Editor’s essay: Letting go in leadership

One of the most important lessons I learned as a young mom who stepped up to volunteer with her children’s school PTA® is that leadership means different things to different people. I also learned that leadership looks different to different people and that each of us has mental representations of what a “good leader” looks like. Little did I know then that decades of scholarly research and thousands of publications on “leadership” backed up what I was experiencing.

Leading

In a nutshell, leadership is influencing people to get things done (cf. Rost, 1993; Yukl & Gardner, 2020). While leadership opportunities often come in the form of specific positions, titles, or roles that one holds, I personally believe that everyone has the potential to be a leader, to motivate people within one’s own spheres of influence to get things done.

I also genuinely believe that the best leaders are the right people (with the right background and experience) for the right position at the right institution at the right moment in time. Perhaps for this reason, finding the “best leader” is a notoriously challenging proposition, and the numerous failures of leadership that we each have witnessed and/or experienced for ourselves in myriad spaces and places is testament to this challenge.

Much scholarly literature in myriad disciplines has been devoted to the gendered and/or racialized aspects of leadership (e.g., Antoniou et al., 2019; Bloch et al., 2021; Eagly & Chin, 2010; Sanchez-Hucles & Davis, 2010; Siemiatycki, 2019; Trimble et al., 2015), as well as the experiences and effectiveness of leaders who are women and/or Black, Indigenous, and other people of color (i.e., BIPOC; e.g., Dickerson, 2006; Eagly & Chin, 2010; Glass & Cook, 2020; Sanchez-Hucles & Davis, 2010).

Public relations scholars likewise have researched leadership (e.g., Berger & Meng, 2014; Gregory & Willis, 2013, forthcoming). This robust body of work has examined leadership and gender (e.g., Aldoory & Toth, 2004; Place & Vardeman-Winter, 2018; Topić, 2021); corporate social responsibility (e.g., Benn et al., 2010); employee satisfaction (e.g., Men, 2014); employee trust (e.g., Yue et al., 2019); organizational change (e.g., Luo & Jiang, 2014; Men et al., 2020); perceptions of organizational justice (e.g., Lee et al., 2021); public health (e.g., McKeever, 2021); and the list could go on.

Obviously, leadership is not just about the individual characteristics of leaders; it’s also about the organizational, societal and cultural realms in which leaders must operate (see, for example, Logan, 2011; Shin et al., 2011). In an effort to map this complicated terrain while examining it through a gendered lens, Lyness and Grotto (2018) developed the “BAFFLE” Female Leadership Model, examining “Barriers And Facilitators of Female Leader Empowerment” (p. 229), which offers a thorough review of factors at the cultural, societal, organizational, interpersonal and intrapersonal levels that impact leadership effectiveness for women. I found this model to be very helpful, not least because Lyness and Grotto (2018) have offered some specific solutions to the gendered gap in leadership, whereas most research in this area – at least in the United States – has focused much more on barriers and much less on ways to remove or overcome them.

Sustaining

The PTA® helped me not only to see my own potential for leadership, but also to enact leadership in ways that would sustain a group of volunteers beyond the two-year term limit of any PTA® president. Perhaps due to that early training, I believe that leadership success is building something to be sustainable past one’s own time in a leadership position.

Of course, the long-term sustainability of any endeavor or institution is likely to require adjustments over time, as contexts shift and priorities change. We in public relations definitely should know this, what with our scholarly work related to systems theory (e.g., Crable & Vibbert, 1986; J. E. Grunig & L. S. Grunig, 1989), organizational adjustments (cf. Broom & Sha, 2013; “The Page Principles,” n.d.), and symmetrical communication (cf. J. E. Grunig, 2001). Furthermore, even as systems adapt to environmental changes, what enhances their long-term survivability is having a strong core that remains constant and conserved (cf. Bernerth et al., 2011; Sha, 2009), such as a sense of identity and shared understanding (Bernerth et al., 2011; Huy, 1999; Sha, 2009).

In the case of the Journal of Public Relations Research, its original identity or founding purpose was to create, test, refine, critique, or expand theory in public relations. During my time as journal editor, I have doubled down on this core mission, not only in terms of which manuscripts ultimately were published, but also with regard to how I offered detailed feedback to all authors, including those of manuscripts that the journal didn’t publish. While providing this feedback was time-consuming to be sure, I felt that this consumed time was an important investment into the scholars of our field, so that together we can elevate the caliber of research published in peer-reviewed journals, which collectively constitute the permanent scholarly record of any discipline.

