Motivating Employees to Do the Right Thing: Corporate Reputation and Values as Justification?

Description

  Companies are increasingly expected to inform employees about business ethics issues and promote ethical behavior in the workplace. To do so, promotional strategies often integrate arguments that reflect corporate communication goals: to strengthen corporate reputation (Argenti 2003) and employee identification with company values (Riel and Fombrun 2007).  But are employees really motivated to behave ethically by corporate reputation and values concerns, or do other arguments seem to be more appropriate?

To address these questions, I first describe corporate ethical behavior promotion by relying on Swalesian genre theory to identify the rhetorical moves and communicative functions of one of the most widespread business ethics genres: ethics policy booklets (Swales 2004). Then I examine employees' points of view by analyzing the results of a recently-conducted survey involving 161 respondents at a global Danish company.  The results reveal the relative importance of chosen arguments, including the persuasive strength of corporate reputation and values.

Emneord: Corporate Communication, Genre Analysis, Business Ethics Communication, Corporate Reputation and Values

Period	21 Jan 2009
Event title	Rhetoric in Society: second conference
Event type	Conference
Location	Leiden Universitet, NetherlandsShow on map