A.S. (Ahmed) Gaara

The public relations professional is the only professional who maintains a relationship with senior management, internal and external stakeholders simultaneously. Their main responsibility is to harmoniously bridge the interest of the organization with its internal and external stakeholders. However, such endeavor often entails multifaceted ethical dilemmas that are complex to resolve. The complexity mainly arises from the ambiguity and uncertainty that characterize these dilemmas. However, despite the ethical challenges, the extant literature offers ethical criteria that are broad and lack coherence. Stated differently, these criteria promote generic guidelines that are not specific for public relations professions and often contradict one another. For instance, the deontological criteria, which dominates the extant literature, emphasizes maintaining respect for all stakeholders while promoting universal norms. The universal application of norms may contradict the emphasis on maintaining respect for stakeholders as the former neglects the inherent diversity of stakeholders' values and interests. Moreover, existing principles do not seem to resolve the conflict between stakeholders' expectations for transparency and senior management's pressure on corporate privacy. Therefore, existing criteria mostly leave public relations professionals without sufficient guidance. Accordingly, this thesis focuses on developing and testing ethical principles unique to public relations professionals' ethical dilemmas. As such, there are four steps involved in realizing such an endeavor. The first step entails identifying critical principles for public relations professionals. The second step entails empirically validating the extent to which these principles are entrenched in practice. The third step entails examining the effect of these principles on the behavior of public relations professionals. The fourth step entails examining individual-level antecedents of these principles. Each one of these steps intends to make unique contributions to practice and theory.