Attitudes

Attitudes are evaluative statements that are either favorable or unfavorable concerning
objects, people, or events.
They reflect how you feel about something.

Main Components of Attitudes:

a. Cognitive component: The employee thought he deserved a fair treatment

(cognitive)
b. Affective component: The employee strongly hates his supervisor (affective)
c. Behavioral component: Looks out for another job

What makes up your attitude?

• Relatively enduring (Why it is relative?)
• favourable/unfavourable evaluations about socially/personally significant objects,
events and people.
• Helps you to access related information and make quick decisions

Socio Emotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, Isaaowitz & Charles, 1999): When the time
is limited people generally prefer chasing social goals related to emotional satisfaction over
the goals related to knowledge acquisition and information seeking.

Cognitive dissonance(Festinger):

Any incompatibility an individual might perceive between two or more attitudes or between
behavior and attitudes. Research has generally concluded that people seek consistency among
their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior. They alter the attitudes or the
behavior, or they develop a rationalization for the discrepancy.

Also, this link between attitude and behaviour is moderated (strengthened/weakened) by

certain factors.

Moderating Variables
d. Importance: Important attitudes reflect our fundamental values, self-interest,
or identification with individuals or groups we value.
e. Accessibility: Attitudes that our memories can easily access are more likely to
predict our behavior.
f. Specificity: Specific attitudes tend to predict specific behaviors, whereas
general attitudes tend to best predict general behaviors.
g. Social pressure: Dissonance increases due to the social pressure
h. Personal experience: The attitude–behavior relationship is likely to be much
stronger if an attitude refers to something with which we have direct personal
experience.
Job Attitudes: Job satisfaction, involvement, psychological empowerment, organisational
commitment (normative, continuous and affective), perceived organizational support, and
employee engagement (Refer book/running notes)
2. Are These Job Attitudes Really All That Distinct?
a. Attitudes are highly related.
i. If you as a manager know someone’s level of job satisfaction, you know
most of what you need to know about how that person sees the
organization.
Job satisfaction:
Determinants:
1. Job Conditions: Interesting jobs that provide training, variety, independence, and
control satisfy most employees.
2. Job conditions—intrinsic nature of the work itself, social interactions, and
supervision—are important predictors of satisfaction and employee well-being.
3. Personality: Research shows that people who have positive core self-
evaluations (CSEs) —who believe in their inner worth and basic competence—
are more satisfied with their jobs than those with negative core self-evaluations.
4. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR): An organization’s commitment to
corporate social responsibility (CSR)—its self-regulated actions to benefit
society or the environment beyond what is required by law—increasingly affects
employee job satisfaction.

Outcomes of Job Satisfaction:

Job Performance : Happy workers are more likely to be productive workers.

Organizational Citizenship Behavior (OCB): Satisfied employees would seem more likely to
talk positively about the organization, help others, and go beyond the normal expectations in
their job, perhaps because they want to reciprocate their positive experiences.
Customer Satisfaction: Evidence indicates that satisfied employees increase customer
satisfaction and loyalty.
Life Satisfaction: Research in Europe indicated that job satisfaction is positively correlated
with life satisfaction, and your attitudes and experiences in life spill over in to your job
approaches and experiences.

The Impact of Job Dissatisfaction:

Counterproductive Work Behavior (CWB): Termed deviant behavior in the workplace, or
simply employee withdrawal. Ranging from Substance abuse, stealing at work, undue
socializing, gossiping, absenteeism, and tardiness.
Absenteeism: We find a consistent negative relationship between satisfaction and
absenteeism. The more satisfied you are, the less likely you are to miss work.
Turnover: Satisfaction is also negatively related to turnover, but the correlation is stronger
than what we found for absenteeism.

Discussions in the classroom: A quick tit-bit (Refer running notes/your attentive friends)

 Attitude and stereotypes with Hitler and Truman.

 Parable of the good Samaritan experiment.
 Other examples that include the assumptions of socio emotional selectivity
theory based on Dr. Abdul Kalaam.