A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ROLES AND PERSONALITY OF PUBLIC RELATIONS PRACTITIONERS IN GOVERNMENT ORGANIZATIONS AND CORPORATE ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

This research was aimed at making a comparison between the action roles and personality traits of public relations (PR) practitioners in public and private organizations. The focus is actually on examining important factors relating to the action roles and personality traits of PR practitioners, and studying the trend of action roles and personality traits essential for PR practitioners in the future. In this qualitative study, in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 PR practitioners and a quantitative study with 400 PR practitioners was also employed.

The research findings were as follows:

The PR practitioners in public and private organizations at present typically had 10 distinctive roles in doing their career: Management Role, Media Relations Role, Communication Liaison Role, Communication Technician Role, PR Communication Role, Research and Evaluation Role, Spokesperson and Representative of the Organization Role, and Corporate Social Responsibility Role. With regard to their personality traits, three different types of personality traits emerged among PR practitioners: external and internal personality traits as well as the Buddhism-related personality traits. The action roles and personality traits of PR in public and private organizations were distinctive. It was found that private sector PR practitioners’ mean score of action roles and opinions towards their personality traits was higher than that of the PR practitioners in the private sector except for the roles involving communication with politicians in which the mean score of action roles among the public sector PR was higher. Furthermore, the results indicated that there were three important factors influencing PR practitioners’ action roles and personality traits, demographic factors, internal factors and external factors of PR practitioners. As for the trend of PR action roles in the future, the study results showed that they would have various actions roles were indispensable for their career such as keeping abreast of information technology and applying it in PR practice, being capable of collecting more accurate data from the target groups to be used as the data base for more effective communicating as well as promoting the world conservation and reducing energy consumption. Moreover, it was found that the trend of PR practitioners’ personality traits essential for their career in the future included being highly energetic, having far-sighted vision ready to adopt innovation and cope with new changes, having self-confidence, thinking creatively, having expertise in professional public relations and sincerity as well as morality in the career.