Attitude in the Workplace

10 Key excerpts on "Attitude in the Workplace"

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  The Emerald Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

  • Robert L. Dipboye(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Emerald Publishing Limited

    (Publisher)

  Fig. 4.1 . A work-related attitude is reflected most obviously in the feelings expressed about the work (e.g., “…a living hell”). They are also expressed in the beliefs about the job (e.g., “The work is physical and demanding”) and the behavioral inclinations of the respondent (e.g., “I’m ready to quit”). An employee holding a positive attitude is more likely to have positive feelings, beliefs, and behavioral inclinations than is an employee with a negative attitude.

  Fig. 4.1.   The Evaluative, Cognitive, and Behavioral Components of Work-Related Attitudes.

  Employees form work-related attitudes that are relatively stable and have important consequences. They influence not only the effectiveness with which employees perform their jobs, but also their health and well-being. I/O psychologists have devoted most of their efforts to studying three work-related attitudes: job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and job involvement. Of these, job satisfaction and organizational commitment have received the most attention (Judge, Weiss, Kammeyer-Mueller, & Hulin, 2017). Job involvement has received the least attention but the recent popularity of worker engagement has seen the revival of a repackaged construct having involvement as a core component. This chapter reviews the research and theory for three work-related attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. The review of the research is organized around four primary questions: How is the attitude measured, and what are the facets or components of the attitude? What are the correlates? What is the process by which the attitude forms? Do satisfaction, involvement, and commitment reflect the same or different constructs? The chapter concludes with a discussion of practical implications.

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  Essentials of Job Attitudes and Other Workplace Psychological Constructs

  • Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling, Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The purpose of this chapter is to examine the intersection between basic concepts and theories on attitudes and the applied research on job attitudes. There are a number of advantages to framing research on job attitudes with the concepts and theories used in social psychology. Social psychology research on attitudes has addressed fundamental issues about construct validity, measurement, and theoretical connections with behaviors, situations, and dispositional effects that inform research in many applied settings, including organizations. In turn, examination of attitudes in organizational settings expands the understanding of the nature of attitudes by examining it in different contexts, with new measurement challenges, and investigating a wide range of different attitude objects. One goal of this chapter is to review concepts and theories that are central to understanding attitudes in general and job attitudes in particular. A second goal is to examine how research on job attitudes has addressed unique challenges to studying attitudes in organizational contexts.

  Conceptualizing Attitudes

  Definitions of Attitudes

  Use of the term “attitude” in the vernacular is not synonymous with its meaning in a scholarly context. In informal conversations, when it is said that a person has “a good attitude” or “a bad attitude” this connotes an individual difference associated with one’s emotional reactions to and beliefs about the world at large and all things in it. However, when the term “attitude” is used in scholarly communications, it is referring to an attitude about something in particular and not all things in general. Within the literature of social psychology, definitions of the term “attitude” have taken various forms. Zanna and Rempel (1988, p. 319) defined an attitude as “the categorization of a stimulus object along an evaluative dimension” which is based on information that is cognitive, emotional, and/or pertaining to past behaviors or behavioral tendencies. This tripartite approach to conceptualizing attitudes has been, and continues to be, prominently used in social psychological literature on attitudes (Maio et al., 2019). Eagly and Chaiken (1993, p. 1), stated that an “attitude is a psychological tendency that is expressed by evaluating a particular entity with some degree of favor or disfavor.” Fazio (1995, p. 247) defined an attitude as “an association in memory between a given object and a given summary evaluation of the object.”

  Central to each of these academic definitions of the term “attitude” is the evaluation of a particular object. Attitudes have valence, a positive or negative direction (e.g., good vs. bad), and differ in the intensity associated with the valence (e.g., extremely good vs. moderately bad). Zanna and Rempel’s (1988) definition mentions beliefs, emotions, and aspects of behavior with the purpose of clarifying that these mental processes are related to an attitude but distinct from the evaluation. Fazio (1995) highlights that this is a summary evaluation, meaning that the evaluation is rapid or immediate. Eagly and Chaiken (1993) stated that an attitude involves a psychological tendency which implies a degree of stability in the evaluation but also a potential for malleability.

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  Britain At Work

  As Depicted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey

  • Mark Cully, Andrew Oreilly, Gill Dix(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  8Employee attitudes to work

  In this chapter we move into the realm of organisational psychology, trying to relate the substantive content of people’s jobs to what they think of their work and their workplace. People’s subjective assessments of their well-being at work may be affected by a variety of factors. Gallie et al. (1998) identify four: the nature of the work task; social integration in the workplace; participation in decision-making; and job security. Guest and Conway (1998) have an alternative list of ‘antecedents’ of motivation. In their model, how the workplace is managed and the organisational climate, together with individuals’ experience of employment, help to determine the three elements of the ‘psychological contract’: fairness, trust, and delivery on promises made. These, in turn, shape peoples attitudes to their work.

