EMPLOYEE ATTITUDE



EMPLOYEE ATTITUDE

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INTRODUCTION

An attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individual's degree of like or dislike for an item. Attitudes are generally positive or negative views of a person, place, thing, or event-- this is often referred to as the attitude object. People can also be conflicted or ambivalent toward an object, meaning that they simultaneously possess both positive and negative attitudes toward the item in question.

Taking into consideration current attitude research, Breckler and Wiggins (1992) define attitudes as “mental and neural representations, organized through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence on behaviour”. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of cognitive, affective and conative components. Attitudes are part of the brain’s associative networks, the spider-like structures residing in long term memory (Higgins, 1986) that consist of affective and cognitive nodes linked through associative pathways (Anderson, 1983; Fazio, 1986). These nodes contain affective, cognitive, and behavioural components (Eagly & Chaiken, 1995).

Anderson (1983) suggests that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotion node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be interwined. In primarily affective networks, it is more difficult to produce cognitive counter arguments in the resistance to persuasion and attitude change (Eagly & Chaiken, 1995).

Attitudes are judgments. They develop on the ABC model (affect, behaviour, and cognition). The affective response is an emotional response that expresses an individual's degree of preference for an entity. The behavioural intention is a verbal indication or typical behavioural tendency of an individual. The cognitive response is a cognitive evaluation of the entity that constitutes an individual's beliefs about the object. Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.

Unlike personality, attitudes are expected to change as a function of experience. Tesser (1993) has argued that hereditary variables may affect attitudes - but believes that they may do so indirectly. For example, if one inherits the disposition to become an extrovert, this may affect one's attitude to certain styles.

Attitude is one of Jung's 57 definitions in Chapter XI of Psychological Types. Jung's definition of attitude is a "readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (Jung, [1921/1971]. Attitudes very often come in pairs, one conscious and the other unconscious. Within this broad definition, Jung defines several attitudes.

The main (but not only) attitude dualities that Jung defines are the following:

• Conscious and the unconscious. The "presence of two attitudes is extremely frequent, one conscious and the other unconscious. This means that consciousness has a constellation of contents different from that of the unconscious, a duality particularly evident in neurosis" (Jung, [1921/1971].

• Extraversion and introversion. This pair is so elementary to Jung's theory of types that he labelled them the "attitude-types".

• Rational and irrational attitudes. "I conceive reason as an attitude" (Jung, [1921/ 1971].

• The rational attitude subdivides into the thinking and feeling psychological functions, each with its attitude.

• The irrational attitude subdivides into the sensing and intuition psychological functions, each with its attitude. "There is, thus, a typical thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuitive attitude" (Jung, [1921/ 1971].

• Individual and social attitudes. Many of the latter are "isms".

Attitude change

Attitudes can be changed through persuasion. The celebrated work of Carl Hovland, at Yale University in the 1950s and 1960s, helped to advance knowledge of persuasion. In Hovland's view, we should understand attitude change as a response to communication. He and his colleagues did experimental research into the factors that can affect the persuasiveness of a message.

1. Target Characteristics: These are characteristics that refer to the person who receives and processes a message. One such trait is intelligence. It seems that more intelligent people are less easily persuaded by one-sided messages. Another variable that has been studied in this category is self-esteem. Although it is sometimes thought that those higher in self-esteem are less easily persuaded, there is some evidence that the relationship between self-esteem and persuasibility is actually curvilinear, with people of moderate self-esteem being more easily persuaded than both those of high and low self-esteem levels (Rhodes & Woods, 1992). The mind frame and mood of the target also plays a role in this process.

2. Source Characteristics: The major source characteristics are expertise, trustworthiness and interpersonal attraction or attractiveness. The credibility of a perceived message has been found to be a key variable here (Hovland & Weiss, 1951); if one reads a report about health and believes it came from a professional medical journal, one may be more easily persuaded than if one believes it is from a popular newspaper. Some psychologists have debated whether this is a long-lasting effect and Hovland and Weiss (1951) found the effect of telling people that a message came from a credible source disappeared after several weeks (the so-called "sleeper effect"). Whether there is a sleeper effect is controversial. Received wisdom is that if people are informed of the source of a message before hearing it, there is less likelihood of a sleeper effect than if they are told a message and then told its source.

3. Message Characteristics: The nature of the message plays a role in persuasion. Sometimes, presenting both sides of a story is useful to help change attitudes.

