Attitudes & Values

Attitudes
• a strong belief or feeling toward people, things, and situations;
• expresses our values, beliefs, and feelings toward something, and
inclines us to act or react in a certain way toward it.
 
Liz Fetter, President and CEO of Northpoint Communications recites
inspirational quotes to herself to keep her attitude on track when things
are getting rough, “If you know how to swim, it doesn’t matter how
deep the water is”.
 
Attitudes are definitely important. Employers place great emphasis on
attitude.
“We have found that our success depends more upon employee
attitudes than any other single factor”
– J.S. Marriott, Jr., President of Marriott Corporation
 Attitudes
Definition Nature
“a learned predisposition to respond in a
consistently favourable manner with respect to 1. Attitudes affect behavior
a given object.”- Newcomb 
2. Attitudes are not exactly visible.
1. Attitudes are learned through experience.
2. They predispose people to behave in certain 3. Attitudes are acquired
specific ways
4. Attitudes are pervasive
3. Attitude and behavior conform to a
principle of consistency.
4. The favourable and unfavourable manner of
behaving indicates the assessment
component of attitude.
 Sources
Where Do Attitudes Come From?
Attitudes are composed of three components: 
1. Beliefs. – your judgments about the object of
the attitude that result from your values, past
experiences, and reasoning.
2. Feelings. – reflect your evaluations and overall
liking of the object of the attitude, and can be
positive or negative.
3. Behavioral intensions. – reflect your
motivation to do something with respect to the
object of the attitude. You might intend to either
avoid or volunteer for a project requiring hard
work.
 Figure 1.1 The Attitude-Behavior Process

Beliefs Feelings Attitudes Intentions Behavior

Our beliefs tend to drive our feelings; our beliefs and feelings in turn influence
our attitudes, which then affect our behavior through intentions.

Our behavioral intentions stem from our feelings, but they also are influenced by
our personalities, values, past experiences, and expectations about the outcomes of
the different behaviors we could choose. People with the same feelings about
something may develop different behavioral intentions.
 
 Functions Formation
Function of attitude often help employees
to adapt with their work environment.
  1. Early Socialization
1. Adaptive Function - this helps people
to adjust to their environment 2. Group Affiliation
2. Ego-defensive Function- This helps
3. Personal Experience
people protect their self-image, Attitudes
explain to others the type or sort of person
an individual believes himself to be.

3. Knowledge Function- It enables people

to assess new information and to make
judgements in new settings
 What Attitudes Are the Most
Important for Organizations?
 Determinants of Job Satisfaction:
1. Job Satisfaction. - reflects our attitudes and
feelings about our job.
• The Work Itself.
The • Pay and Benefits.
Work
Itself • Growth and Upward Mobility.

Personalit Job
• Supervision.
Attitudes
y Satisfaction • Coworkers.
• Job Security.
Values
• Attitude toward Work. ­

Figure 1.2
2. Organizational Commitment. – reflects the degree to which an employee identifies with the
organization and its goals and wants to stay with the organization. There are three ways we can
feel committed to an employer:
 
• Affective commitment – positive emotion to the organization and strong identification with
its values and goals. Affective commitment leads employees to stay with an organization
because they want to, and is related to higher performance.

• Normative commitment – feeling obliged to stay with an organization for moral and ethical
reasons. Normative commitment is related to higher performance and leads employees to stay
with an organization because they feel they should.

• Continuance commitment – stating with an organization because it perceived high economic

(taking another job would mean losing valuable stock options) and/or socials costs
(friendships with coworkers) involved with leaving. Continuance commitment leads
employees to stay with an organization because they feel that they have to.
 
3. Employee Engagement . – a “heightened” emotional and intellectual connection that an
employee has for his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers, that in turn, influences
him/her to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.
 
Engagement is enhanced when employees:

• Have clear goals and roles

• Have the resources needed to do a good job
• Get meaningful feedback on their performance
• Are able to use their talents
• Are recognized for doing a good job
• Have positive relationships with coworkers
• Have opportunities to learn and grow
• Have supportive leadership
Table 1. Top Five Drivers of Employee Attraction, Retention, and Engagement

Top Five Drivers of Top Five Drivers of Top Five Drivers of

Attraction Retention Engagement
Competitive base pay Excellent career Senior management is
advancement opportunities sincerely interested in
employee well-being
Competitive health care Satisfaction with the firm’s Organization’s reputation in the
benefits business decisions community
Vacation/ paid time off Good relationship with Improved skills and
supervisor capabilities over the past year
Convenient work Organization’s reputation Appropriate amount of
location as a great decision-making authority to
do a good job
Flexible schedule Ability to balance work Organization quickly resolves
and personal life customer concerns
Cognitive Dissonance – an incompatibility between behavior and
an attitude or between two different attitudes.