  Common to both explanations is a recognition that people have different ‘work orientations’, the underlying values they bring to their work. It may be that these values differ systematically across particular types of workers so that, when we observe differences in attitudes, they are set against a varied tapestry of values. If, for example, part-timers have higher levels of job satisfaction than full-timers, is this because their jobs are ‘better’ in some objective sense, or part-timers are more easily satisfied? Differences in work orientations have also been explored across occupations, for example between professional and manual workers. We alluded to some of these differences in the last chapter when exploring reasons for working overtime.

  It is most important to note that we did not attempt to define or measure employees’ work orientations. This is an area where sociologists of work have been unable to agree on reliable measures, and one which is certainly not within the scope of a relatively short questionnaire. Can patterns in the attitudes of employees, identified in our results, be attributed to aspects of their employment relationship rather than differences in personal, underlying values? Our approach is to establish whether general patterns found in the data are consistent within sub-groups whose work orientation, we might anticipate, may be similar. If such patterns are found to persist, then they are likely to be independent of work orientation. The main employee characteristics we focus on are gender, occupation and the four-way division of working hours used in the last chapter.

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  Personality and Intelligence at Work

  Exploring and Explaining Individual Differences at Work

  • Adrian Furnham(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  People have attitudes to, at and about work. There have been literally dozens of studies about attitudes to appraisal, flexitime, pay, promotion, retirement, tenure and work–life balance. Some are theory driven, others are not. How they measure attitudes differs, and comparatively few examine how personality traits and cognitive abilities are related to these attitudes. Even fewer examine the relationship between attitudes to, and specific behaviour concerning, a particular issue at work.

  Attitudes are functional and they guide behaviour. Because work is such an important part of people’s lives, they quite naturally have strong, complex and diverse attitudes to it. However, attitudes to (and indeed behaviour at) work may be shaped by strongly held social values. Everyone has certain implicit and explicit values that reflect their unique upbringing, their education and the wider culture within which they live. Some of their values are overtly materialistic, others completely spiritual. These values about freedom, equality and altruism are very relevant in the workplace. For instance, they are partly responsible for where people choose to work. We often hear of people boycotting organisations and products that are associated with specific values antithetical to their own. They would clearly never work for these organisations. Many people seek out organisations whose values (expressed in their mission statement, or known by reputation) fit their own.

  Values are related to belief systems, that is values are groups of beliefs about a particular object or process. Thus, people may have a fairly elaborate gender belief system about such issues as discrimination against women, biological differences between the sexes, attitudes to homosexuals and lesbians, and the problems associated with people of one gender working in a job commonly associated with the opposite gender (a man as a midwife, a woman as a soldier). These belief systems are, in turn, related to highly specific attitudes to issues at work. Attitudes towards pay and absenteeism may be part of a reward belief system shaped by values about equity.

  2. Do attitudes predict behaviour?

  Whilst it is interesting to know about attitudes at work, if they are weak predictors of work behaviour they are of considerably less interest. One explanation is the level of specificity at which we usually measure attitudes and behaviour. Often, attitudes are measured at a very general abstract level and behaviour at a highly specific level. The more the two are in alignment, the better the one predicts the other. To predict a particular work-related behaviour, one needs to measure specific related attitudes to that behaviour. Second, there is the problem of single versus multiple act measurement. If people are interested in attitudes to migrant workers, it is better to look at a series of possible behaviours associated with them. Attitudes are much better predictors when a series of behaviours (multiple acts) is taken into account. “One-shot” measures of behaviour are often unreliable and do not give us much information about the relationships between attitudes and behaviour. One needs to aggregate

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  Organization Behaviour for Leisure Services

  • Darren Lee-Ross, Conrad Lashley(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  These shifts impact on firms and employees in a variety of ways, and former work attitudes may need changing to ensure success in new and increasingly competitive and international environments. In a practical sense, managers are faced with the decision either to effect an attitude change in their employees or not. If attitudes are deemed core, it may be more cost-effective not to make the attempt.

  This is often why companies offer individuals redundancy or early retirement packages rather than introducing costly (and ineffective) attitude-change programmes. On the other hand if managers have opted to change workers’ attitudes, they must understand:

  • their composition
  • how to audit or diagnose them
  • the relationship between attitudes and behaviour.

  Rosenberg and Hovland (1960) explain that attitudes comprise three elements, which appear in Table 5.2 .

