Navigating the transformation through the insights from a study on public relations and organisational transformation

Abstract

Organisations encounter an unprecedented level of constant change in the contemporary digital era. The exponential growth in computer processing power has revolutionised industries and disrupted traditional business models. Organisations must embrace change to remain competitive and thrive in a dynamic global economy. The current study aims to scrutinise the vast literature body on public relations and organisational change to develop a robust conceptual framework. An innovative review approach named ‘Methodi Ordinatio’ or ‘InOrdination’ was employed to accomplish the study objectives. The extensive data collection process was conducted through the renowned Scopus database from 1998 to 2022. Subsequently, a bibliometric analysis was performed on the existing corpus of studies to ensure the reliability and depth of insights derived from the study findings. Specifically, an exponential surge in attention toward the intersection of public relations and organisational change since 2012 was revealed. Additionally, the word cloud analysis discovered the simultaneous emergence of relevant keywords, such as leadership and human relations, thus underscoring the pivotal role in driving successful transformations. Hence, the findings substantiated the critical importance of effective leadership and human connections in navigating organisational change. Meanwhile, a conceptual framework was developed to present a transformative perspective while empowering organisations to effectively navigate change. The study outcomes also empowered future researchers and practitioners to comprehend the role of public relations in driving organisational change.

Keywords:

• Public relations
• organisational change
• change management
• Methodi Ordinatio
• bibliometric

REVIEWING EDITOR:

• Guangchao Charles Feng, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong

SUBJECTS:

• ICT; Organizational Communication; Political Communication; Public Relations

Introduction

Organisations in the digital era have experienced constant change due to the exponential rise in computer processing power, with significant impacts on a constantly changing global economy (Raeder, 2023). Organisational change is evolving as the change is essential at individual and organisational levels (Kim & Kim, 2023). Furthermore, the change enables a company to adapt to the respective environment and improve the market position. Organisational change denotes the readiness of relevant parties to accept and operate within an alternative system (Hvidsten et al., 2023). The change also assists firms to introduce more productive ways of producing or generating products (Albrecht & Roughsedge, 2023; Ali & Johl, 2023).

The need for organisations to introduce change stems from received external pressures and the requirement for internal alignment of structural defects (Odor, 2018). The need could be caused by economic, political, or social pressures. Specifically, organisational change is primarily contributed by the need to maintain organisational dynamics while simultaneously improving organisational success and personnel performance (Hubbart, 2022). Moreover, organisational change seeks to prevent or resolve organisational crises in a competitive and unstable environment. Companies that do not adapt to environmental pressures will diminish the survival rate in the industry (Ali & Johl, 2022; Arifin, 2020). Thus, organisational change is integral to continuing the success and existence of companies (Ali et al., 2020; Raeder, 2023).

Organisational change is challenging for most corporations despite the constant presence of change. In reality, numerous organisations fail to perform the required reformations to survive. Change management is one of the most significant obstacles for organisations worldwide and remains an essential element in facilitating organisational transformations. Rick (2016) emphasised employee opposition as the most challenging aspect of adapting to change. Other issues include creating a change-friendly organisational culture and allocating sufficient resources (Hubbart, 2022; Raeder, 2023; Zhang et al., 2022). Accordingly, transformation advocates frequently blame opposition from employees and middle managers for implementation difficulties. Senior leaders and managers frequently overestimate the ability to influence the organisation while misunderstanding the challenges of leading and implementing change (Hvidsten et al., 2023).

Past studies revealed that organisational changes contained higher rates of failure and resistance from employees (Ahmad & Huvila, 2019). The resistance would create a significant gap in the approaches employed by organisations to establish suitable strategies for a successful change process while enhancing organisational growth. Employees tend to resist the process of change when the process occurs unexpectedly. Previous scholars demonstrated that sudden exposure to organisational change negatively impacted employee well-being, including increased risk of mental health issues and poor self-rated health (Day et al., 2017). Employee burnout would also be exacerbated by job stresses and demands, such as psychological uncertainty about the sudden shift in influencing the current job position, role ambiguity due to unclear expectations, and increased workload. In addition, organisational change was associated with decreased employee well-being and health and the increased usage of stress-related drugs (Sahoo et al., 2023). Hence, understanding employees’ perspectives of organisational change is integral to determining an appropriate strategy for managing changes without jeopardising corporate performance.