I could not have done any of this work without the 2015–2019 institutional support offered by San Diego State University’s Glen M. Broom Center for Professional Development in Public Relations; the kind encouragement offered by my past deans Joyce Gattas and Donna Conaty at San Diego State and by provosts Pamella Oliver and Carolyn Thomas at Cal State Fullerton; the motivating mentorship provided by Glen Broom, David Dozier, and Martha Lauzen at San Diego State; and the editorial leadership shared over the years by Hongmei Shen, Hilary Fussell Sisco, Sung-Un Yang, Lan Ni, Yi-Hui Christine Huang, and Nick Browning.

While any journal’s success during any one moment in time might be depicted as impact factors or rankings or acceptance rates, its ultimate success in the ever-changing and increasingly difficult landscape of academic publishing will be, simply, its survival. Toward that end, I’m grateful to entrust the Journal of Public Relations Research to my successor editor, Sung-Un Yang, who I’m certain will lead and adapt the journal in his own ways to ensure its continued relevance to the discipline and its ongoing viability in the marketplaces of ideas and of refereed scholarly journals.

Relinquishing

I’m pleased to now join the ranks of the Journal’s past editors, to each of whom this journal’s continued existence is indebted, because they led the journal in ways that enabled its long-term sustainability: Founding editors Jim and Lauri Grunig, followed by Elizabeth Toth, Linda Childers Hon, Linda Aldoory, and Karen Miller Russell. Thank you all for letting me be part of this journal’s legacy of leadership in pushing the boundaries of theory in public relations.

In the leadership trainings that I attended, PTA® volunteers were taught to “learn, lead, and let go.” I can attest to the wisdom of this advice, having personally observed various situations in which organizations or programs were weakened when founding or otherwise long-time leaders did not let go or did not otherwise permit what they had built to grow beyond their initial foundations. For my part, I see the conclusion of my editorship not as a letting go of leadership, but as a letting go in leadership — because I believe that one’s potential to influence others is a never-ending opportunity to behave in ways worthy of that influence.

As the editorial guard officially changes for this journal, I hope in my final issue to re-emphasize the publication’s identity as one that pushes the boundaries of public relations theory and theorizing. Thus, the articles in this themed issue all offer ways to re-imagine research in public relations.

• Rethinking internal public relations: Organizations and publics as community members

This thoughtful essay by Hongmei Shen and Hua Jiang calls for a re-imagining of internal public relations as a community-building function, elaborating on the community approach first brought to the discipline by Kruckeberg and Starck (1988). Citing Etzioni (1993), the authors define responsive communitarianism as a balance between individual rights or autonomy on the one hand, and social order and common good on the other. The authors make a careful distinction between publics that are identified and segmented by organizations, and communities that are self-organized by a group on the basis of their commonalities. In this conceptualization, communities can bring organizations and publics into closer and common relationship, in contrast to extant scholarship that often juxtaposes organizations and publics in opposition to each other.

Building on the work of Culbertson and colleagues that articulated tenets of communitarianism as applied to public relations (cf. Culbertson & Chen, 1997; Culbertson & Knott, 2004), the essay offers seven tenets of responsive communitarianism applied specifically to internal public relations, with implications for research in this area. The authors believe that this shift toward a community approach to studying internal public relations will foster community agency among internal publics, reconceptualize relationships internal to organizations, shift thinking on internal communication toward more-democratic approaches, re-contextualize the cultural bases of internal public relations, and diversify the methodological options for public relations research.

Driven by the pandemic first into physical and later into psychological isolation, all of us are seeking ways to re-situate ourselves in community with others. Thus, I find this essay to be both timely and provocative, as we work collectively to rebuild our myriad communities, including the public relations community of scholars who research and of professionals who practice the building and maintaining of relationships internal to organizations.

• Serious games as strategic communication tools: An analytic framework for the study of digital games in public relations research

In this conceptual piece, Jolene Fisher offers public relations scholars not only a way to re-imagine how we think about games, but also a framework for how we analyze them as venues for meaning making in ways that can affect public relations’ community- and relationship-building goals. The proposed analytic framework (comprised of The Organization, The Game, The Dissemination Process, and The Game Playing Public) extends research on digital games beyond the typical uses-and-gratifications approach that focuses on the impact of gaming on individual players. The author argues that future research in public relations should examine not only each level of the analytic framework, but also the interactions between levels.