  Element	Description	Example
  Cognitive	Perceptual responses and verbal statements of belief and opinion	You may believe that split-shift and short-term working in the leisure services sector causes workers to quit their jobs; as such it is bad practice
  Affective	Sympathetic nervous responses and statements of feelings or emotions	This is your acceptance or rejection (you either like or do not like) of split-shift and short-term working arrangements
  Conative	Overt actions and statements concerning behaviour	This is your statement of intent not to apply for work in organizations which only offer jobs based on the above tenure

  Table 5.2 The composition of attitudes

  While the ability to implement organizational change programmes in response to macro environmental shifts is important, managers also need to understand employees’ attitudes in order to gauge employee wellbeing or ‘mental health’.

  Worker attitudes commonly are obtained using questionnaires. These forms can be custom made by managers but there are also several standard instruments available for this purpose. For example, Hackman and Olham’s (1974; 1980) Job Diagnostic Survey (JDS) has proved popular and targets job tasks, linking them with the outcome attitude of job satisfaction.

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  The 27 Challenges Managers Face

  Step-by-Step Solutions to (Nearly) All of Your Management Problems

  • Bruce Tulgan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Jossey-Bass

    (Publisher)

  I use the term “attitude” to zero in on that very special category of employee performance problem that matters so much but seems so hard for so many managers to actually get their arms around. As long as you think of attitude as a personal, internal matter, it is going to remain intangible, and you will remain out of your depth. Plus, whatever your employees may be “feeling inside” is indeed none of your business. Stop focusing on the inside/personal stuff. Focus on the outside.

  Feelings are on the inside. Observable behavior is on the outside. That observable behavior can be seen, heard, and felt. When we talk about attitude, it’s not about who the person is, it’s about how the person behaves. No matter how intrinsic the source may be, it is only the external behavior that can be and must be managed.

  Attitude Is Expressed in Communication Practices

  If you focus on that observable external behavior, all of a sudden it becomes really simple. On the outside, attitude is all about communication practices: Words, format, tone, and gestures.

  Just like any other aspect of performance, the only way to lead, manage, or supervise employee attitude is with strong, highly engaged management. That means steady, consistent, high-quality communication—your only real leadership tool—high structure, high substance. It’s just a matter of applying the fundamentals to this difficult, complex, and all-too-common challenge. You need to define it and spell it out as a set of expectations, and then monitor, measure, and document it—require it, recognize it, and reward it—like any other aspect of performance.

  Do you want to be great at dealing with employee attitude problems? Do you want to find it downright easy to tell employees when and how they need to change their attitudes at work? Here’s what you need to do:

  • Don’t let attitude be a personal issue. Instead, make it 100 percent business. Make great attitude an explicit and regularly discussed performance requirement for everyone. Make it all about the work.
  • Never try to change an employee’s internal state; speak to only the external behaviors

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  The Undreaded Job

  Learning to Thrive in a Less-than-Perfect Workplace

  • Richard Brislin(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  These strong reactions after placement of suggestions into managers’ latitudes of rejection help explain a common workplace problem. Workers wanted change and communicated their suggestions to their managers. But the bosses reacted in a very negative manner. The workers then think, ‘‘We had no idea that management would react in such an intense way. We just wanted more workplace communication and a two-way flow of information.’’ In this example of workplace participation, employees will have more success with attitude-change attempts if they frame their sugges- tions in terms that fall into their managers’ latitudes of acceptance or neutrality. This recommendation requires that workers know their bosses well. Such knowledge of others is always useful and important in attitude change attempts. If managers interact in a relaxed manner with employees at company social gatherings, perhaps employees can suggest a weekly informal gathering over coffee where ideas can be shared. Or, if managers enjoy responding to e-mail, perhaps several employees can send separate e-mails with the same suggestion for workplace improvement. In all such communications, workers should not be demanding and should not threaten their boss’s authority. If they fail to take this advice and are seen as overly aggressive, then the boss will dismiss them and will reject their suggestions (Park, Levine, Westerman, Foregger, & Orfgen, 2007). SOME SPECIFIC ATTITUDES OF IMPORTANCE FOR WORKPLACE SATISFACTION Up to this point, I have discussed attitudes in general terms, with special attention given to attitudes that are important to people’s social identities and to views of themselves. I will turn now to reviews of more specific attitudes that are central to the theme of this book: find- ing happiness at work and avoiding feelings of dread as the workday Attitudes in the Workplace 147

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  Organizational Behavior

  • Michael A. Hitt, C. Chet Miller, Adrienne Colella, Maria Triana(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley

    (Publisher)