Organisations cannot depend on respective successes and previous achievements in the current turbulent environment. Instead, organisations must seek alternative opportunities by challenging the status quo, such as the potential of public relations in change management. Multiple enterprises have failed to transform despite implementing changes in respective business and market environments due to being generally content with the status quo by continuing the existing practices (Franklin & Benjamin, 2016; Zhang et al., 2022). As change has become a fundamental element in standard business and organisational practices, managing the changes, including public relations, is critical for business sustainability to remain active in the current competitive and fluctuating environment. Accordingly, this study aims to review the role of public relations on employee resistance to the organisational change process and develop a conceptual framework.

Literature review

Organisational change

Organisational change was described by Hussain et al. (2018) as an organisational movement from the present state to an unfamiliar desired future state. Following Bejinariu et al. (2017), organisational change entails transforming the organisational mission, vision, and processes to significantly impact both the individual and the organisation. Rizescu and Tileag (2016) delineated several key determinants of change, including internal factors or drivers encompassing changes in operations, technologies, internal policies, and laws, an urgent requirement for modernisation, changes in management decision-making, and the commercialisation or privatisation of formerly government-held organisations. According to Banutu-Gomez and Banutu-Gomez (2016), a cause is required for internal or external organisational change, to create the subsequent effects. Odor (2018) expounded that the change seeks to develop the core organisational elements, such as systems, processes, job roles, structures, and operations. Based on the literature review, organisational changes can be classified as changes in the management structure, organisation, employee, management culture, human resource management processes, and strategic changes, which are all interconnected to increased labour productivity and efficiency, develop skill and competence, and improve operational efficiency (Waddell et al., 2019).

Employee perspective

King et al. (2020) elucidated that organisational changes in the workplace could negatively impact employees’ sense of belonging. As employees would be directly impacted by organisational changes, including employees in the change process and management is pivotal to reducing the potential negative impacts (Arifin, 2020). Employees’ opinions must also be included in the preliminary planning steps before executing the corresponding transformations. Furthermore, several investigations discerned employee-related issues during organisational change (Goksoy, 2017; Simatupang et al., 2016) to determine the stability of change and workers’ commitments. Simultaneously, uncertainties about careers and roles, fear and anxiety, communication, different roles, relationships, and job skills are significant concerns for employees (Ali et al., 2020; Franklin & Aguenza, 2016; Li et al., 2021; Memon et al., 2017).

Certain workers might encounter difficulties in shifting from the existing organisational approaches during the change process owing to experiencing a sense of loss at forfeiting the valued conventional structures, approaches, and rules (Mansaray, 2019). Additionally, employees might interpret the changes as a loss of status or prestige for the organisation. Grama and Todericiu (2016) propounded that employees would oppose the change and further create obstacles when perceiving the change contrary to the stipulated organisational objectives (Mousa, 2017). Thus, observing employees’ emotional changes and ability to express and regulate personal emotions is vital to determining the levels of accepting a workplace condition, job satisfaction, and intention to leave the organisation (Men et al., 2020).

Public relations

Public relations is the management function that determines, establishes, and sustains mutually beneficial relationships between an organisation and various parties affecting organisational success (Stacks, 2016). According to Theaker (2020), the concept of public relations is a distinctive function of management that maintains mutual lines of understanding, communication, cooperation, and acceptance between an organisation and customers. The function also correlates with the organisational policies to achieve the process through extensive and planned information, productive cooperation, and the efficient fulfilment of the common organisational interest. Austin and Pinkleton (2015) discussed that public relations management is a deliberate and sustained effort to foster and sustain goodness, willingness, and understanding between an organisation and society. Particularly, the presence of public relations management activities resulted in organisational behavioural changes. Increasing the result specificity and the focus of public relations programmes on final audiences’ expectations could effortlessly measure respective changes in organisational behaviour. For instance, the primary objective of fundraising campaigns is to raise additional funds for non-profit institutions. The outcome suggests that the public relations activity is successful when the funds increase after the campaign (Austin & Pinkleton, 2015).