Example: Assume that you strongly believe that all companies need to be
environmentally responsible, and that you are the new CEO of a company
that is terrible polluter. You learn that reducing your company’s carbon
emissions would be so expensive that the company would no longer be
profitable. What would you do? The gap between your environmentally
responsible attitude and your attitude that your responsibility is to run a
profitable company creates what is called cognitive dissonance.
Several options exist for dealing with cognitive dissonance:
 
1. You can change your behavior and reduce the company’s carbon
emissions.
2. You can reduce the felt dissonance by reasoning that the pollution is
not so important when compared to the goal of running a profitable
company.
3. You can change your attitude toward pollution to decrease your belief
that pollution is bad.
4. You can seek additional information to better reason that the benefits
to society of manufacturing the products outweigh the social costs of
polluting.
Your choice of whether or not to try to reduce feelings of cognitive
dissonance is affected by:

Your perception of the importance of the elements that are creating the
dissonance

The amount of influence you feel you have over these elements

The rewards involved in the dissonance

 Management Attitudes and How They Affect Performance
 
Douglas McGregor classified attitudes, which he called assumptions, as Theory X
and Theory Y.

Managers with Theory X attitudes hold that employees dislike work and must be
closely supervised to get them to do their work. Theory Y attitudes hold that
employees like to work and do not need to be closely supervised to get them to do
their work. Managers with dominant personalities often do not trust employees;
thus, they have Theory X attitudes.
 
Over the years research has shown that managers with Theory Y attitudes tend to
have employees with higher levels of job satisfaction than the employees of Theory
X managers. However, managers with Theory Y assumptions do not always have
higher levels of productivity in their departments.
 How Management’s Attitudes Affect Employees’ Performance
 

Managers’ attitudes and the way they treat employees affect employees’ job
behavior and performance. It is called the Pygmalion effect.

Pygmalion effect states that supervisors’ attitudes and

expectations of employees and how they treat them largely
determine their performance.

 
 
Changing Your Attitudes

The environment around us influences our attitudes. Usually we

cannot control our environment, but we can control and change our
attitudes. Think “I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust
my sails to always reach my destination”. You can choose to be and learn
to be optimistic or pessimistic. You can choose to look for the positive
and be happier and get more out of life.
The following hints can help you change your attitudes:

• Remember that what you think about affects how you feel, and how
you feel affects your behavior, human relations, and performance.

“You choose to be happy or sad (or optimistic and pessimistic); happiness

comes from having a poor memory for the bad things that happen to us. So if
you think about the good things, you will feel happy and have more effective
behavior, human relations, and performance”.
– Lou Holtz, Football Commentator
• Be aware of your attitudes. People who are optimistic have higher
levels of job satisfaction. Consciously try to have and maintain a
positive attitude.

• Realize that there are few, if any, benefits of harboring negative

attitudes. Negative attitudes, such as holding a grudge, can only hurt
your human relations, and hurt yourself in the end.

• Keep an open mind. Don’t have a negative attitude toward people

because they look or act differently than you do.
 
Measurement
 
1. Paired-comparison Scale - respondent make a series of paired judgements
picking two products at a time on the basis of his preference, regarding to
extent of a certain attribute present in the product.

2. Summated Scales - utilizes item analysis approach wherein, a particular

items is evaluated on the basis of how well it discriminates between those
persons whose total score is high and those whose score is low. (strongly
Agree, Agree, Undecided, Disagree, Strongly Disagree)

3. Scalogram Analysis: Guttman Scale - attitude items can be arranged in

such an order that a respondent who easily answers to a particular items
will also respond positively to all other items having a lower rank.
 Values
• ways of behaving or end-states that are desirable to a person
or to a group
• things that have worth for or are important to the individual
 Values can be conscious or unconscious. Although our values tend to be fairly
well established by the time we are teenagers, our values can be reshaped by major
life events including the birth of a child, going to war, the death of a loved one,
illness, or even business failure.
 
A company leader’s personal values affect the firm’s business strategy and all
aspects of organizational behavior including staffing, reward systems, manager-
subordinate relationships, communication, conflict management styles, and
negotiation approaches.
 
Personal values also influence ethical choices. When there are no clear rules
for dealing with specific ethical problems, we tend to respond to each situation on
an individual basis depending on our values at that time. Our personal values
combine with organizational influences like company culture to generate decisions
that can be significantly different from those made based solely on our personal
values.
 
 Value System
- set of standards by which the individual lives. Values concern what
“should be”; they influence the choices we make among alternative
behaviors. Values direct the form that motivated behavior will take. For
example, if you have three job offers, you will select the one that is of the
highest value to you.

 
Values shape your attitudes. When something is of value to you, you tend
to have positive attitudes toward it.
Types of Values
1. Terminal and Instrumental Values. – reflect our long-term life goals, and include
prosperity, happiness, a secure family, and a sense of accomplishment. For example,
people who value family more than career success will work fewer hours to spend
more time with their kids than people whose values put career success first. Of course,
this does not mean that having strong family values will prevent one from having a
successful career.