I find the essay helpful for articulating some conceptual definitions for key terms, including strategic communication, games, digital games, and serious games. This groundwork may seem unglamorous, but it is necessary for future scholarship to truly push the boundaries of theory-building at the intersection of public relations and gaming. With one estimate putting the global value of the digital gaming market at USD $300 billion (cf. Accenture, 2021), public relations practitioners and researchers ignore this area at our own peril.

The essay’s discussion of procedural rhetoric (cf. Bogost, 2006; Seiffert & Nothhaft, 2015) — which explains how a gaming system generates meaning for a game player — was particularly interesting to me and made me reflect on all the ways in which extant systems might generate meaning for people who operate in those systems. I suggest that future public relations scholars connect procedural rhetorical to Bourdieu’s (1990, 1991) concept of habitus (see the article by Logan & Ciszek in this issue) to further investigate the connection between systems and the meanings that people derive from them. After all, if systems generate meaning for individuals, perhaps that’s why systems are so hard to change — because changing the system threatens to render meaningless the purpose and/or existence of some system participants.

• Digital public relations through the lens of affordances: A conceptual expansion of the dialogic principles

This essay by Alvin Zhou and Sifan Xu connects the disciplines of computer-mediated communication and public relations using the concept of “affordances.” Defining an “affordance” as “an action possibility available in the environment” (cf. Evans et al., 2017, p. 37), the authors propose favorable affordances as an expansion of the dialogic principle of ease of interface (cf. Kent & Taylor, 1998). In a careful conceptual build up, Zhou and Xu first reinforce the distinction between dialogic communication and digital dialogic principles, and then interrogate how normative ideals about dialog are incompatible with actual practice of public relations in an increasingly digital age.

Beyond merely proposing a new concept, the authors offer a careful explication of favorable affordances, explaining its conceptual advantages (e.g., being platform agnostic), and justifying its inclusion in future public relations scholarship. The manuscript also offers a service to the discipline in clarifying the terms dialogue, dialogic communication, and digital dialogic principles, summarizing the distinctions neatly in tabular form.

I find the authors’ application of the concept of favorable affordances to a longstanding public relations theory (i.e., dialogic communication; cf. Kent & Taylor, 2002; Sommerfeldt & Yang, 2018) to be an exemplar (that I hope future scholars will follow) of proposing new theoretical concepts where possible when they critique extant concepts in public relations theory. Furthermore, I am struck by the potentially rich utility of both elements of the newly proposed term: “affordances” as a concept and “favorable” as an adjective. For example, with regard to affordances, future studies might examine various types (or categories) of action possibilities in public relations, whether organizations and publics share the same views about those possibilities, and the impact of the availability of affordances on organization-public relationships. And if some affordances are favorable in the sense of leading to desired outcomes, then intriguing research awaits on what affordances might be unfavorable in public relations.

• Linking authenticity in CSR communication to organization-public relationship outcomes: Integrating theories of impression management and relationship management

Drawing on literature from relational authenticity, self-verification, and impression management, Joon Soo Lim and Hua Jiang offer a conceptual explication of authenticity in CSR (corporate social responsibility) communication as a multifaceted concept and as an antecedent to organization-public relationships (OPRs). Because authenticity as a concept is received and felt by message receivers, as opposed to merely being projected by message senders, the study focuses on consumers and notes that the perceptions of other organizational stakeholders may differ. The research results indicate that the OPR dimensions of trust, commitment, satisfaction, and control mutuality are in fact predicted – albeit to varying degrees – by the authenticity dimensions of genuineness, identity, and consistency.

This study contributes to ongoing public relations research on relationship management (cf. Ki et al., 2015) by specifying the ways in which authenticity affects relationships, and it reconnects impression management theory (IMT) with its conceptual roots (see Goffman, 1959) in advocating for consistency between organizational words and organizational actions (e.g., Lock & Seele, 2017). I also appreciate the authors’ carefully appropriate application of exploratory factor analysis for instrument validation (cf. Ruscio & Roche, 2012), as opposed to the more-commonly used purpose of data reduction.

I believe this work has profound implications in our contemporary zeitgeist, in which people’s perpetual search for authentic connections often is hindered by technological advances that facilitate “deep fakes” in produced content, “manipulative or deceptive” impression management by individuals on social media (cf. Bolino et al., 2016), and prevalent disinformation spread regarding organizations, persons, and issues alike. Given that businesses enjoy the highest levels of trust compared to other entities (cf. Edelman Trust Barometer, 2022), perhaps organizations can model authentic relationship-building in their CSR communications in ways that bring about the social unity that appears to be fracturing in so many societies.

