CHAPTER 8

Attitudes, Values and Job Satisfaction

8.1 Attitudes: Concept of Attitudes, Formation of Attitudes, Types of Attitudes,

Measurement of Attitude, Attitude Change
8.2 Values: Concept of Value, Types of Values, Formation of Values, Values and
Behaviour
8.3 Job Satisfaction: Concept of Job Satisfaction, Determinants of Job Satisfaction,
Measuring Job Satisfaction, Effects of Job
8.4 Organizational Commitment: Concept, Dimensions, Factors Influencing, Effects of
Organizational Commitment

8.1.1 Attitudes: Concept of Attitudes

• An attitude is a positive; negative or mixed evaluation of an object that is expressed at some level
of intensity.
• It is an expression of a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of a person, place, thing or event.
• These are fundamental determinants of our perceptions, and actions toward all aspects of our
social environment.
• Attitudes involve a complex organization of evaluative beliefs, feelings, and tendencies toward
certain actions.
How much we like or dislike something determines our behaviour towards that thing.

We tend to approach, seek out or be associated with things we like; we avoid, shun or reject things we
do not like.

Some examples of attitudes are-

• he has a positive attitude about the changes

• she is friendly and has a good attitude

• he was showing some attitude during practice today, so the coach benched him

• I like my friends that means I am expressing my attitudes towards my friends, etc.

Definition of Attitude

1. Gordon Allport, “An attitude is a mental and neural state of readiness, organized through
experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects
and situations with which it is related.”

2. Frank Freeman: “An attitude is a dispositional readiness to respond to certain institutions, persons
or objects in a consistent manner which has been learned and has become one’s typical mode of
response.”

3. Thurstone: “An attitude denotes the sum total of man’s inclinations and feelings, prejudice or
bias, preconceived notions, ideas, fears, threats, and other any specific topic.”

4. Anastasi: “A tendency to react favourably or unfavourably towards a designated class of stimuli,

such as a national or racial group, a custom or an institution.”

5. N.L. Munn: “Attitudes are learned predispositions towards aspects of our environment. They may
be positively or negatively directed towards certain people, service or institution.”

Attitude is the manner, disposition, feeling and position with regard to a person or thing, tendency or
orientation especially in the mind.

8.1.2 Formation of Attitudes

Attitude can be described as a tendency to react positively or negatively to a person or circumstances.

Thus the two main elements of attitude are this tendency or predisposition and the direction of this
predisposition. It has been defined as a mental state of readiness; organize to through experience
which exerts a directive or dynamic influence on the responses.

Attitudes are not inherited. These are acquired or learned by the people from the environment in
which they interact. The formation of attitudes is broadly classified into two sources:
1. Direct Experience, and
2. Social Learning
Direct Experience: One's direct experience with an object or person serves as a powerful source for
his/her attitude formation. In other words, attitudes are formed on the basis of one's past experience in
concerned object or person. Take your own case, for instance. How do you know that you like
organizational behaviour or dislike financial management. The answer to it is that you have formed
these attitudes from your experience in studying the two subjects. Research has shown that attitudes
derived from the direct experience are more powerful, stronger, and durable and are difficult to
change than are attitudes that are formed through indirect experience. This is because of their
availability in our cognitive processes.

Social Learning: The process of deriving attitudes from family, peer groups, religious organisations
and culture is called social learning. In social learning, an individual acquires attitudes from his/her
environment in an indirect manner. Social learning starts from early age when children derive certain
attitudes from their parents. This is often evident from when young children express their political
preferences similar to those held by their parents. Attitudes are derived from peer groups also. For
example, if Ravi Saxena has been attending his duty late for some days but co-workers have always
been on time, Ravi Saxena is likely to attend his duty on time. Individuals acquire much of their
attitudes by merely observing their models whom they admire and respect. The observer overhears
their models expressing their opinion or watches them displaying a behaviour that reflects their
attitude.
Then, the same attitude is imbibed and displayed by the observer. So to say, individuals shape their
attitudes to align with their models.
Learning attitudes from observation involves the following four processes:
• Attention: Attention must be focused on model.
• Retention: What was observed from the model must be retained.
• Reproduction: Behaviour must be practiced again and again.
• Motivation: The learner must be motivated to learn from the model.