Relationship between public relations and organisational change

The departments and professionals of public relations play important roles as change agents to overcome employee resistance when organisations perform required modifications to fulfill the demands present in the internal and external social environment (Men et al., 2020). As change agents, the departments and professionals could communicate the rationales to employees, inspire employees to attend sessions explaining the change initiatives and strengthen shared perceptions and visions. Several studies empirically examined the proposed qualities of effective public relations leadership for organisational change (Thurlow et al., 2018). Resultantly, public relations leadership is integral to producing internal symmetrical communication and allowing employees to share personal suggestions. As internal symmetrical communication relies on employee empowerment and decision-making involvement, engaging employees in bidirectional conversations during the implementation of organisational change could positively impact employees’ cognitive and behavioural responses. Therefore, public relations could alleviate employee resistance to organisational change.

Quality communication and information exchange can reduce workers’ resistance to organisational change while creating a positive work environment (Men et al., 2020). The lack of involvement from the employees in the change process was extensively reported as a primary cause of resistance. According to Nilsen et al. (2019), comprehending the reasons for change resistance could enable managers to avoid negative outcomes while boosting the success rate. Neill (2018) also reported that the public relations unit or function could display leadership skills during organisational change by coaching middle management to handle employee emotions, providing communication training to middle management in communicating and strengthening shared visions for change, and resolving conflicts between the middle and top management over relevant rationales, plans, and implementation. In a nutshell, public relations could generate effective organisational change management by promoting mutual comprehension via dialogue and assisting an organisation to build long-term quality relationships with strategic public audiences and incorporate the perspectives of the strategic public into management decision-making.

Material and methods

The current study employed the research methodology in two phases, namely the formulation of the research portfolio and conceptual framework (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. The methodological framework.

Research portfolio construction

Based on the study objectives, this study conducted a systematic literature review as suggested by Pagani et al. (2015), de Campos et al. (2018), Ali and Johl (2022), and Souza et al. (2021). The InOrdination equation was employed to identify the potential publications for the research portfolio construction. The InOrdination equation consists of three main factors, namely impact factors or cite scores (IF), number of citations (Ci), and year of publications. As recommended by Pagani et al. (2015), the equation was performed with nine steps. The first step indicated the study’s purpose, which was to review the relationship between public relations and organisational change. The second step was selecting the database. Ali and Johl (2022) highlighted that three databases were dominantly utilised in review studies, namely Web of Science (WOS), Scopus, and Google Scholar. In this study, the data were collected through the Scopus database. The third step defined two keywords to extract relevant publications. Initially, the term ‘Public relations*’ was combined with ‘organisational change’ and, subsequently, ‘change management’. The asterisk character (*) was employed to ensure the inclusion of variants adjacent to the main terms (Vaz et al., 2018).

The initial database search for publications from 1998 to 2022 was performed in the fourth step. Only journals and conference proceedings were included, whereas book chapters and review articles were excluded from the search. Furthermore, publications in the English language were considered for the further review process. Duplicate and irrelevant studies were removed from the final analysis in the fifth step, which resulted in the final dataset of 89 articles. The Scopus IF and Ci were counted for research portfolio construction in the sixth step In the seventh step, the InOrdination equation categorised the publication [(IF/1000)+ α x [10-(Research year- Publish Year)]+ (∑Ci)], where Alfa value (α) indicates the importance of publications and assigned score from 1 to 10. The recent publications were assigned a higher alpha value than older documents (Ali & Johl, 2022; de Campos et al., 2018; Pagani et al., 2015). Subsequently, the final articles were downloaded for in-depth perusal and analysis. Eventually, all publications were systematically scrutinised and analysed for further classification (see Table 1).

Table 1. The nine steps of Methodi Ordinatio (InOrdination).

