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 = My supervisor gave a promotion to a coworker
●

who deserve it less than me. My supervisor is

evaluation unfair.

Affective = ●
I dislike my supervisor
feeling
Behavioral I am looking for other work; I’ve complained
●

about my supervisor to anyone who would

= action 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 percieve
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
• 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 tree 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
ACTIVE EXIT VOICE

PASSIVE NEGLECT LOYAL

DESTRUCTIVE CONSTRUCTIVE
• 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 work place.
 Job satisfaction and OCB (organization
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.