2010 - Public Relations Society of America

Practical implications
This study also poses several implications for applied practice of internal public
relations. First, organizational leaders can, and perhaps should, allow their faith and
vision to contribute meaningfully to the types of leadership style, organizational culture,
and internal communication practices promoted within an organization. As
CommunityBankCorp has demonstrated, spirituality can provide a strong foundation for
shared organizational values and behavioral expectations/principles. However, leaders
must be careful to maintain respect for employees from other faith traditions or no faith
traditions to foster buy0in to those values, expectations, and principles. Second,
enactment of authentic, transformational, principle-centered, and servant leadership styles
coupled with open, two-way symmetrical internal communication within a spiritually
based organizational culture should, according to the model, produce positive, peopledriven
cultural values, interpersonal communication, and employee
empowerment/growth. In praxis, leaders and public relations professionals must be
consistent, intentional, and unified in maintaining these specific leadership styles, cultural
values, and excellent communication processes. Commitment to constant training and
reinforcement will be required across all organizational levels. In addition, leaders must
employ carful hiring and firing practices based on foundational cultural values,
behavioral expectations, and principles. In short, for the model to work, the organization
must “practice what it preaches.”
Finally, the resulting outcomes of relational strength, organizational unity, and
employee leadership development will feed back into maintaining organizational success
over time. Special attention must be paid to encouraging these outcomes from the top
leadership trickling out through mid-level leaders to employees at all levels. Again,
intentional, consistent organization-wide training, modeling, and mentoring will help
ensure a perpetuating cycle of success. As leaders model positive, respectful relationship
building and as appropriate hiring/firing practices (with careful attention to cultural fit)
are employed, employees at all levels should begin to emulate this behavior. Public
relations professionals, through facilitating face-to0face communication as well as
through cultural maintenance strategies such as vision/values communication,
storytelling, and relationship-building informally and through activities, should help to
facilitate this perpetuating cycle as well.
Future research. Directions for future research include further model
testing/development, specifically its staying power within the original organization and
its potential applicability and universality in both similar and dissimilar organizations. In
addition, testing the importance of cultural maintenance assessment within the
organization as well as specifically exploring the role of listening in achieving internal
public relations excellence will enhance understanding of the hybrid confluences depicted
here.
Due to its unique context and combination of research streams as well as the
resulting model, this study is theoretically and descriptively rich, adding to the
understanding of internal relationship management found in mainstream public relations
research. For too long, employees have been passed over as a critically value public and a
crucial research topic; yet without them—and more importantly, without greater
understanding of how to best build relationships between them and organizational
leaders—businesses would experience constraint in their ability to practice both internal
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