What Does “Professionalism”
Mean for HR Professionals?
PUBLIC OPINIONS SHED A BLEAK LIGHT ON
HOW THE PROFESSION IS PERCEIVED
By Claude Balthazard, PhD, C.Psych, CHRL
Professionalism is at the confluence of two
important themes for human resources
professionals. For one, professionalism is
closely linked to the process of profession-alization
– the meta-strategy that the profession
has pursued for decades. Professionalism is also
what makes self-regulation work and is vitally
important to the promotion and protection of the
public interest.
The term professionalism has two meanings.
Interestingly, when sociologists use the term they
think of the characteristics of the institutions and
how the profession is organized. However, most
think of professionalism as it applies to individ-uals
– the attitudes, values and behaviours of
members of the profession. When professional-ism
is used to refer to the attitudes, values and
behaviours of an individual, it often refers to one
or more of the characteristics below:
■■ Maturity of character
■■ Dedication to one’s craft
■■ A disciplined approach to one’s work
■■ The ability to set aside one’s personal feelings
and attitudes
■■ Emotional self-control
■■ Trustworthiness
■■ Honesty
■■ Modesty
■■ High ethical standards
■■ High standards of quality in one’s work
■■ Intrinsically motivated
When the topic of professionalism comes up in
HR circles, the response most often heard goes
something like, “I always behave in a professional
manner, and my clients and colleagues think of
me as such.”
Unfortunately, this perception doesn’t seem to
be shared by the public at large.
In January 2018, HRPA commissioned Ipsos,
a polling firm, to ask two questions of the Ontario
public: “How would you rate the honesty and
ethical standards of (HR professionals)?” and,
“Do you have a positive or negative opinion of
(HR professionals)?”
These questions were chosen because they
had been used by the Gallup Organization and
Insights West respectively. The two questions
were asked of different samples to avoid bias and
each sample had upwards of 1,000 respondents.
In the first survey, 29 per cent of respondents
gave a “high” or “very high” response for regis-tered
HR professionals. For 2017, Gallup ratings
ranged from a high of 82 per cent for nurses to a
low of eight per cent for lobbyists. Medical doc-tors
and engineers achieved ratings of 65 per cent
and accountants a rating of 39 per cent. The occu-pations/
professions closest to HR professionals
would be nursing home operators at 26 per cent
and auto mechanics at 32 per cent.
However, we find that regulated occupations/
professions tend to occupy the upper half of
the list, whereas unregulated occupations/pro-fessions
tend to occupy the lower half. When
compared to regulated professions, HR profes-sionals
are quite low with only lawyers obtaining
a lower score at 18 per cent.
In the second survey, 64 per cent of respon-dent
gave a “somewhat positive” or “very positive”
response for registered human resource pro-fessionals.
Inserting that result in the Insights
West table, this comes out as an average score.
Registered HR professionals were ranked 17th
out of 28 occupations/professions.
Again, as with the Gallup results, regulated
professions figure prominently among the more
highly rated occupations/professions. Regulated
professions occupy nine out of the top 13
16 ❚ CONFERENCE ISSUE 2019 ❚ HR PROFESSIONAL
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