Attitudes, Perceptions & Emotions

Attitude is a psychological construct, a mental and emotional entity that inheres

in or characterizes a person, or their attitude is their approach to something, or
their personal view on it. Attitude involves their mindset, outlook, and feelings.
Attitude structure can be described in terms of 3 components
• Affective component
- This involves a person’s feeling or emotion about the attitude object. For
example: “ I am scared of spiders”.
• Behavioral (or conative) component
- The way the attitude we have influences on how we act or believe. For
example: “ I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one”.
• Cognitive Component
- this involves a person’s belief or knowledge about an attitude object. For
example: “ I believe spiders are dangerous.”
3 types of attitude in term of organizational behavior
1) job satisfaction
- A collection of positive and or negative feelings that an individual holds
toward his or her job.
2) Job involvement
- Refers to the degree to which a person identifies himself (psychologically with
his job, actively participates and considers his perceived performance level
important to self-worth.
3) Organizational commitment
- Refers to a degree to which an employee identifies himself with the
organizational goals and wishes to maintain membership in the organization.
Perceptions
• Is the state of being or a process of becoming aware of something through
our senses. it is an organization, identification and interpretation of sensory
information used to represent and understand our surrounding
environment.
FEATURES OF PERCEPTION
✓ PERCEPTION IS AN INTELLECTUAL PROCESS.
✓ PERCEPTION IS AN PSYCHOLOGICAL PEOCESS
✓ PERCEPTION IS BEING AN INTELLECTUAL PSYCHOLOGICAL PROCESS.
Factors influencing perceptual process
Perceiver
➢ Person values
➢ Attitudes
➢ Past experiences
➢ Needs
➢ personality
Setting
➢ Physical context
➢ Social context
➢ Organization context
Perceived
➢ Target’s contrast
➢ Intensity
➢ Figure-ground
➢ Separation
 ➢ Size
➢ Motion
➢ Repetition
➢ novelty
Importance of perception
• an understanding of perception is important to understand and control the
human behavior.
• Managers should be able to distinguish between a perceived world and the
reality.
• Perception affects the outcome of our behavior because we act on the
basis of what we see.
• Perception plays a very important role in shaping the personality of an
individual.
Emotions
❖ They are intense feelings that are directed to someone or something
❖ Emotion are private experiences.
❖ We in infer observable behavior associated with emotion.
Four components of emotion
1. Feeling Component
• Emotions are subjective feelings.
• Anger or joy.
• Meaning and personal significance.
• Vary in intensity and quality.
• Rooted in mental process(labeling).
2.Bodily arousal
▪ Biological activation.
 ▪ Autonomic and hormonal systems.
▪ Prepare and activate adaptive coping behavior during emotion.
▪ Body prepared for action.
▪ Alert posture, clenched fists.
3. Purposive component
▪ Give emotion its goal-directed force.
▪ Motivational to take action.
▪ Cope with emotion-causing circumstances.
▪ Why people benefit from emotions.
▪ Social and evolutionary advantage.
4.Social-expressive component
▪ Emotion’s communicative aspect.
▪ Posture, gesture, vocalizations, facial expressions make emotions public.
▪ Verbal and nonverbal communication.
▪ Help us interpret the situation.
▪ How person reacts to event.
Categories of emotions
❑ Primary Emotions
A primary human emotion type are one triggered in response to an
event.
❑ Secondary Emotions
An emotion fueled by other emotions.
Variety of emotions
❑ Positive Emotions
Positive emotions that lead one to feel good about oneself will lead to an
emotionally happy and satisfied result.
❑ Negative Emotions
Negative Emotions sap your energy and undermine your effectiveness. In
the negative emotional state, you find the lack to desire to do anything.
Four branches
1. Perceiving Emotions
The first step in understanding emotions is to accurately perceive them.
2. Reasoning with emotions
The next step involves using emotions to promote thinking and cognitive
activity. Emotions prioritize what we pay attention and react to: we respond
emotionally to things that garner our attention.
3. Understanding Emotions
The emotions that we perceive can carry a wide variety of meanings.
4. Managing Emotions
The ability to manage emotions effectively is a key part of emotional
intelligence.