PDF on Attitude - OB

1. Dr. Rajasshrie Pillai

2.  Individual Process And Behavior:
 Attitude: Importance of attitude in an organization,
Right Attitude,
 Components of attitude, Relationship between
behavior and attitude,
 Developing Emotional intelligence at the workplace,
Job attitude, Barriers to
 changing attitudes

3. ATTITUDES

4.  Attitudes represent beliefs, feelings and
action tendencies towards objects, ideas or
people

5.  “An Attitude is mental state of readiness, learned and
organized through experience, exerting a specific
influence on person’s response to people, object and
situations with which it is related”

6. Experience with the
object
Classical
Conditioning
Operant
Conditioning
Vicarious Learning
Family and Peer
Groups
Neighborhood
Mass
Communication
Economic Status Attitude
Formation
of Attitude

7. Attitudes

8. Three Components of Attitude
 Attitude
 Affective Component
 The feeling, sentiments, moods and emotions about some
idea, person, event or object
 Cognitive Component
 The belief, opinion, knowledge or information held by the
individual
 Behavioral Component
 The predispositions to get on a favorable or unfavorable
evaluation of something

9. FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDE
 Attitude serves four important functions:
 The adjustment (Adaptive) function
 Some attitudes serve to enable people to attain particular,
desired goals or avoid undesirable circumstance
 The knowledge function
 Some attitudes are useful because they help to make the
world more understandable. They help people ascribe
causes to events and direct attention towards features of
people or situations that are likely to be useful in making
sense of them.

10. The ego-defensive function
 Some attitudes serve to protect the person that holds
them from psychologically damaging events or
information by allowing them to be recast in less
damaging or threatening ways.
The value expressive function
 Some attitudes are important to a person because they
express values that are integral to that person’s self
concept (i.e. their ideas about who they are). The attitude
is, consequently, ‘part of who they are’ and the expression
of that attitude communicates important things about
that person to others.

11. Job-Related Attitudes
 Job involvement ( Employee Engagement Kahn)
 Extent that a person identifies with his job.
 Organizational commitment
 Extent that a person identifies with the organization.
This is a great predictor for turnover.
 Job satisfaction (Edwin A. Locke’s)
 A pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from
the appraisa1 of one's job or job experiences“.

12. Types of Attitudes

13. Responses to Job Dissatisfaction

14. CHANGING ATTITUDES
Barriers to changing attitudes
 There are two basic barriers that can prevent people from
changing their attitude. One is called prior commitment,
which occurs when people feel a commitment to a
particular course of action and are unwilling to change.
 A second barrier is the result of insufficient information.
Sometimes people do not see any reasons to change
their attitude.

15. OVERCOMING BARRIERS
 Providing information.
 Use of fear
 Resolving discrepancies
 Influence of friends or peers
 The co-opting approach

16. Changing Attitudes of Employees
 Give feedback
 Provide positive conditions
 Positive Role model
 Providing new information
 Use of fear
 Influence of friends or press
 The co-opting approach
 Group Membership
 Rewards
 Others

17. Changing Attitudes of Self
 Be aware of one’s attitudes
 Think for self
 Realize that there are few, if any, benefits from
harboring negative attitudes
 Keep an open mind.
 Get into continuous education program
 Build a positive self-esteem
 Stay away from negative influences

18. 3–23
Self-Perception Theory
Attitudes are used after the fact to make sense out of
an action that has already occurred.

19.  Self-Fulfilling Prophecy:
 Process by which ones expectations about another
person eventually lead the other person to behave in
ways that confirm these expectations

20. © 2003 Prentice Hall Inc. All
rights reserved. 3–25
The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance
Desire to reduce dissonance
• Importance of elements creating dissonance
• Degree of individual influence over elements
• Rewards involved in dissonance

21. Measuring the A-B Relationship
 Recent research indicates that the attitudes (A)
significantly predict behaviors (B) when moderating
variables are taken into account.
Moderating Variables
• Importance of the attitude
• Specificity of the attitude
• Accessibility of the attitude
• Social pressures on the individual
• Direct experience with the attitude

22. EI
 Emotional intelligence is the capacity for recognizing
our own feelings and those of others for motivating
our selves, and for managing emotions well in
ourselves and in our relationship.” Daniel Goleman

24. Sample Attitude Survey