4. Cognitive Routes: A message can appeal to an individual's cognitive evaluation to help change an attitude. In the central route to persuasion, the individual is presented with the data and motivated to evaluate the data and arrive at an attitude changing conclusion. In the peripheral route to attitude change, the individual is encouraged not to look at the content, but at the source. This is commonly seen in modern advertisements that feature celebrities. In some cases, physician, doctors or experts are used. In other cases, film stars are used for their attractiveness.

Emotion and Attitude Change

Emotion is a common component in persuasion, social influence, and attitude change. Much of attitude research emphasized the importance of affective or emotion components (Breckler & Wiggins, 1992). Emotion works hand-in-hand with the cognitive process, or the way we think about an issue or situation. Emotional appeals are commonly found in advertising, health campaigns and political messages. Recent examples include no-smoking health campaigns and political campaign advertising emphasizing the fear of terrorism.

Affective forecasting, otherwise known as intuition or the prediction of emotion, also impacts attitude change. Research suggests that predicting emotions is an important component of decision making, in addition to the cognitive processes (Loewenstein, 2007). How we feel about an outcome may override purely cognitive rationales.

In terms of research methodology, the challenge for researchers is measuring emotion and subsequent impacts on attitude. Since we cannot see into the brain, various models and measurement tools have been constructed to obtain emotion and attitude information. Measures may include the use of physiological cues like facial expressions, vocal changes, and other body rate measures (Breckler & Wiggins, 1992). For instance, fear is associated with raised eyebrows, increased heart rate and increase body tension (Dillard, 1994). Other methods include concept or network mapping, and using primes or word cues (Shavelson & Stanton, 1975).

Processing Models

Some research on emotion and attitude change focuses on the way people process messages. Many dual process models are used to explain the affective (emotion) and cognitive processing and interpretations of messages. These include the elaboration likelihood model, the heuristic-systematic model, and the extended parallel process model.

In the Elaboration Likelihood Model, or ELM, (Petty and Cacioppo, 1986), cognitive processing is the central route and affective/emotion processing is often associated with the peripheral route. The central route pertains to an elaborate cognitive processing of information while the peripheral route relies on cues or feelings. The ELM suggests that true attitude change only happens through the central processing route that incorporates both cognitive and affective components as opposed to the more heuristics-based peripheral route. This suggests that motivation through emotion alone will not result in an attitude change.

In the Heuristic-Systematic Model, or HSM, (Chaiken, Liberman, & Eagly, 1989) information is either processed in a high-involvement and high-effort systematic way, or information is processed through shortcuts known as heuristics. Emotions, feelings and gut-feeling reactions are often used as shortcuts.

The Extended Parallel Process Model, or EPPM, includes both thinking and feeling in conjunction with threat and fear appeals (Witte, 1992). EPPM suggests that persuasive fear appeals work best when people have high involvement and high efficacy. In other words, fear appeals are most effective when an individual cares about the issue or situation, and that individual possesses and perceives that they possess the agency to deal with that issue or situation.

Components of Emotion Appeals

Any discrete emotion can be used in a persuasive appeal; this may include jealousy, disgust, indignation, fear, and anger. Fear is one of the most studied emotional appeals in communication and social influence research. Dillard (1994) suggests that “fear appeals have been thought of as messages that attempt to achieve opinion change by establishing the negative consequences of failing to agree with the advocated position”.

Important consequences of fear appeals and other emotion appeals include the possibility of reactance (Brehm & Brehm, 1981) which may lead to either message rejections or source rejection and the absence of attitude change. As the EPPM suggests, there is an optimal emotion level in motivating attitude change. If there is not enough motivation, an attitude will not change; if the emotional appeal is overdone, the motivation can be paralyzed thereby preventing attitude change.

Important factors that influence the impact of emotion appeals include self efficacy, attitude accessibility, issue involvement, and message/source features. Self efficacy is a perception of one’s own human agency. In other words, it is the perception of our own ability to deal with a situation (Bandura, 1992). It is an important variable in emotion appeal messages because it dictates a person’s ability to deal with both the emotion and the situation. For example, if a person is not self-efficacious about their ability to impact the global environment, they are not likely to change their attitude or behaviour about global warming.

Attitude accessibility refers to the activation of an attitude from memory (Fazio, 1986). In other words, it indicates how readily available is an attitude about an object, issue, or situation. Issue involvement (Zaichkowsky, 1985) is the relevance of an issue or situation to an individual. Issue involvement has been correlated with both attitude access and attitude strength. Past studies conclude that accessible attitudes are more resistant to change (Fazio & Williams, 1986).