2. Instrumental Values. – our preferred means of achieving our terminal values or our
preferred ways of behaving. Terminal values influence what we want to accomplish;
instrumental values influence how we get there . Honesty, ambition, and independence
are examples of instrumental values that guide our behavior in pursuit of our terminal
goals. The stronger an instrumental value is, the more we act on it.
Six primary values tend to influence manager’s behaviors and choices and
thus are important to understanding managerial behavior:

• Collectivism: concern for a family or social group as opposed to oneself

• Rationality: valuing fact-based and emotion-free decisions and actions
• Novelty: valuing change
• Duty: valuing obligation, loyalty, and the integrity of reciprocal relationships
• Materialism: valuing wealth and tangible possessions
• Power: valuing control of situations and other people
 
Intrinsic work values. – relate to the work itself.
 
For example, some employees want challenging jobs with a lot of variety that
require them to continually learn new things, whereas others prefer simpler jobs they
can perform in the same way every day. Most people need to find some personal
intrinsic value on their work to feel truly satisfied with it.
 
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you
love what you are doing, you will be successful.”
– Albert Schweitzer, Philosopher
 
Extrinsic work values. – related to the outcomes of doing work.
Employees who work to earn money or to have health benefits are satisfying
extrinsic work values. Having high status in the company, getting recognized for
quality work, and having job security are extrinsic work values.
 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Work Values
 
Intrinsic Work Values Extrinsic Work Values

Challenging work Financial gain

Adventurous work Benefits
Having autonomy Social contact
Having a lot of responsibility Time with family
Being creative Time for volunteering
Helping others Time for hobbies
Working with others Job security
Competition Public recognition
Becoming an expert Free time
When Values Conflict

1.  Intrapersonal Value Conflict. – when highly ranked instrumental and

terminal values conflict and both cannot be met, we experience inner
conflict and stress.

2. Interpersonal Value Conflict. – when two different people hold

conflicting values. Interpersonal value conflicts are often the cause of
personality clashes and other disagreements.

 3. Individual-Organization Values Conflict. – when an employee’s

values can conflict with the values of the organization. Lower individual-
organization value conflict leads to greater job satisfaction, higher
performance, lower stress, and greater job commitment.
Consider this conversation:
Maria: “I can’t believe you quit your job. The pay was the
best around”.
Steve: “My old job certainly paid better, but I didn’t like the
way they treated customers. My new job may not pay as well,
but the management is much more ethical, and I am enjoying
myself a lot more”.
 
Maria’s materialistic values clearly differ from Steve’s ethical focus. As a
manager, it is important to remember that people’s constellations of
instrumental and terminal values differ. These differences can lead to
differences in work styles, work preferences, and reactions to
announcements or events.
3. Individual-Organization Values Conflict. – when an employee’s
values can conflict with the values of the organization. Lower individual-
organization value conflict leads to greater job satisfaction, higher
performance, lower stress, and greater job commitment.

 
Exercise
To better understand your own attitudes toward human nature, score your
answers.

For items 1, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10, give yourself 1 point for each usually (U)
answer; 2 points for each frequently (F) answer; 3 points for each
occasionally (O) answer; and 4 points for each seldom (S) answer.

For items 2, 3, 4, and 8, give yourself 1 point for each seldom (S) answer; 2
points for each occasionally (O) answer; 3 points for each frequently (F)
answer; and 4 points for each usually (U) answer.

Total all points.

Your score should be between 10 and 40. Theory X and Theory Y are
on opposite ends of a continuum. Most people’s attitudes fall
somewhere between the two extremes.
 
The lower you score, the stronger the Theory X attitude; the higher
your score, the stronger the Theory Y attitude. A score of 10 to 19
could be considered a Theory X attitude. A score of 31 to 40 could
be considered a Theory Y attitude. A score of 20-30 could be
considered balanced between the two theories. Your score may not
accurately measure how you would behave in an actual job;
however, it should help you understand your own attitudes toward
people at work.
_____ Total: Add up the 10 numbers.
 
Interpreting you score. You can think of your job attitude as being on a continuum from
positive to negative.

Generally, the higher your score, the more positive your job attitude is. You may want to
have your boss and trusted coworkers answer the first nine questions, as suggested in
question 10, to determine if their perception of your job attitudes is the same as your
perception.
 “Our attitudes control our lives. Attitudes are a secret
power working twenty-four hours a day, for good or bad. It
is a paramount importance that we know how to harness
and control this great force”
– Irving Berlin, Songwriter
REFERENCES:
 
Lussier, R.N. (2017), Human Relations in Organizations: Applications
and Skill Building 10th Edition. New York. McGraw-Hill Education

Robbins, S.P. & Judge, T.A. (2015), Organizational Behavior 17th Edition.
Pearson.

Chitale, A.K., Mohanty, R.P., & Dubey, N.R. (2013). Organizational

behaviour. New Delhi, PHI learning Private Limited.
 
MUCHISIMAS GRACIAS!