• At the intersection of race, gender, sexuality, and class: A queer of color critique of public relations habitus

Nneka Logan and Erica Ciszek offer a powerful study that centers the perspectives of transgender people of color who work in public relations, thus offering voice to a group of practitioners whose experiences historically have been excluded from public relations articles in both the academic and trade literature. Even more powerful — for its contribution to public relations theory and theorizing — this article deploys Bourdieu’s (1990, 1991) theory of habitus to explain the contemporary state of public relations practice. The study’s conceptual framework interweaves habitus, intersectionality theory, and queer of color critique in ways that not only explain the status quo, but also offer insight on ways to ameliorate it.

The article’s literature review includes a summary explanation of three forms of intersectionality (structural, political and representational; cf. Crenshaw, 1991), and the study’s findings offer insights into how three key themes of advocacy, representation, and empowerment characterize public relations work in transgendered communities, while reflecting issues of intersectionality. I appreciate the authors’ research method that combines respondent interviews and thematic analysis, as well as their thoughtful reflections on how their own positionalities may have impacted their scholarship.

The authors’ exploration of habitus suggests to me intriguing research paths for some of the persistent problems in public relations and in other fields, including the lack of racial diversity, the gendered pay gap, the glass ceiling, and even resistance to professionalization. I look forward to future research that explicates and investigates the notion of habitus in public relations, because I agree with the authors that their study has implications for expanding public relations scholarship in critical theory, identity theory, intersectionality, and activism, with particular promise for the notion of disidentification.

• From relationship management to change empowerment: Shifting public relations theory to prioritize publics

Drawing on the distinction between management and leadership, Dean Mundy offers in this research article a reconceptualization of public relations that broadens the discipline from building and maintaining relationships with publics (cf. Broom & Sha, 2013) to include the empowering of publics to make change. In organizing the study’s theoretical framework, the author offers an overview of the evolution of public relations theory from being organization-centric to focusing in more-balanced ways on both organizations and publics. The article then draws in change management literature from business management disciplines, ultimately problematizing the notion of “management” altogether.

While other scholars have called conceptually for more empowerment of organizational publics (e.g., Karlberg, 1996), Mundy’s research went directly to advocacy leaders to investigate how their organizations actually responded to and empowered their publics during changing times. The data reported here were collected prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on changes in the LGBTQIA advocacy environment after the passage of U.S. legislation enabling marriage equality (cf. Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015). Nevertheless, the study’s findings — about working with strong partner coalitions, at the intersections of identities, and in pursuit of cultural change — remain relevant for public relations theory and practice in the contemporary moment.

I appreciate the article’s helpful summary of scholarly literature demonstrating the importance of communication to the ultimate success of organizational change efforts, as well as the author’s emphasis on the need for public relations practitioners to function as internal agents of organizational change. And I support the author’s optimistic assertion that “public voice” (cf. McGrath, 2016) and public discourse will drive organizational changes in the decades to come. What remains to be seen, however, is whether the highly lucrative public relations industry will continue to help amplify some voices in the public sphere to the exclusion of other voices; I suspect that the logical answer is “of course.”

Thus, my opinion is that if we, as activist scholars (or scholar activists), truly wish to see the equitable amplification of all voices in the public sphere, then we need to do more than research. We need re-imagine our own “work” to include mentoring, counseling, and supporting current and future generations of public relations practitioners working as advocacy leaders — as well as the countless numbers of nonprofessional-communicators who are trying to influence change in some way in their own communities — toward a better, more-democratic world.

Without doubt, the reviewers of manuscripts submitted to scholarly journals contribute to the amplification of well-done research and the betterment of our academic world. With sincere gratitude, I thank the following reviewers of the articles published in this themed issue on re-imagining research in public relations:

• Melissa Dodd, University of Central Florida

• Bernard Dodge, San Diego State University (California)

• Lee Edwards, London School of Economics and Political Science (UNITED KINGDOM)

• Sungwook Hwang, Pusan National University (SOUTH KOREA)

• Chun-ju Flora Hung-Baesecke, University of Technology Sydney (AUSTRALIA)

• James Ivory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

• Dean Mundy, University of Oregon

• Jens Seiffert-Brockmann, Vienna University of Economics and Business (AUSTRIA)

• Trent Seltzer, Texas Tech University

• Natalie Tindall, University of Texas, Austin

• Two reviewers who requested to remain blinded (North America)

In closing, I thank the Public Relations Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication for its continued support and sponsorship of this journal. Thanks also to the membership of the division for electing me twice to serve as the journal’s editor-in-chief. It’s been an awesome responsibility and an amazing privilege. And now, Sha out.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).