  The basic notion is that people prefer that their attitudes be consistent with one another (in balance or congruent). If we have a specific attitude toward an object or person, we tend to form other consistent attitudes toward related objects or persons. A simple example of attitude formation based on consistency appears in Exhibit 5-6. Dan is a young accounting graduate. He is impressed with accounting theory and thinks that accountants should work with data to arrive at important conclusions for management. Obviously, he has a positive attitude toward accounting, as illustrated by the plus sign bet- ween Dan and accounting in the exhibit. Now suppose that Dan’s new job requires him to work with someone who dislikes accounting (represented by the minus sign between the new colleague and accounting). In this case, Dan may form a negative attitude toward the person in order to have a consistent set of attitudes. Dan likes accounting and may have a negative attitude toward those who do not. Two Important Attitudes in the Workplace The two most thoroughly examined attitudes in organizational behavior are job satisfac- tion and organizational commitment. Job satisfaction is a broad attitude related to the job. A high level of satisfaction represents a positive attitude toward the job, while a low level of satisfaction represents a negative attitude. Organizational commitment, as defined here, is a broad attitude toward the organization as a whole. It represents how strongly an individual identifies with and values being associated with the organization. Strong commitment is a positive attitude toward the organization, whereas weak commitment is a less positive atti- tude. As we discuss below, these two attitudes can impact behavior that is important to the functioning of an organization; thus, it is important to consider job satisfaction and organi- zational commitment as desirable aspects of human capital.

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  Sociolinguistics / Soziolinguistik. Volume 1

  • Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill, Ulrich Ammon, Norbert Dittmar, Klaus J. Mattheier, Peter Trudgill(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  'Attitude' is derived from two roots: from the late Latin word 'aptitudo', meaning readiness, inclina-tion, and — via the Italian 'atto' — from the Latin 'actus', meaning action, behaviour. Hence, attitude has a lot to do with behav-iour, but it is not behaviour; attitude means readiness to behaviour. Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 6) define 'attitude' as a predisposition to respond in a consistently favourable or unfavourable manner with respect to a given object — this object may be a person, a group, an event, a situation, a fact, a language variety, a linguistic variant etc. A first impor-tant implication of this definition is that an attitude as such is not directly perceivable or measurable. It is a mental and neural state of readiness (Allport 1954, 24), a hypothetical construct which mediates between stimulus and response. However, hypothetical does not mean empty or vague. On the contrary, the definition implies both structure and quality. Regarding structure, the presence of a number of components is assumed; as to quality, consistency is the central criterion. 3. Structure The construct of attitude is often thought to consist of three components, a cognitive one, an evaluative one and a conative one. The reasoning is that before somebody can react consistently to an object, he first has to know something about it. Only then can he evaluate the object positively or negatively. Finally, this knowledge and these feelings are accom-panied by behavioural intentions. 3.1. The Cognitive Component The cognitive component of the attitude in-cludes all kinds of knowledge one has about the attitude object. This knowledge is com-posed of so-called beliefs. Beliefs are the smallest cognitive units of the conceptual structure. Fishbein and Ajzen (1975, 131) de-fine them as a person's subjective probabi-lity judgments concerning some discriminable aspect of his world.

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  The SAGE Handbook of Industrial, Work & Organizational Psychology, 3v

  Personnel Psychology and Employee Performance; Organizational Psychology; Managerial Psychology and Organizational Approaches

  • Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Deniz S Ones, Neil Anderson, Chockalingam Viswesvaran, Handan Kepir Sinangil, Author(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  Some theoretical antecedents of some job attitudes have already been meta-analytically synthesized but the data is largely incomplete. For example, Judge, Heller, and Mount (2002) reported on the relationship of Big Five personality traits with job satisfaction but the relationship of Big Five traits with either commitment or involvement has to the knowledge of this author not been meta- analytically synthesized. CONCLUSION Understanding how employees experience both their jobs and the broader context in which these jobs are located is important, irrespective of whether or not job attitudes are strongly predictive of workplace behaviors. Work is a central part of life; as important to many people as their roles as spouse, partner, or parent. As such job attitudes should be regarded as important outcomes in their own right because they reflect the quality of a central life experience. Industrial and organiza-tional psychologists are therefore correct in having spent so much time and effort in attempting to further our understanding of how job attitudes develop, how they can be changed, and how they relate to various workplace behaviors. This chap-ter has attempted to summarize our current under-standing of the field while also drawing attention to the fact that our collective enthusiasm for fur-thering our understanding of job attitudes may have resulted in some degree of over-elaboration that might require some pruning of the construct space in order to balance theoretical richness with parsimony. Finally, this chapter has also discussed the manner in which the growing literature from outside of North America can be used to further our understanding of job attitudes and their impor-tance in organizational life. REFERENCES Abbas, Q., & Khanam, S. J. (2013). Psychometric properties of Urdu translation and adaptation of organizational commitment questionnaire in Pakistan. Asia Journal of Management Science and Education , 2 , 240–248.

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