Step	Explanation	Detail
1	Research purpose	To review the relationship between public relations and organisational change
2	Identifying the research database	WOS, Scopus, and Google Scholar
3	Selecting keywords	Keywords: (‘Public relations*’) AND (‘Organisational change’ OR ‘Change Management’)Databases: Scopus
4	Inclusion and exclusion criteria	Article year: 1998-2022 Article published in English language only
5	Filtering procedures	Deletion of duplicate articles = 42Articles not related to the theme = 47Final articles in the portfolio = 89
6	Identifying the IF, CI, and publication years	IF = Scopus cite score Ci = Scopus citations
7	Employing the InOrdination equation to categorise publications: $\begin{array}{l}\mathit{\text{InOrdination}}=(\mathit{\text{IF}}/1000+\alpha \times \\ \left[10-(\mathit{\text{Research year}}-\mathit{\text{Publish year}})\right]+\hspace{0.17em}\sum \mathit{\text{Ci}})\end{array}$	Alfa value (α) = The researcher assigned a score from 1 to 10 based on the importance of the topic novelty
8	Downloading the complete articles	The final selected articles.
9	Systematically perusing, analysing, and classifying final publications	The full portfolio of all articles was obtained pre-content reading and methodical analysis.

Results

The bibliometric analysis was performed following the dataset finalised through the InOrdination approach through R-Studio and VOSviewer. The results were presented based on publication trends, three-fold analysis, word cloud, co-occurrence, and co-citation analyses. The following sections thoroughly explain the analyses.

Publication Trends

The data were collected through the Scopus database from 1998 to 2022, as illustrated in Figure 2. Specifically, limited attention was provided to the role of public relations in change management from 1998 to 2009, with only seven studies conducted. The research topic gained considerable attention from 2010 to 2020 with more than 80% of articles published before declining in 2021 and 2022.

Figure 2. Publication trends.

Three-field analysis

The three-field plot or analysis was performed (Radanliev & De Roure, 2021) to highlight the relationship strength among keywords emerging in the abstract, title, and author keywords. Figure 3 depicts the title on the left side, the authors’ keywords in the middle, and the abstract on the right side. Particularly, change management was strongly associated with organisational factors.

Figure 3. Three-field analysis.

Word cloud analysis

Word cloud analysis served to underscore the keywords appearing in the publication corpus, which is also recognised as the science mapping approach. The corpus of 89 studies indicated that the most occurring authors’ keywords were organisational change, leadership, public relations, and interprofessional teamwork. Furthermore, the word cloud was analysed among different study abstracts. The most occurring abstract keywords were change management, organisational, system process, and leadership (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Word clouds.

Co-occurrence analysis

The co-occurrence analysis evaluated the cross-disciplinary involvement and cooperation in certain research fields, in which the circle size (see Figure 5) represents the occurrence of keywords with the line representing the node. Figure 5 portrays the co-occurrence of authors’ keywords between public relations and change management from 1998 to 2022 in five clusters. The largest cluster represented in red illustrates the research perspective, wherein the change management research was performed from a different perspective. For instance, the most prominent context was health, including healthcare delivery, quality, and health services. Concurrently, other research contexts also acquired significant attention, such as programme development, education, and total quality management.

Figure 5. Co-occurrence analysis.

The second and third clusters highlight the behavioural and human aspects of change management as represented in green and blue. The prominent keywords are human, gender, attitude, and psychological aspects, with all nodes in the clusters associated with the first cluster. Meanwhile, the fourth cluster in purple depicts the role of change management in healthcare with an emphasis on patients. The last cluster demonstrates the co-occurrence of keywords related to public relations and change management in yellow. The prominent keywords are public relations, organisational innovation, organisational change, and customer relationship management.

Co-citation analysis

The co-citation analysis was conducted to discover the intellectual structure of the research domain by presuming that simultaneously cited publications are thematically similar as shown in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Co-citation analysis.

Future research directions

The current study aimed to review relevant studies on public relations and change management by performing a bibliometric analysis of 89 studies between 1998 and 2022 collected through the Scopus database to determine the relationship between public relations and change management.

