Professionalism of News Workers - Grady College of Journalism and ...

Professionalism of News Workers: The Creation and Evolution of the Concept Page 24
for the comparison of journalists with Hall’s sample of occupations in terms of their degree of
professionalism. Leroy’s television sample was generally below Hall’s median rank.
Haga, Graen and Dansereau (1974) drew on Hall to create measures of the professionalism of
managers in a college housing and food service division. They found that highly professional managers
behaved quite differently from their low professional counterparts. Specifically, the highly professional
managers worked harder and longer on tasks associated with their roles.
Dyer (1977) also used Hall’s attitudinal approach in a study of social workers with bachelor’s
degree to compare their professional, bureaucratic and client service orientation with those of social
workers trained by an agency. He found that the workers with a bachelor’s degree had a stronger
tendency to accept professional work norms than their agency-trained counterparts.
More recently, studies of professional workers such as lawyers and doctors have referenced
Hall’s use of individual autonomy and self-regulation as important factors in job satisfaction and
professional commitment. Wallace (1995) included autonomy as a variable in both job satisfaction and
organizational commitment in a study of lawyers working in 136 Canadian law firms. The findings
suggested that corporatist control generally increases job satisfaction and organizational commitment for
professionals. Hoff (2000) used Hall’s autonomy and self-regulation characteristics to represent
professional values in a survey measuring professional commitment among physician executives in their
roles as managed-care administrators. The findings showed that the professional commitment of the
physician executives was positively related to doing clinical work and that it helped them maintain their
professional identities.
Only the study by Leroy (1972-73) in those reviewed above based on the Hall (1968) approach
actually employed a standardized set of measures of professional attitudes. The other studies rather are
conceptually linked to Hall in that they employ the same reasoning about what professional attitudes are.
Over the years, a number of researchers in communication have modified the original McLeod
and Hawley (1964) measures (Lattimore and Nayman,1974; and Nayman, Atkin, and O’Keefe,1973;
Henningham,1984). One reason for the modification was the belief that McLeod and Hawley’s approach
assumed journalists’ non-professional traits were in some way “anti-professional” (Henningham, 1984).