Implicit and explicit attitudes

There is also considerable research on implicit attitudes, which are generally unacknowledged or outside of awareness, but have effects that are measurable through sophisticated methods using people's response-times to stimuli. Implicit and explicit attitudes seem to affect people's behaviour, though in different ways. They tend not to be strongly associated with each other, although in some cases, they are. The relationship between them is poorly understood.

POSITIVE MENTAL ATTITUDE [PMA]

Positive mental attitude, (PMA) is a psychological term which describes a mental phenomenon in which the central idea is that one can increase achievement through optimistic thought processes. PMA implies that one has a vision of good natured change in one's mind. It employs a state of mind that continues to seek, find and execute ways to win, or find a desirable outcome, regardless of the circumstances. It rejects negativity, defeatism and hopelessness. Part of the process of achieving PMA employs motivating "self talk" and deliberate goal-directed thinking.

Positive Mental attitude has been known to help people through certain difficult times in their lives or even help them overcome illnesses. Many people believe it can help you not only mentally but physically. Hence "laughter is considered to be the best medicine".

SPECTRUM OF ATTITUDE

▪ Adjustment function: One of the components of attitude is the feeling of an individual. People, therefore, adjust to the environmental conditions depending on how they feel about a situation and their attitude help them to adjust to the situation. Working conditions, treatment by the superiors, sudden change in the management policies are the situations to which the employees adjust and form an attitude towards the management.

▪ Ego-Defensive function: Attitude may persist at any level between very favourable to very unfavourable. Because of this, people try to defend their feeling or belief and hold on to their attitude either positive or negative and in the process, their attitude helps to defend themselves.

▪ Value-expressive function: Values are not same as attitude, but are interrelated. Values are the convictions which are personally or socially acceptable and are preferred. Attitudes help people to express their value belief. The behaviour intention and the cognitive response are two components of attitude that help in the expression of value and at the same time, attitudes help in reconfirming the value-belief of the persons.

In the organizational set up, it is to be realized that the number of persons working in the organization represent that many number of personalities. The management, thus, need to deal with multiple number of attitudinal issues. The structure, systems, procedures and corporate policies of the organizations are, thus, framed keeping in view different aspects of personality and attitude related issues. It is, therefore, necessary to identify and examine important job-related issues keeping in mind the basic concepts of personality and attitude. Three issues related to the attitude are:

▪ Job satisfaction

▪ Job involvement

▪ Organizational commitment

Job satisfaction : E. A. Locke has defined job satisfaction as “a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experience.” Seven job dimensions have been identified as important characteristics of a job conducive to job satisfaction.

These are:

a) Mentally challenging job and the job content.

b) Equitable remuneration.

c) Opportunities for career growth.

d) Supportive co-workers.

e) Supportive supervision.

f) Conducive working conditions.

g) Personality-Job Fit profile (Holland’s Theory).

The employees having high level of job satisfaction will have high level of productivity, and low rate of absenteeism. Employees with better job satisfaction will not leave the organization compared to those with low rate of job satisfaction. Research on this subject, however, suggests that the positive relationship between job satisfaction and the above outcome is not necessarily very high. It, thus, suggests that besides the above mentioned characteristics of job satisfaction, the environmental factors and motivational factors also have considerable relationship with the productivity, absenteeism and employee turnover.

Job Involvement : It is a comparatively new concern in the study of attitudinal issues and is considered important for understanding work behaviour like employee turnover, tardiness and absenteeism. It has been variously conceptualized as (a) the degree to which one is actively participating in one’s job, (b) the degree of importance of one’s job to one’s self image and (c) the extent to which one’s self esteem is affected by one’s perceived level of performance. Of the three, the relationship between self image and job image conceptualization is empirically important. It has been identified that there are three classes of antecedents of job involvement and these are personal characteristics, situational characteristics and work outcomes.

• Organizational Commitment : Organizational commitment has been defined by Stephen P. Robbins as “an individual’s orientation toward the organization in terms of loyalty, identification and involvement”. While job involvement means identifying with one’s job, organizational commitment means identifying with the organization as a whole with its values, objectives, mission and culture. An employee may have low job involvement which in most cases is not permanent. But the same employee may, simultaneously have high organizational commitment because of the conviction, confidence and commitment to the corporate values and management practices of the organization. A higher organizational commitment is a better and dominant factor contributing to low employee turnover, and low absenteeism. In a sense, organizational commitment as an attitude reflects the employee’s loyalty to the organization. J. P. Meyer and N. J. Allen have proposed three component model of organizational commitment. They are:

• Affective commitment – this involves employee’s emotional attachment to and identification with the organization.

