conflict with others about these issues, and report similar levels of anxiety and isolation. They look a lot like their colleagues who don't report to the CEO -- except for one key difference.

Namely, practitioners who do not report to the organization's top leader are far less likely to go to the CEO for help when confronted with an ethical issue. 

• These public relations practitioners are three times more likely to go to senior staff for help, instead of the chief executive.   
• These data suggest that reporting to the CEO provides useful and beneficial access to the top officer for communicators and access to critical information for CEOs. [2]

Turnover seems to be one of the serious consequences of isolating the public relations practitioner from the Chief Executive.  

• Those who do not report to the top leader are three times more likely to say they have considered leaving their current job or company to get away from the pressure of ethical communication.

Some conclusions by James E. Lukaszewski

At the beginning of 2012, the Society of Corporate Compliance and Ethics (SCCE) released a survey, (Stress, Compliance and Ethics) of corporate compliance officers asking about their working conditions, their on-the-job and off the job stress and the sources and causes of stress. That survey produced some remarkable and cautionary information: 

• More than half of the respondents said they suffered sleepless nights as a result of pressures, management attitude, and resistance to ethical decision-making, even the feeling of being isolated by the attitudes of various corporate functions. 
• A similar number, 68%, said they were looking for different places to work due to the stress of their jobs created by the contentious environment caused by the conflicting behaviors of various members of the executive team.

Being a stick-in-the-mud and bump-in-the-road, or being characterized as a barrier to progress.  

• Some functions, like sales and marketing actually vocalized that compliance activities and requirements negatively affected sales and the attitudes of salespeople.

These findings made me quite curious about the stress created by the conflict and contention caused by the desire to be an ethical communicator. So, with the help of Katlyn Daoust, public relations staff member here at Risdall Public Relations, whose major focus was in communication, we proceeded to reconstruct (with their permission) the SCCE survey, this time adapting 10 questions to apply to communication professionals.

The 102 voluntary participants in this survey were solicited from my private email list of senior-level public relations practitioners, HR professionals, senior security managers and corporations, some CEOs, CFOs, but by far the largest number are in some senior or top-level communications capacity. The common feature of all participants is that they are opt-in members who follow my work, sometimes quite vigorously.

The findings are quite interesting and more importantly indicate areas of practice, and professional relationship issues that deserve further, much more rigorous study. As a consultant practitioner since 1974, rather than a seasoned researcher, several questions jumped out at me that, if answered, could provide significant insight to our profession as important members of the managerial support team. 

• Parallel surveys of operational leaders in organizations confronted with authorizing or denying ethical communications could yield important information about improving the relationship between senior managers, responsible for ethical behavior and tone, and the stresses and strains of staff functions, particularly communicators, when there are ethical dilemmas to be resolved.

What remains to be mentioned are some of the questions the results of this survey indicate would be very useful to explore in a future study:

1. How pervasive, and at what levels is the desire to communicate ethically in collision with various levels of management and of corporate functions?
2. Is there a significant difference in stress levels when the practitioner reports to someone below the CEO, vs. those who have direct CEO reporting relationships?
3. What are the most common stress-causing circumstances?
4. What useful and practical information could be derived from parallel studies among operating executives?
5. Which corporate functions cause practitioners to feel isolated
6. Do compliance and ethical codes of conduct reduce or increase stress?  Do they reduce the volume of ethical issues in the workplace?
7. Do annual compliance acknowledgements by employees help to minimize ethical incidents?