Theoretical direction

Based on the review, a theoretical framework is proposed for future researchers (see Figure 7) to explicate the relationship between public relations and employee acceptance of change through the relationship management theory. Ledingham (2003) proposed and expounded the theory of relationship management as the effective management of organisational-public relationships concerning common interests and shared goals for mutual understanding and benefits.

Figure 7. The proposed theoretical framework.

The relationship management theory was compatible with significant theoretical concepts, such as systems theory and the two-way symmetrical model (Hazleton, 1992; Ledingham, 2003). While most theories related to public relations emphasise communication, relationship management endeavors to define the organisational function of public relations, explain the role of communication within the specific function, and provide a process to ascertain the contribution of public relations in achieving organisational goals (Ledingham, 2003). As such, communication is a strategic management function supporting the management of relationships with essential parties that influence organisational missions, goals, and objectives. The principles of relationship management theory are presented as follows:

• Organisation-public relationships are transactional, goal-oriented, and dynamic.

• Organisation-public relationships comprise causes and effects determined by the relationship quality, maintenance methods, the relationship form, and involved parties.

• The relationships are motivated by the perceived needs and wants of interacting organisations and the public.

• The endurance of the relationships depends on the fulfilment extent of expectations conveyed during the interactions between involved parties.

• Relationships require communication influenced by the relational history, transactional type, exchange frequency, and reciprocity.

• Organisation-public relationships can be specified by personal, professional, community, symbolic, or behavioural types that are independent of corresponding perceptions.

• The discipline of public relations should emphasise relationships when unidirectional communication could not maintain long-term relationships without supportive organisational behaviour.

• Successful relationship management encourages mutual understanding and benefit, which applies to relevant public relations processes and techniques.

The theory emphasises the role of communication in managing internal and external relationships for organisational efficiency. In recent years, the importance of managing relationships with various stakeholders and the public has taken precedence in public relations research via strategic public relations management (Theaker, 2020), specifically the relationship management theory. Lewin (1951) proposed a theory on change and elucidated that individuals are frequently influenced by restraining forces or obstacles to maintain the status quo as opposed to the driving forces propelling the change. To successfully incorporate change and alter the status quo, three steps are pivotal for organisations to manage the change (Burnes, 2019):

• Unfreezing is a stage that changes the force maintaining the status quo (Harigopal, 2001) by ensuring employees’ awareness of the discrepancies in behaviour. The stability of human behaviour depends on an equilibrium sustained by the interconnection between driving and restraining forces.

• Moving is a process where change is carefully implemented with sufficient time provided for habituation to the change process. Communication is crucial to guide employees through the change with available alternatives to demonstrate relevant benefits while reducing the restraining forces that negatively impact the change.

• Refreezing is performed to establish an alternative equilibrium by incorporating the change, in which the organisation has stabilised a different set of behaviours through alternative norms and policies (Harigopal, 2001).

Conceptual direction

Based on the past literature, another promising direction is the conceptual upgradation of organization-public relationship research. Based on the relationship management theory and contingency theory, a new concept of contingent organization public relationship (COPR) has been developed (Cheng, 2018). According to Cheng (2018), COPR ‘is the information flow between an organization and one or more publics who are in the status ranging from mutually beneficial to highly conflictual’. From an operational perspective, COPR is a function of combined stances each protagonist takes in a public discourse. The concept of COPR is based on two research streams; relationship management theory and contigency theory of conflict management.

Furthermore, ‘trust’ is a key metric in organizational public relations that has been extensively studied, assuming its presence in relationships. However, Dutta and Banerjee (2014) highlighted situations where parties may never trust or engage with each other, introducing the concept of districts as distinct quality measurements. Additionally, scholars often overlooked the distinction between interpersonal and inter-organizational trust, despite their correlation. In future research, studies should differentiate trust dimensions for external (customers) and internal (employee) publics in various contexts, emphasizing the need for tailored measurements. Future research should clarify participants’ roles and develop specific measurements for different situations (Cheng, 2018).

