Answer to Question #233186 in Psychology for Vutomi Ngobeni

Question

As the official spokesperson for #Not in name South Africa,you have been tasked with planning public relations activities for the movement. Explain how the systems theory of public relations can be used to coordinate the planning and execution of your public relations jobs activities with sectors and sections of society

Answer 1

The systems theory explains that public relations professionals must constantly monitor their environment, intended goals, actions, and feedback from stakeholders and publics in order to make the necessary changes to the organization to fit within the environment and reach a goal state of equilibrium.

First identified in the 1940s, systems theory achieves insights into communication . Especially influential on organizational communication, systems theory explains how and why people form groups, each of which is a system as well as part of a larger system. Its focus is on the whole system rather than on its parts, and how these parts interact to affect the whole system. Infante, Rancer and Womack (1997) define a system as hierarchical — a set of interdependent units working together to adapt to a changing environment. It can be divided into smaller subsystems or incorporated with other systems to create larger systems, referred to as suprasystems or environments. A systems approach to organizational communication expands the basic model of sender-receiver to feature communication networks; this explains how systems adapt to their environments .

As previously stated, PA is composed of three basic subsystems: internal information, media and community relations. Although the military mainly uses each subsystem interdependently, the entire system is much more than the sum of the contributions of each individual part. As Infante, Rancer and Womack explain it, “every system is like a cake in the sense that if you take away or change one individual part, the entire system is affected” . The focus of organizational communication is on the whole system, rather than on parts of the system .

Communication systems, such as public affairs, are “open” systems — they interact with their environments. Open systems “continually take in new information, transform that information and give information back to the environment” . By contrast, “closed” systems are characterized by a lack of input communication, making it difficult to make good decisions and stay current with the needs of the environment . Closed systems lean toward entropy, chaos or total disorganization . Applying the open systems approach to military PA requires a purposeful sensing of the environment to anticipate and detect changes that affect the organization’s relationships with its publics. Ultimately, the systems approach should serve as the foundation for a more effective management practice. This becomes the basis upon which our ideal model for PA interaction was created

Communication serves as the basis for control and coordination in organizations; it also provides information essential to effective completion of the organizational mission” (Poole, 1978, p. 493). But, what “exactly” is communication? In layman’s terms, communication is the interchange of information between two or more persons. Farace, Monge and Russell (1977) define communication as the exchange of symbols that are commonly shared by the individuals involved, and which evoke quite similar symbol-referent relationships in each individual. Organizational communication goes a bit further. Organizational communication is “both similar to and distinct from other types of communication”. It is more than the daily interactions of individuals within organizations, it is the process through which organizations create and shape events (Shockley-Zalabak, 1999).

The study of organizational communication centers on processes of interaction means by which people obtain information, form opinions, make decisions, merge into the organization, leave the organization and create rapport with one another (Shockley-Zalabak, 1999). Through communication, people coordinate their actions to achieve individual and organizational goals (Shockley-Zalabak, 1999). Effective organizational communication within the PA arena is critical. The public’s perception of credibility and validity of any PA office depends largely on the successful transmission of verbal and nonverbal messages and the sharing of information at all links (subsystems) through the organization’s channels.

According to Huse and Bowditch (1973), an organization is effective and efficient when it has the ability to be integrated and to consider three different perspectives simultaneously: structural design, flow and human factors. Looking into this further, a literature review by Campbell (1977) found that more than 30 different criteria were used for the measurement of organizational effectiveness (Praeger, 1986). These measurement criteria ranged from specific aspects of organizational effectiveness to a global view. Campbell’s (1977) review also finds some of the measurement criteria to be inconsistent, in that few studies used multivariate measures of effectiveness and the same criteria were rarely used across studies (Praeger, 1986).

Herein lies the basic theme of this paper, suggesting that military PA organizations, in an effort to gain greater efficiency, should attempt to both integrate and simultaneously consider its three subsystems (internal information, media and community relations) as well as best practices in the civilian corporate PR arena, when approaching organizational issues.