ATTITUDES

INTRODUCTION

It is defined as individuals’ feelings like likes and dislikes, pros and cons, favorable or unfavorable, positive or negative towards various other people, objects, events or activities. These are the evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable towards object or people. I like coke. I do not like rock music. These are expression of attitudes towards products. In organizations, attitudes are important because they affect job behaviors. If employees believe that supervisors, auditors, bosses , engineers are all in a conspiracy to make the employee work harder for the same or less money, then it makes sense to try understand how attitudes were formed, their relationship to actual job behavior and how they can be made more favorable.

ATTITUDES

Attitudes can be defined as an individual’s feelings about or inclinations towards other persons, objects, events, or activities. Attitudes encompass such affective feelings as likes and dislikes, and satisfactions and dissatisfactions. Our needs, past experiences, selfconcept, and personality shape the beliefs, feelings, and opinion we hold towards the perceived world. Once we have formed our likes and dislikes, we generally cling on to them and find it difficult to change our attitudes, unless we make a conscious and determined effort to do so. An interesting phenomenon is that our values shape our attitudes. Traditionally, behavioral scientists have divided attitudes into two major groups:

i) those that are cognitive (for example, beliefs or expectations about cause-effect relationships between events) and ii) those that are evaluative (for example, liking or disliking for event). An example of a cognitive attitude would be an employee’s belief that superior job performance would be rewarded by praise from a superior. An example of an evaluative attitude would be the degree to which he or she would like or value such praise.

Components of Attitudes

There are three components of attitudes such as Cognitive (Thinking), Affective (Feeling) and Conotive (Behavioral).

• Cognitive Component: Cognitive component deals with thinking, evaluation, comparison, rational, logical issues with respect to the targeted object. This will facilitate to form a strong belief or further strengthen the belief system towards various objects. By observing and analyzing the various features of Sony lap top computer, you may form a very good opinion stating that Sony laptop is best among others. Such an evaluation is based on the cognitive component of attitudes.
• Affective Component: Affective component deals with feelings or emotional issues of the targeted objects. I do not like Ramesh as he had hunted down a rare species of deer’s in the forest. As deers are harmless creatures, I love them very much. The disliking of Ramesh is due to emotional aspects or personal feelings towards the targeted object.
• Behavioral Components: This refers to intention to behave in a certain way towards someone or something. As I do not like rock music, I am not interested to attend the concert. The action of not attending is due to a part of disliking of rock music concert. All these three components collectively act together for the formation of attitudes.

Sources of Attitudes:

Attitudes are formed through various sources. We acquire or learn from parents, teachers, peer group members.

• Family Members: Parents or siblings influence strongly to form favorable or unfavorable attitudes towards various objects. The child rearing practices, the types of reinforcement received from parents or siblings will help mould certain attitudes such as strong preference towards color, religious faith, choices of food habits etc which would be stable and long lasting over a period of time.
• Reference Group: People tend to form a strong attitude based on the influence of powerful personalities whom they admire a lot. For example, celebrities, charismatic political or religious leaders significantly influence either to strengthen the existing attitudes or form new attitudes. Marketing managers rely on celebrity figures to endorse the products to subtly influence their admirers to buy the products.
• Peer Group influence: Friends or colleagues at work place will have a strong influence on the formation of certain attitudes or belief system due to pressure to conforming to their norms, standards, values etc. People need people. The acceptance or reassurance of group members will strongly reinforce the chosen attitudes and behavior.
• Socialization and Learning process: The way in which people are brought up in family, the do’s and dont’s laid down by the parents, educational and educational institutions, the rules and regulations of work place, the types of rituals, cultures, norms of society etc will strongly influence the formation of attitudes.

Types of Attitudes:

There are three types of job-related attitudes such as job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment.

• Job Satisfaction: The term job satisfaction refers to an individual’s general attitudes towards their job. The likingness or dislikingness differ from individual to individual with respect to job contextual factors or job content factors. Some people give much importance to job contextual factors like salary, security, supervision, supportive colleagues, company policy, working conditions, perquisites, promotions, equitable rewards etc. Whereas others may show much interest in job content factors such as advancement, challenging assignments, career progress, appreciation and recognition, work itself. Research results revealed that the job satisfaction had a tremendous impact on improving productivity, enhancing quality requirements, reduced absenteeism rate and employee turnover. The employees expressed their dissatisfaction through so many ways such as leaving the organization, raising their voice to demand to improve the working conditions, be patient by passively waiting for the conditions to improve and neglecting everything in work. A person with a positive attitude is likely to have more job satisfaction, while a person with negative attitude is likely to have job dissatisfaction towards his or her job. Job satisfaction is one of the major determinants of an employee’s organizational citizenship behavior. Satisfied employee would seem more likely to take positively about the organization, help others and go beyond the normal expectation in their job. Moreover, satisfied employees normally are more prone to go beyond the call of duty because they were to reciprocate their positive experiences. The following are some of the major determinants of job satisfaction – mentally challenging work, equitable rewards, supportive working conditions, supportive fellow employees, personality-job fit, company policies and programs.
• Job Involvement: This refers to the extent to which a person identifies psychologically with her or his job. The person feels that the job is more meaningful and it utilizes one’s talent and skills to the fullest extent. There is a perfect harmony between the types of skills a person possesses and the work content. The individual experiences as if the whole work is being carried out by him having full control over everything related to the work. Due to this perception, performance level will be increasing significantly and enhance the overall self worth. Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do in their job. Job involvement measures the degree to which a person identifies psychologically with her or his job and considers her or his perceived performance level important to her or his self-worth. Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do in their job. There is high level of relationship between job involvement and fewer absences and lower resignation rates of an individual.
• Organizational Commitment: It is refers to the extent to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals, and wishes to maintain membership in the organization. The person shows much of association and loyalty to their organization. Organizational commitment has gained a great deal of interest in recent years because of the changing nature of the workplace. People, who feel a perfect congruence between his values, beliefs, attitudes, and the organizational policies, practices, programs and its overall work culture, are likely to have more commitment than those who have incongruence. In order to elicit a high level of commitment from the employees, a due care must be taken at every stages right from the recruitment to retirement. Administering suitable screening tests such as aptitude tests, personality tests, interest’s tests etc will help significantly placing a right person to do a right type of job. With fewer workers, managers want workers who identify with the organization’s purpose and will work hard to achieve its goals. Organizational commitment can also be enhanced through organizational communication process, team briefing, supportive leadership etc. A good fit between the personality and the job, an internal locus of control, positive realistic expectations, opportunities for career advancement etc are the good predictors of organizational commitment. A well designed formal mentoring program has also been shown to increase organizational commitment. Promotional opportunity, providing employees with more information, supervisor’s support etc are likely to improve organizational commitment.

