Culture's Role In Ethical Decision Making Of Chinese And American Agency Public Relations Practitioners

Along with the increasing globalization worldwide, the landscape of both the economy and the society has been undergoing a tremendous change. With the facilitation of advanced communication tools and information technology, the communication and understanding between different cultures has been deepened. The interaction between the eastern and western in this period takes on fresh-new characteristics. The pace of intercultural communication in China is reving up as a result of influx of myriad foreign enterprises and speeded mobilization of human resources with diverse cultural backgrounds. The cultural diversity incorporates diverse values, perceptions, traditions and viewpoints among different groups of people. In this diesis, the author expressly chooses business ethics as a focus and tries to probe into the pervasive ethical dilemmas in the public relations industry with intercultural analytical approaches and models.Culture, an overly explained term, has many definitions given by different researchers and experts. It is exuding through every corner of this world, from the costumes and traditions to the deep-seated beliefs and values. In this thesis, the author follows the trail of Hofstede and Trompenaars and propounds his own framework for studying the culture's role in the ethical decision making. Ethics refers to defined standards of right and wrong that prescribe what humans ought to do, usually in terms of rights, obligations, benefits to society, fairness, or specific virtues. Ethics can also be referred a branch of study in this area. Making good ethical decisions requires a trained sensitivity to ethical issues and a practiced method for exploring the ethical aspects of a decision. It also involves weighing the considerations that should impact our choice of a course of action.Public Relations (PR) industry, a relatively new service industry, has gained dramatic development recently. It is an industry fraught with lots of ethical dilemmas, where sound decisions are needed. Having been working in Hill & Knowlton, the author is gradually acquainted with the fundamentals and way of doing things in this industry. Through the daily communication with the American colleagues, the author finds that Chinese and American employees have conspicuous difference in communication and in their way of makingdecisions. When ethical dilemmas arise, how do the public relations practitioners behave, how do they resolve these dilemmas, what kind of approaches are they resorting to? Are there any interlink between their behaviors and their cultural backgrounds? These are the questions my thesis is going to answer.Based on resourceful literature, the author proposes three hypotheses as following: 1. Individualism and collectivism influences the Chinese and American PR practitioners' ethical decision making. 2. Power Distance affects the ethical decision making of Chinese and American PR practitioners. 3. Cultural context (high-context and low-context cultures) is embedded in the ethical decision making. Chinese and American PR practitioners prioritize different stakeholders when they have to make a decision in a dilemmatic situation.By comparing the differences between Chinese and American cultures, the author gradually touches on the underlying reasons for these hypotheses. By applying different cultural analytical models, the author develops his own framework in probing into the connection between culture and ethical decision making within the public relations industry. By conducting the survey via questionnaires and interview in Hill & Knowlton (China) and Hill & Knowlton (US), the author empirically tests the hypotheses and finally finds that the Hypothesis 1 and Hypothesis 3 are valid while Hypothesis 2 is invalid.This study will be conducive to intercultural communication study and shed light on the research of managerial decision making. As this study is covering many frontiers of research areas, it not only outlines a clear framework of previous studies in this area, but also enlightens the future research. This study will also contribute to the practical corporate management by raising the awareness of cultural difference. Being aware of cultural difference and aligning the corporate strategy accordingly will help the multinational companies or diverse-culture teams work more efficiently and effectively toward their goals.