• Continuance commitment – this involves the cost involved in leaving the organization in terms of career prospects in the organization as also the social recognition for being a part of an organization which is viewed with high esteem in the society.

• Normative commitment – this involves employees’ moral commitment to self for staying in the organization an attitude of mutual commitment between self and the organization.

ATTITUDE SURVEY

It is considered important that the management gets a proper feedback, as objectively as possible of the attitude of the employees towards the organization, the managerial personnel and the assigned job. This is done by conducting Attitude Survey. Information obtained by the management through this survey helps both in preventing and solving employee problems giving insight to the management about the degree of satisfaction or dissatisfaction the employees may have about their job, the managers or the organization as a whole. However, attitude survey is a sensitive issue and needs careful handling because it deals with the state of mind of the employees. For conducting attitude survey, it is helpful to ensure that certain conditions are prevailing as suggested by John W. Newstorm and Keith Davis. They are:

a) top management supports the survey;

b) clear objective exists for conducting the survey;

c) employees are involved in the planning of the survey;

d) management is willing and capable of taking follow-up actions,

e) both the results and action plans are communicated to the employees.

Survey can be conducted through interviews, obtaining and tabulating data from existing records or by obtaining the opinion of the employees through open ended or close ended questionnaire.

Major steps in a systematic approach in conducting surveys are:

a) Identify reasons for survey.

b) Obtain management commitments.

c) Develop Survey Instrument.

d) Administer survey.

e) Tabulate results.

f) Analyse results.

g) Provide Feedback to Participants.

h) Prepare Action Plan and implement that.

In using questionnaire for the purpose of survey, it has been observed that the workers attach importance to the numerical value to the responses given by them as that appears to be easier to make a comparative assessment of the replies. In Attitude Survey, therefore, appropriate rating scales are used. One of such rating-scales is Minnesota Satisfaction Questionnaire which provide description for each number in the scale. For example, if the response from the workers are measured on a 5 point scale, where 5 is the highest and 1 is the lowest, each point in the scale is given a brief description. For example, 5 = extremely satisfied, 4 = very satisfied and so on, and the lowest point 1 = not satisfied. A somewhat similar rating scale popularly known Likert’s Rating Scale is also used for measuring the employee attitude. A typical example is where in a questionnaire, say 20 questions are included and the participants are asked to rate their reply of each question on a 5 point scale, same as mentioned above. Answer to each question will have a rating between 1 and 5. These ratings are then added and averaged. The resultant figure is the measurement of attitude of the respective employee. When all the responses of all employees are processed in the same manner, an overall measurement of attitude of employees is obtained along with the attitude on each of the 20 issues raised in the questionnaire.

For assessing the attitude of the employees, the type of question asked depends on the basic purpose for which the attitude survey has been undertaken. If the survey is done to assess the attitude of the employees towards the compensation management of the company, the questions asked for the purpose will be entirely different from the questions if the survey is meant to assess the interpersonal relationship in the hierarchy in the organization.

PREPARING FOR A SURVEY

▪ Set a date for conducting the survey. In order to get the highest level of participation, conduct the survey in-house, during work hours. Surveys generally take around an hour time.

▪ Tell your employees in advance – a week’s notice should be sufficient. Assure them of the professional and other benefits of the survey through direct communication, preferably in small face-to-face “information sessions.” These sessions should cover.

▪ the survey’s purpose, its process and the manner in which the accumulated data will be used and disseminated,

▪ the date, time and place of the survey – this allows employees to arrange their schedules so that they can participate without falling behind in their work,

▪ the safeguards in place to protect confidentiality and anonymity, and

▪ when and how employees can access to the survey’s results.

▪ Reassure your employees that the results of the survey will be made available to them and will be used to make required changes within a reasonable time-frame. Emphasise that this is about correcting problems and recognizing efficient processes, and not about individual witch-hunting

DURING THE SURVEY

▪ Use a quiet, appropriately sized meeting room or schedule people throughout the day if the sample is large.

▪ Before the survey begins, explain why you are conducting it and how to complete it. Allow time for questions. Emphasise that the process is voluntary. If people are not convinced about the benefit or confidentiality, allow them to exclude themselves by not joining the survey.

