Glossary
Communicating with Internal and External Stakeholders
Credibility:
Credibility is your perceived competence, trustworthiness and dynamism assigned by an
audience.
Ethics:
Morale principles which govern the behavior of individuals and organizations and their
decision choices.
Enquiry into morality (i.e. what is right and wrong, and the yardsticks by which people
assess what is right or wrong). project/programme purpose ethics
is an enquiry into the moral dimensions of project/programme purpose activities; descriptive
ethics merely describes moral matters; prescriptive ethics passes judgment on them.
The
attitudes to organizationalethics
(Reidenbach and Robin): 1.
Amoral organizations are prepared to condone any actions that contribute to the
organizationalaims. 2. Legalistic organization obey the law but not necessarily the spirit
of it, if that conflicts with economic performance. 3. Responsive organizations those
that take a view - perhaps cynically, perhaps not - that there is something to be gained
from ethical behavior. 4. Emerging ethical (or 'ethically engaged') organizations
take an active (rather than reactive) interest in ethical issues. 5. Ethical organization
have a 'total ethical profile': a philosophy that inform everything that the organization does
and a commitment of the part of everyone to carefully selected core values.
Leadership: Process of
influencing others to work willingly towards a goal, and to the best of their
capabilities. Note that leadership and management are not the same (although managers can
be leaders). A leader does not have to be a boss; and managers can be bad leaders.
Organizational Culture:
Culture is comprised
of the shared values, customs, traditions, rituals, behaviors and beliefs shared by a
social group (national, ethnic, organizational, etc.).
Cultures also share languages, or ways of speaking. From a communication perspective, cultures are made
and remade through the words we use to describe our world.
Organizational/Communication
Climate: Climate is the
atmosphere of a organization. More specifically, organizational/communication climate is the
atmosphere of supportiveness or defensiveness people feel within the organization and the
feelings they have about sending and receiving messages.
Real Change Leader: RCLs are leader-managers who tend to share their
power. RCLs are willing to try new approaches
to problem solving that allow for risk taking and mistakes.
Importantly, RCLs see the value of distributing power among working teams
comprised of people they view as already knowledgeable and capable of decision making. Instead of focusing solely on the numbers, RCLs are
interested in satisfying beneficiaries and workers, hold everyone on the team accountable for
outcomes and are not afraid to move to a new working environment.
Power: Power is
the ability to influence, persuade or move another person in a desired direction.