Methodological direction

Based on the corpus of studies, self-reported research methods are dominant in the study domain, with less than 10% employing interviews, content analysis, or experiments. This study argues that relying solely on unilateral self-reported surveys may lead to inaccuracies in assessing relationships. In reality, relationships are bilateral or multilateral, requiring input from all parties involved. Thus in future research, the researchers should adapt diversified methods incorporating content analysis and social network analysis, to offer a more comprehensive understanding of firm-public relations beyond self-reported survey data.

In the same vein, cross-sectional methods, commonly used in firm-public relations research, pose challenges in analysing changes over time and may lead to biased measurements of relationships. Researchers often test individual perceptions at one specific time, neglecting potential long-term changes in opinions. Despite the firm-public relationship being dynamic, longitudinal studies are underutilized. Future research should employ more longitudinal approaches to capture the evolving dynamics of the concept. Finally, Table 2 summarizes the current and future states of organization-public relations research.

Table 2. Future research directions.

Aspects	Current states	Future states
Theoretical	Most of the current literature is based on relationship management theory.	Future research should focus on Lewin’s change management theory or the integration of relationship management and Lewin’s change management theories.
Conceptual	The current literature mostly centered around organizational-public relations concept which is based on relationship management theory. The concept of ‘trust’ is a key dimension in organizational-public relations literature.	1. Future research should focus on contingency organizational-public relations (COPR), which is based on the contingency theory of conflict management. 2. Future research should focus on trust dimensions for internal and external relationships.
Methodological	Self-reported study methods are dominant in current literature. The cross-sectional approach is dominant in prior studies.	Future research should adopt diversified methods like content and social network analysis. Future research should adopt a longitudinal approach.

Contributions and implications

The fast-growing competitive market is one of the main challenges impacting organisational operations and businesses, with existing operators struggling to maintain and develop the current market share. Customers possess a wide range of alternatives and choices and prefer more efficient customer services. Thus, the corporate management and employees must accept and be prepared to adopt the required changes to survive in the competitive market and flourish when the environment permits. In supporting the preparation of change, organisational leaders should be aware of and strive to harness relevant organisational cultural factors for corresponding business advantages. This study postulated that organisations performing the managerial process of change without any input from the involved management or employees would negatively impact employee behaviour and function while encountering significant employee resistance.

The research outcome is anticipated to be applied to the operations in organisational change, which guides the administration to actively engage employees at all levels while encouraging positive behaviour and perception. Specifically, employees who perceive that personal worth and value are adequately appreciated by the company will engage in a fundamental process that transforms the current job attitude and behaviour to support the change process. Based on the literature review, more studies on the impact of public relations on employee resistance to organisational change are required in emerging economies. Therefore, the present study would be beneficial for corporations in developing countries. The findings would also assist organisational management in thoroughly comprehending the challenges, issues, and factors underlying the resistance to change while assisting the management in understanding that resistance is an ordinary consequence with manageable reactions. This study also corroborated that public relations could reduce employee resistance to organisational change.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mohammed Faris Shaya

Mohammed Faris S. Shaya is a distinguished scholar and researcher with a strong academic background, continuing his Ph.D. in Public relations and change management fields. In 2019, he dedicated himself to full-time research, showcasing his commitment to advancing knowledge within his chosen discipline. His research focus lies in exploring the intricate dynamics between internal public relations and employees’ resistance to change within profitable companies, with a particular emphasis on the context of Saudi Arabia.

Jamilah Ahmad

Professor Dr Jamilah Ahmad is currently attached to the School of Communication, Universiti Sains Malaysia. She has produced over a hundred of journal articles, proceedings, research monographs, books and book chapters on a broad range of topics in the field of Corporate Social Responsibility, Public Relations, Youth Studies, Communication, Media and Audience Analysis. Contributing to the academic community, she has been actively sharing her expertise in the editorial board and as issue reviewer for more than 33 international and local journals. Jamilah, is also known for her numerous involvements as principal investigator and co-researcher in over 40 research projects.