8.1.3 Types of Attitudes

Though an individual can have numerous attitudes, but organisational behaviour focuses on
job related attitudes only. As such, job-related attitudes are of three types:

i) Job satisfaction
ii) Job involvement and
iii) Organisational commitment

i) Job Satisfaction:
• refers to an individual's pleasurable or positive emotional state toward his or her job.
• related with the five specific dimensions of the job:
a) pay,
b) the work itself,
c) promotion, opportunities,
d) supervision, and
 e) co-workers
When people speak of employee attitude, more often than not, they mean job satisfaction. In
fact, the two terms attitude and job satisfaction are frequently used interchangeably.

ii) Job Involvement:

• the degree to which employees immerse themselves in their jobs,
• invest time and energy in them, and
• consider work as a central part of their overall lives.
• employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify with their jobs and take
utmost care about the kind of job they do.
• such employees seldom will be tardy and absent.
• will attempt to be high performer.

iii) Organisational Commitment:

• an attitude about employee's loyalty to their organisation
• a process through which employees identify with the organisation and want to maintain
membership in the organisation
• is a measure of the employees' willingness to remain with a firm in the future also
• usually stronger among longer-term employees, and those who have relished personal
success in the organisation
• while job involvement means identifying with one's job

8.1.4 Measurement of Attitude

8.1.5 Attitude Change

Attitudes of employees are not always rigid, these can be changed. Sometimes, it is in the
best interests of the organization to try to do so. For example, if the employees have got a
negative attitude towards their job or towards the management and organization, he is
dissatisfied, he feels that he is not taken care of by the management; management would like
to change this attitude, because happy work force is the major strength of the organisation.
But sometimes, attitudes change is very difficult to accomplish because of certain barriers.
Therefore, the job of the management is to identify these barriers and then examine the ways
of overcoming them and effectively changing the attitudes.
The changes in attitude can be classified into the following two types:
1. Congruent Change:
Congruent change in attitude means that the change is a movement in the same direction but
the intensity of feeling is reduced. For example, if a person dislikes his boss very much, this
negative attitude may persist, but the degree of dislike will be reduced.

2. Incongruent Change:
Incongruent change involves change of direction itself from negative to positive or vice versa
towards the person. For example, if in the above example, that person starts liking his boss;
this is a change from negative to positive attitude.

A. Barriers to Changing Attitudes:

There are a number of barriers which prevent people from changing their attitudes:

1. Prior Commitments:
One barrier to change of attitude is prior commitments. This occurs when people feel a
Commitment to a particular course of action and are unwilling to change. Theory and
research have also supported escalation of commitment which means, tendency of the
decision makers to persist with failing course of action.

For example, if the president of a company is an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad and he himself
appoints a marketing manager who is also from the same institute. Unfortunately, the things
are not working out well and the marketing manager is not very good. However, as the
president has himself hired this man, he is unwilling to admit the mistake. Using the ego-
defensive function of attitudes, the president distorts all negative information received about
the marketing manager and continues to believe that everything is going well and the right
selection decision was made.

2. Strong Commitment:
If an employee is strongly committed, it becomes difficult to change his or her attitude. In
other words we can say that the stronger the belief about the attitude, the harder it is to
change it.

3. Publicly Expressed Attitudes:

Attitudes that have been expressed publicly are more difficult to change. This is because of
the fact, that it requires a lot of effort for one to admit his or her mistake.

4. Low Credibility:
The term credibility implies trust, expertise and objectivity. Employees are least interested in
responding to change the efforts made by someone who is not liked, has low rate of
credibility and is not convincing. If people hate you, they are least interested in adopting your
message.

5. Insufficient Information:
Sometimes people do not see any reason as to why they should change their attitudes. The
boss may not like the negative attitude of the subordinate, but the subordinate may be quite
pleased with his own behaviour. Till the boss shows him that his negative attitude will hinder
his career progress and his salary increase, he will continue to have the negative feelings.
This is particularly true when the attitude is a result of poor treatment by the management.
The worker will use the negative attitude to serve an adjustment function "I can't respect a
manager who treats us the way he does."

6. Degree of Fear:
If there is a low level of fear, people often ignore it as the warnings are not strong enough to
warrant attention. Similarly, if a very high degree of fear is used, people again reject the
message and refuse to be persuaded as the warnings are too threatening and thus not
believable. In both these situations it is difficult to change the attitude of employees.