Article: Personal and Professional Ethics

Seow, Ting Lee. 2011. "Conceptualizing ethical knowledge and knowledge transfer in public relations." Public Relations Review, Volume 37, Issue 1, March Pages 96-98, ISSN 0363-8111, 10.1016/j.pubrev.2010.11.003.

Lee Seow Ting of the University of Singapore conducted an email survey based on a Likert scale to determine how the public relations practitioners feel about the orientation of ethics and the best method teaching ethics. She emailed 1016 people and received 230 responses. She mentions this 34.5% as “acceptable considering the typically low response rates from public relations practitioners in academic survey (Lee 2011, 97).

Public relations practitioners responded in the survey to say that ethical practice is a trainable attribute. They cite case studies as the most successful tool for this training. Other strong methods listed were mentorship programs, workshops and seminars, and meeting with employees who broke ethical guidelines (Lee 2011, 98). Less than 50% of the study found the following methods to be helpful when teaching ethical guides: scholarly publications, email reminders, textbooks, and memos.

Lee summarizes two main findings from the study. The first comes from a majority of responses saying ethics are “a function of individual experiences such as personal values, family upbringing, religious values and personal experiences” (97). A majority believed that personal ethics create the professional ethics. The second comes from the majority of respondents who believed “ethical knowledge [was] a codifiable and communicable body of knowledge that could be transferred and shared in the workplace despite the origins of the knowledge in the individual realm of personal experiences and values” (98).

The author extrapolates that more emphasis should be made to teach ethics in environments such as case studies and meetings. The “active interaction” helps communicate this subject (98). Also, the approach to ethics should be viewed holistically, taking in the background of the employee, since so many felt their personal ethics directed their professional ethics (98).

This article seemed to be making a connection needed for many other studies. The author may have been motivated to connect certain practices to valid research. I say this because the article is so short and the author states, “this finding reinforces the importance of a holistic approach to ethics” (98), and cites an article.

One thing I didn’t understand in this article were mentions of tacit and explicit ethical knowledge (97). The author referred to The Tacit Dimension, a 1966 book authored by M. Polanyi. This seems to refer to a means of describing communication directions (internal, external, personal, public), but I would have to do more research to find out more about it.

The takeaway for my research is that personnel at agencies might base their professional ethics in their personal ethical stances. Therefore, if it was necessary to “water down” the truth in order to get the right public response, an employee might do it if their own ethical development permitted it and they had not been taught proper ethical boundaries in meetings and with case studies.