Strategic Employee Communication: Building a Culture of Engagement

332 Pages·2019·3.448 MB·English

by  Gail S. Thornton, Viviane Regina Mansi, Bruno Carramenha, Thatiana Cappellano

STRATEGIC
EMPLOYEE
COMMUNICATION
BUILDING A CULTURE
OF ENGAGEMENT
EDITED BY
GAIL S. THORNTON
VIVIANE REGINA MANSI
BRUNO CARRAMENHA
THATIANA CAPPELLANO
Strategic Employee Communication
“I search constantly for resources that can help provide insight and guidance to take
students and professionals to a higher level; Strategic Employee Communication:
Building a Culture of Engagement does this and more. A fundamental character-
istic of the world is our interconnectedness, and this book illustrates the exciting
opportunity we in public relations have to assist organizations and clients into a
better, more integrated set of social, economic and professional communities. The
power behind this work lies not only in the insight it provides, but in helping us see
what a forceful and powerful influence employees can be.”
—Robert W. Grupp, Director and Instructor, Global Strategic Communication
Master’s Degree Program, University of Florida
“This book adds to the public relations body of knowledge in two important ways.
First, it looks at employee communication through the lens of cultural varia-
tion, adding valuable insight into an aspect of the field that is still underexplored.
Second, it brings scholarship that originates in a language other than English into
the mainstream of public relations research. The public relations industry needs to
do much more to pull together important research from around the world—includ-
ing research reported in languages other than English—but this book is a tremen-
dous start in that direction.”
—Christopher Wilson, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Communications,
Brigham Young University
Gail S. Thornton · Viviane Regina Mansi
Bruno Carramenha · Thatiana Cappellano
Editors
Strategic Employee
Communication
Building a Culture of Engagement
Editors
Gail S. Thornton Bruno Carramenha
Chester, NJ, USA Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado
São Paulo, Brazil
Viviane Regina Mansi
Faculdade Cásper Líbero Thatiana Cappellano
São Paulo, Brazil Fundação Armando Álvares Penteado
São Paulo, Brazil
ISBN 978-3-319-97893-2 ISBN 978-3-319-97894-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97894-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018954558
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
2019
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Foreword
When I forayed into the arena of international public relations in 1989,
there was very little meat on the global bones of the practice. Not a whole
lot was going in the way of public relations that crossed geographic, politi-
cal, or social boundaries.
The International Public Relations Association had existed since 1955,
but it was small and struggling. IPRA’s Web site admitted the association
only “a close-knit fellowship of public relations pioneers”, escaping the
interest of most practitioners. Some corporations had international efforts
for marketing but not public relations. Margaret Nally’s International Public
Relations in Practice, to my knowledge the first book on the subject, was
in the works for 1991 publication. But expertise levels within PR firms,
whether global or local, radically differed from nation to nation.
Since then, much has changed. Corporations and agencies have improved
their capabilities for global practice. Research and theory building is still
limited but has begun to catch up with the need for global knowledge.
My work with Drs. James and Lauri Grunig and other colleagues at the
University of Maryland and elsewhere has helped that development with the
generic-specific theory, personal influence model, and other research. IPRA
is stronger and more active, and the Global Alliance for Public Relations,
a consortium of more than 70 national associations, has been cultivating
global standards for public relations since 2000. Understanding of interna-
tional practices is indeed increasing as we approach the 2020s.
v
vi Foreword
But something critical has been missing from these global advances, and
this book is an excellent start toward filling that gap.
For decades, scholars, and professionals around the world have had access
to myriad books and materials about public relations—as long as they par-
ticipated in English. For decades, Western European and US scholarship
has dominated the academic realm; most global public relations firms were
headquartered in English-speaking nations; and the funding for publishing
materials was almost all centered in the Western world, which also harbored
the largest markets for these materials.
The problem with this is that public relations were never exclusive to the
West; solid theoretical work and academic instruction have unfolded for
decades in multiple nations and languages. Many who guided these efforts
in Europe were fluent in English as well as their native tongue and pub-
lished in English to parlay themselves into international conversation. Other
nations also sourced significant principles and practices for the field, but
these works have never been able to enter the English-language mainstream.
Therefore, while some discussion about international practice has occurred
in conferences, a whole lot of advancement of the practice around the world
has never been included in the global body of knowledge. As a result, we’re
not all getting exposed to all of the range of knowledge and perspectives we
should be picking up for the field.
There could be many reasons for this lack of accessible information from
non-English-speaking nations, but two big ones are the complexity of trans-
lation and the various copyright entanglements that must be negotiated
to make publication transfer from one language to another. As one may
imagine, these issues are highly expensive. Most publishers will not absorb
these expenses unless they see a potential marketplace that can justify this
effort—or, they foresee the innate value of expanding global reach and per-
spective in an industry’s body of knowledge.
All of this is to explain that it has been an incredibly lengthy and chal-
lenging process to get the public relations treatises in this book translated
from Portuguese into English and then published so that people worldwide
can see the great advancements in the field coming out of Brazil.
This has been a labor of love for Gail Thornton, whom I believe is one
of the few premiere global public relations executives of this era. Since the
1990s, she has established and conducted international communication
efforts for five major pharmaceutical companies, helping them expand glob-
ally and into emerging marketplaces. She has forged contacts throughout the
world and guided early efforts to bring an international presence into the
Foreword vii
Public Relations Society of America and other associations in various parts
of the globe.
More important, she is one of the very few in the world who truly under-
stands that doing public relations work internationally is vastly different
from what most PR people do, even most who call themselves global or
international specialists; she knows how to take into account political dif-
