Fostering Organization-Public Relationships Through Openness and Engagement: A Meta-Analysis

ABSTRACT

The accumulating literature regarding antecedents of organization-public relationships (OPRs) has been mixed. This study employed a meta-analytic method to synthesize the roles of organizational openness and publics’ engagement behaviors quantitatively and systematically in studies of OPRs. The results showed that the corrected mean correlations ($\bar{\rho }$) between organizational openness and OPRs ranged from .52 to .72, and those between publics’ engagement behaviors and OPRs ranged from .30 ‘to .42. Overall, the relationships between engagement and elements of OPRs differed for (1) for-profit organizations versus others (e.g. nonprofits, government); (2) samples collected from the eastern versus western cultures; and (3) different types of populations (i.e. students, survey panels, and target populations). Similar patterns also emerged for the moderating effects of organization and population type on the associations between openness and OPRs. Synthesizing existing empirical results on openness, engagement, and OPRs meta-analytically helps build consensus on those relationships and inspires new directions for OPRs theory building.

KEYWORDS:

• Engagement
• meta-analysis
• openness
• OPRs
• organization-public relationship

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. The number of studies that examined other relationship cultivation strategies’ effect on OPRs was not sufficient to permit a powerful meta-analysis of those variables.

2. Pearson’s r statistics are preferred than regression coefficients to be used as effect sizes in meta-analysis. Therefore, when dissertations became publications, we kept the dissertation only in our meta-analysis where r statistics were available.