Attitudes and Consistency

People always seek harmony in their life. They desire to maintain consistency between attitudes and behavior or consistency among their various attitudes. Even in case of divergent opinion or happen to work in a place where the work demands are not aligned with the basic values, people will show interest to change either the nature of assignment or leave the organization or change their basic values in such a way to ensure consistency in their life style. This means that individuals seek to reconcile divergent attitudes and to align their attitudes and behavior so that they appear rational and consistent. Where there is an inconsistency, forces are initiated to return the individual to a state of equilibrium where attitudes and behavior are again consistent. This can be done by altering either the attitudes or the behavior, or by developing a rationalization for the discrepancy.

Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Cognitive dissonance refers to any incompatibility between their behavior and attitudes or incompatibility among a various attitudes. In general, people always prefer a consistency or equilibrium in their life. Festinger argued that any form of incompatibility will lead to a state of discomfort in the minds of people and people will try to attempt to reduce the dissonance and seek a stable state where there is a minimum level of dissonance.

It is very difficult process to avoid dissonance completely. But one can minimize the occurrences of such dissonance by carefully choosing the choices or changing the attitudes suitably. One of the most interesting examples of this cognitive dissonance is as follows: Mr Ramesh, who has been brought up with high moral values and cultivated to do right things and uphold strong human values, has joined a pharmaceutical firm as sales representative promoting and selling drugs meant for expectant mothers. Based on this understanding and knowledge of pharmaceutical field, he noticed that a particular drug is likely to have more side effects and it is harmful to the expectant mother. His boss is forcing him to push the product more aggressively among the doctors and hospitals. Due to this, he is undergoing a high level of cognitive dissonance due to discrepancy between his attitudes (belief that the drug is harmful to the expectant mother) and behavior (promoting and selling the drug). What will he do? Clearly, Ramesh is experiencing a high degree of cognitive dissonance. Because of the importance of the elements in this example, one cannot expect Ramesh to ignore the inconsistency.

There are several paths that he can follow to deal with her dilemma.

i) He can change his behavior (stop promoting and selling drug) and quitting the job.

ii) He can reduce dissonance by concluding that the dissonance behavior is not so important after all (I have to make a living, and in my role as a sales representative, I have to promote the drug and make my organization to maker profit).

iii) He can change her attitude (There is nothing wrong in this drug, and giving rationalization that all drugs have some amount of side effects).

The degree of influence that individuals believe they have over the elements has an impact on how they will react to the dissonance. If they perceive the dissonance to be uncontrollable results, they are less likely to be receptive to attitudes change. Rewards also influence the degree to which individuals are motivated to reduce dissonance. High dissonance, when accompanied by high rewards, tends to reduce the tension inherent in the dissonance. This occurrence is perhaps personified in the expression “Everyone has their price”. The regard acts to reduce dissonance by increasing the consistency side of the individual’s balance sheet.

Self-Perception Theory:

Attitudes are used to make sense out of an action that has already occurred. When asked about an attitude towards some object, individuals recall their behavior relevant to that object and then infer their attitude from the past behavior. So if an employee were asked about his feelings about being travel agent, he might think I have had this same job as travel agent ten years ago, so I must like it. Self-perception theory therefore argues that attitudes are used, after the fact, to make sense of the action that has already occurred rather than as devise that precede and guide action.

Attitudes Surveys:

It is eliciting responses from employees through questionnaires about how they feel about their jobs, work groups, supervisors, and the organization. Typically attitude surveys present the employee with a set of statements or questions. Ideally, the items will be tailor-made to obtain the specific information that management desires. An attitude score is achieved by summing up responses to the individual questionnaire items. These scores can be then being averaged for work groups, department, divisions or the organizations as whole.

Surveys have been used over the last three decades to measure attitudes such as job satisfaction, climate, leadership, teamwork, and commitment. As a result, a number of surveys have reasonable national averages that can be used to compare against organizations results. Using attitude surveys on a regular basis provides managers with valuable feedback on how employees perceive their working conditions. Policies and practices that management views as objectives and fair may be seen as inequitable by employees in general. Such type of things can be gathered by conducting attitudes surveys.