ferences, different media, different cultural values and ways of doing things,
economic influences, time zone influences, and many other complexities
that the huge majority of public relations people never face and cannot
negotiate well when they do face them.
Gail has always realized the need for these broad, multicultural perspec-
tives in the international public relations arena, and because of that she
brought her unique expertise, contacts, persistence, and tears to make this
groundbreaking initiative happen. I am extremely grateful for her leadership
and for the vision and courage shown by Palgrave Macmillan to agree to get
these essays translated and published. Particular thanks go also to the highly
knowledgeable and innovative global public relations consultants in Brazil—
Viviane Regina Mansi, Bruno Carramenha, and Thatiana Cappellano—for
writing and compiling these essays in the first place and for then agreeing to
have them extended into the English-dominant literature.
The focus of this book is organizational culture and employee communi-
cation. These, to me, are perfect topics with which to begin this landmark
effort to transfer theory from non-English nations into the mainstream of
public relations theory. Back in the early 1990s, the Grunig-led comprehen-
sive study on excellence in public relations included organizational culture as
a vital element of a global organization. In the transnational entity, employee
communication is inherently an intercultural process, fraught with the same
global challenges and complexities mentioned above. Most of the perspec-
tives on all of these issues have so far come from Western nations, and so it
is refreshing to have voices from other nations added to the widely accessible
literature in the field. Furthermore, some of the chapters introduce theories
that are not currently in mainstream literature—theories such as body media,
appreciative inquiry, employee influence, “liquid culture”, “endotelling”, and
others. It makes for interesting perusal and contemplation.
I encourage public relations professionals and scholars to embrace this
book. As I’ve mentioned, Gail Thornton and Palgrave Macmillan publishers
are taking a risk to bring this vitally important effort to the international
literature. If the book is financially successful, Palgrave and perhaps other
publishers will have justification to carry out even more of these efforts. The
viii Foreword
public relations field all over the world stands to benefit enormously from
these added theoretical and cultural perspectives. They need to be widely
read, shared, and cited, and also theoretically scrutinized in subsequent stud-
ies in order for the book to fulfill its purpose.
Provo, USA Robert I. Wakefield
Associate Professor, Communications, Ph.D., APR
Brigham Young University
Preface
In 2011, the three of us—Bruno, Thatiana and Viviane—first got together
to start talking about the project that would eventually become our first
book, titled Comunicação Com Empregados: A Comunicação Interna Sem
Fronteira (employee communications: internal communications without
borders). That book is based on our beliefs, many restless considerations,
and several other topics born out of the clash between academic knowledge
obtained in classrooms (both from our time as public relations students and
later as professors) and the experiences each of us has had at the companies
we have worked for. The book was published in 2013, in Brazil, where we
live and work. It then became clear to us that that was just the first step—
and a small one at that.
The field of employee communications—yes, we have given this a great
deal of thought and decided this is a more appropriate name to the field
than Internal Communications—was quickly gaining traction, meaning we
needed to push further in our exploration. However, it was clear to us that
it made little sense to walk this path by ourselves. If we really wanted to
cast a new look into this discipline, we needed reinforcements. Therefore,
we intensified our research, organized several events to discuss employee
communications, published our findings in other outlets (both academic
and business-focused), and ramped up the debate on this complex topic. All
these efforts finally converged to the idea of launching a new book. Above all
else, this book is the result of countless conversations—after all, we are firm
believers that good dialogue is the key for understanding one another!
Authors selected, invitations accepted—several months followed until the
book was finally out. It was not an easy task; we can assure you. We had
ix
x Preface
already learned a great deal from publishing our “red book”, but this would
be the first time the three of us would work together to organize a collection
of essays, whose greatest goal was to be more diverse and comprehensive.
Since the very beginning, we knew we wanted this book to enable dialogue
between all those who have thought, are currently thinking, or want to start
thinking about employee communications in all its forms and interactions
with other areas of knowledge. For this reason, we decided to focus on four
main topics, which would eventually become the four sections of the new
book. The year was 2015.
Later, we stumbled upon an opportunity to make our book go global.
Gail Thornton, who penned an excellent essay on leadership communication
for the Brazilian edition, has now joined us as an organizer. Additionally,
some of the cases originally published have been updated, and the scope of
a few discussions has been expanded. The result is what you, dear reader,
now have at your fingertips: the opportunity to expand your horizons on the
topic of employee communications, based on the reality of Brazilian organ-
izations, which takes place in the context of the country’s behavioral and
social nuances—even though American and Mexican authors are included.
This is the point of view from a country that has been multicultural since it
first became a nation and, for this reason, is used to living with the uncer-
tain, navigating complexity and experiencing the culture of company head-
quarters from abroad while keeping its local identity (which no doubt
encompasses a certain dose of affection).
We have kept the divisions of the Brazilian edition on this book.
Therefore, it is divided into four main topics, which help understand differ-
ent areas of interest.
Organizational Culture—we believe culture and communications are
two sides of the same coin—one cannot exist without the other, and the
lack of one will detrimentally affect the other. Therefore, it is impossible to
understand employee communications without first taking an in-depth look
into organizational culture in all its complexity. This trend is clear in the
essays that compose the first section of the book, as each of them offers a
different point of view. We do not see this as a problem, since that topic can
and should be examined through a kaleidoscopic perspective.
The second section, Leadership and Engagement, discusses the approach
to the participation of leaders in employee communications. The essays
tackle topics such as purpose, dialogue, and other issues that have remained
forgotten under the mechanical nature of daily routines, but which, today
more than ever, must begin to occupy a place of relevance again.