▪ Employees should be placed at a reasonable distance apart so that they cannot see others’ responses.

▪ Give people ample time to complete the survey. Allow them to leave when finished. Thank them for participating.

AFTER THE SURVEY

▪ Analyse the data. Develop graphs to show highlights, trends and comparisons.

▪ Review the results with management. Plan to share the information with staff.

▪ Communicate results of the survey to all employees in a format that they can easily understand. A personal presentation with charts and graphs should be supplemented with a written summary.

▪ Develop plans for improvement with employees’ input.

▪ Continue to improve morale by solving new problems as they arise, so that people will see that you are sincere about dealing with their concerns.

▪ Conduct focus groups with staff where clarification is needed or where there is value in defining the problems specific to a particular department. Consider using a nonpartisan facilitator to get the most useful information.

Using Survey Information : While the collection and analysis of data needs technical expertise, using the end result of the survey for the benefit of the organization calls for high level of judgmental skill of the concerned managerial personnel responsible for initiating and conducting the study. After the data are analysed, two important aspects of the study need to be examined. They are, the Reliability and the Validity of the survey process. The reliability of the survey or the test is established if almost the same result is obtained irrespective of the fact who conducts the survey. The validity of the survey is established when it is confirmed that the survey procedure or the questionnaire or in short, the survey instrument is appropriate, relevant and is capable of measuring for which the test is being used. As some authors have put it “The difference between the reliability and validity becomes clear when we attempt to use a wooden yardstick to measure metric distance. In this case, the yardstick is consistently accurate at what it does (it is reliable), but it is invalid since it measures the wrong thing. Obviously, we need to be sure of both the reliability and validity of our measure….”. After being satisfied about the reliability and validity of the survey, further actions are taken for using the data.

Action 1. Communicate data to all Managers who are either affected or are concerned about the follow up actions. Decisions are also required to be taken about the extent to which the participants are communicated of the data.

Action 2. Explaining and interpreting the data to those who received the information. A well designed meeting or conference or forum should be organized to explain the data and to give clarifications if sought by any member in the meeting.

Action 3. If a similar survey was done earlier, make a trend analysis to assess the swing in the attitude if any, on any particular issue as also to assess the effectiveness or otherwise of the follow up action if taken earlier.

Action 4. Examine and analyse the received data for establishing co-relationship between the answers to relevant questions. For example, if some participants answer to a particular question showing their confidence on the performance appraisal system of the company and at the same time expresses lack of confidence on the immediate supervisor, then it is a negative co-relationship and the answers to the two relevant questions need to be re-examined from other possible parameters.

Action 5. Decide about the action plan and workout time bound implementation scheme of the decided action plans.

CONCLUSION

▪ If you have a positive mind and faith, instead of being discouraged when something bad happens, you will learn lessons that will be for your good, and you will grow from the experience.

▪ Things are happening so fast today that we don’t have time to stop and do an attitude check every time we are forced with a problem. The winner’s mindset must be internalized through the constant reinforcement of positive attitude to respond to next challenge instinctively and habitually.

▪ It is essential to know what your people are thinking. Discontent with management policies, processes and personalities will more often manifest itself in absenteeism, turnover and shoddy job performance. These are all symptoms of an underlying disease, and can only be dealt with after a thorough diagnosis – an attitude survey. Attitude surveys, if properly formulated and carried out will provide you an accurate assessment of what is wrong and right with your team, department and company.

References

▪ Anderson, J. R. (1983) 'A spreading activation theory of memory', Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour.

▪ Bandura, A. (1982). Self-efficacy mechanism in human agency. American Psychologist.

▪ De S.J. (2008), Managing Organization through Human Resource Management, Prime Time, Kolkata.

▪ Jung, C.G. (1966). Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Collected Works, Volume 7, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ISBN.

▪ Tesser, A. (1993) On the importance of heritability in psychological research: The case of attitudes. Psychological Review.

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( A product of XLRI, former Divisional Manager (Pers) of Tata Steel, Vice President (P & A) of Satna Cement, Advisor (Pers & I.R.) of Manikgarh Cement, Mr B D Pande is currently Advisor (Pers & I.R.), Century Cement (a division of Century Textiles & Ind. Ltd.), Baikunth – 493 116, Dist: Raipur, Chhattisgarh, email – personnel@webmail.centurycement.co.in and Editor-in-Chief, PERSONNEL TODAY.

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