Attitude

Attitude

• Attitudes are evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people or events. They reflect how we feel about something. When I say “I like my job”, I am expressing my attitude about work.

• Attitudes are complex. If you ask people about their attitude toward religion or the organization they work for, you may get a simple response, but the reasons underlying it are probably complicated. In order to fully understand attitudes, we must consider their fundamental properties or components.

Main components of Attitude

• There are three components of attitude:
• Cognitive component
• Affective component
• Behavioral component

Cognitive = evaluation

• My supervisor gave a promotion to a coworker who deserve it less than me. My supervisor is unfair.

Affective = feeling

• I dislike my supervisor

Behavioral = action

• I am looking for other work; I’ve complained about my supervisor to anyone who would listen.

Does behavior always follow from attitudes?

• Early research on attitudes assumed they were casually related to behavior – that is the attitudes people hold determine what they do. Common sense, too, suggest a relationship.
• One researcher argues that attitudes follow behavior.

• Example: A person who was constantly saying against USA’s foreign policies is filling the form of DV.
• This is cognitive dissonance, any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes.

• People seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior. They either alter the attitudes or the behavior, or they develop rationalization for the discrepancy.

Moderating variables

• The most powerful moderators of the attitudes relationship are:
• Importance of the attitude and its correspondence to behavior
• Its accessibility
• The presence of social pressure
• Whether a person has direct experience with the attitude

�Importance of the attitude and its correspondence to behavior�

• Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self interest, or identification with individuals or groups we value. Specific attitudes tend to predict specific behavior whereas general attitudes tend to predict general behavior.

�Its accessibility�

• Attitudes that our memories can easily access are more likely to predict our behavior. Interestingly, the frequently expressed attitudes are more likely to be remembered. The more you talk about your attitude on a subject, the more you’ll remember it, the more likely to shape your behavior.

�The presence of social pressure�

• Discrepancies between attitudes and behavior tend to occur when social pressure to behave in certain ways hold exception power, as in most organizations.
• This may explain why the tobacco executives who are not smokers themselves and who believes the research linking smoking and cancer, don’t actively discourage others from smoking.

�Whether a person has direct experience with the attitude�

• The attitude-behavior relationship is likely to be much stronger if an attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal experience. Asking college students about authoritarian supervisor is far less likely to predict actual behavior than asking the same question to someone who has actually worked for such supervisor.

What are the major job attitudes?

• We each have thousand of attitudes, but OB focuses our attention to a few job related attitudes.
• Job satisfaction
• Job involvement
• Organizational commitment
• Perceived organizational support (POS)
• Employee engagement

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• Job satisfaction is how content an individual is with his or her job, in other words whether or not they like the job or individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision.
• A person with high level of job satisfaction holds positive feeling about the job while a person with low job satisfaction holds negative feeling.

Job involvement

• Job involvement measures the degree to which people identify psychologically with their job and consider their perceived performance level important to self-worth. Persons with high level of involvement strongly identify with and really care about the job they do.

Organizational commitment

• In organizational commitment, an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and wishes to remain a member.
• There are three types of organizational commitment:
• Affective commitment
• Continuance commitment
• Normative commitment

• Affective commitment: an emotional attachment to an organization and the belief in its values.
• Continuance commitment: the perceived economic value of staying with an organization compared with leaving it.
• Normative commitment: an obligation to remain with an organization for moral or ethical reasons.

Perceived organizational support (POS)

• The degree to which employees believes an organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being.

Employee engagement

• An individual’s involvement with, satisfaction with, and enthusiasm for the work he or she does.

Causes of job satisfaction

• Pay
• Promotion
• Coworkers
• Supervision
• Work itself
• overall

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• Exit refers to leaving the organization, transferring to another work unit, or at least trying to exit the dissatisfying situation. Exit usually follows specific “shock events,” such as when your boss treats you unfairly. These shock events generate strong emotions that energize employees to think about and search for an alternative employment.

• Voice refers to any attempt to change, rather than escape from, the dissatisfying situation. Voice can be constructive response, such as recommending ways for management to improve the situation, or it can be more confrontational, such as by filing formal grievances. In the extreme, some employees might engage in counterproductive behaviours to get attention and force changes in the organization.

• Loyalty has been described in different ways, but the most widely held view is that “loyalists” are employees who respond to dissatisfaction by patiently waiting – some say they “suffer in silence” – for the problem to work itself out or get resolved by others.

• Neglect includes reducing work efforts, paying less attention to quality, and increasing absenteeism and lateness. It is generally considered a passive activity that has negative consequences for the organization.

Job satisfaction and job performance

• Employee job performance is one of the crucial elements for every organization. And job satisfaction has a direct relationship with job performance. Some researches showed that the better performers have higher level of job performance, too. Obviously the employees with high level of job satisfaction has a positive attitude towards their jobs which lead to high performance in the workplace.

Job satisfaction and OCB (organizational citizenship behavior)

• OCB includes three critical aspects that are central to this construct. First, OCBs are thought of as discretionary behaviors, which are not part of the job description, and are performed by the employee as a result of personal choice. Second, OCBs go above and beyond that which is an enforceable requirement of the job description. Finally, OCBs contribute positively to overall organizational effectiveness. Higher the job satisfaction is higher the level of OCB will be.

Job satisfaction and customer satisfaction

• The link between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is almost twice as strong when you have high employee satisfaction compared to when they are not satisfied with their jobs. This double-positive finding stands in contrast to the idea that a firm can neglect to satisfy their employees as long as they pursue customer satisfaction.”

Job satisfaction and absenteeism

• Absenteeism - employees not showing up for work when scheduled - can be a major problem for organizations. As pressures increase on the budgets and competitiveness of companies, more attention is being given to reduce workplace absenteeism and its cost. Most research has concluded that absence is a complex variable and that it is influenced by multiple causes, both personal and organizational. Job satisfaction has been noted as one of the factors influencing an employee’s motivation to attend.

Job satisfaction and turnover

• Organizational culture influences employee’s job satisfaction and high job satisfaction has been associated with better job performance. High performing cultures have also been shown to produce excellent results, attract, motivate, and retain talented employees, and adapt readily to change. Job satisfaction is inversely related to turnover intention and low turnover has been shown to increase organizational productivity and performance.

Job satisfaction and workplace deviance

• Job satisfaction and antagonistic relationship with coworkers predict a variety of behaviors organizations find undesirable, including unionization attempts, substance abuse, stealing at work, undue socializing and tardiness.