Attitude in the Workplace
Attitude in the workplace refers to an individual's outlook, emotions, and behavior towards their work environment, colleagues, and tasks. It encompasses elements such as positivity, motivation, adaptability, and professionalism. A positive attitude can contribute to a productive and harmonious work environment, while a negative attitude can hinder teamwork and overall performance.
6 Key excerpts on "Attitude in the Workplace"
eBook - ePub- Michele Kehoe(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Gill Books(Publisher)
...3 ATTITUDES IN ORGANISATIONS Objectives This chapter will help you to: Define an attitude. Describe the structure and functions of an attitude. Examine the nature of cognitive dissonance. Explain the nature of job satisfaction. Recognise the factors leading to organisational commitment. 3.1 Employee attitudes defined Employee attitudes have a significant impact on the success or failure of an organisation. Attitudes influence everything from customer service to employee turnover and profits. People’s attitudes affect how they behave in the workplace. An attitude is a method of expressing feelings. They are formed as a result of people’s values, experiences and personalities. Individuals form attitudes about everything in the world around them, such as their family, friends, job, organisations, products and events. Attitudes have an impact on people in the workplace and affect performance, absenteeism and turnover. Attitudes are developed as a result of our perceptions and are positive or negative. Since attitudes are acquired, they can be changed. Ultimately, they help people to make sense of the world around them. According to Bird and Fisher (1986), an attitude is ‘ a person’s relatively enduring disposition toward people, objects, events or activities ’. Robbins et al. (2010) state that ‘ attitudes are evaluative statements – either favourable or unfavourable – about objects, people or events ’. 3.2 Attitude structure An attitude is made up of three basic building blocks represented by the following three components: Belief – The knowledge, beliefs, information and opinions that you have about a particular person or job. The information you have may or may not be accurate, as it is based on perceptions of truth and reality. This is also called the cognitive element of an attitude. Feeling – This refers to the emotional aspect of an attitude and concerns how you feel about something. This implies that you have evaluated the stimulus and like or dislike it...
eBook - ePubBritain At Work
As Depicted by the 1998 Workplace Employee Relations Survey
- Mark Cully, Andrew Oreilly, Gill Dix(Authors)
- 1999(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Employee 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...
eBook - ePubPersonality and Intelligence at Work
Exploring and Explaining Individual Differences at Work
- Adrian Furnham(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...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...
eBook - ePubThe Psychology of Behaviour at Work
The Individual in the Organization
- Adrian Furnham(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
...5 Work-related attitudes, values and perceptions Introduction 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 and beliefs. 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 organizations and products that are associated with specific values antithetical to their own. They would clearly never work for these organizations. Many people seek out organizations whose values (expressed in their mission statement, or whose reputation is known) fit their own. Some take the role of “whistle-blower” against their own organization when they see things done that conflict with their values (Furnham & Taylor, 2004). 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 problem associated with people of one gender working in a job commonly associated with the opposite gender (a man as midwife, a woman as soldier). These belief systems are, in turn, related to highly specific attitudes to issues at work. Attitudes to pay and to absenteeism may be part of a reward belief system shaped by values about equity. This chapter first examines various beliefs systems that have been identified by psychologists over the years and discusses how these relate to the world of work...
- Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling, Valerie I. Sessa, Nathan A. Bowling(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...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)...
eBook - ePub- Michael Riley, Andrew Thompson(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Understanding attitudes DOI: 10.4324/9780080510910-7 Why learn about attitudes? What should a manager know about attitudes? This is not an easy question to answer except that they should know enough psychology to be able to distinguish between attitudes and opinions, to know the limitations on how far a perceived attitude indicates motivation and to understand that if an attitude survey is required it should be designed by professionals. That said, the sensitive manager looking for clues on employee behaviour knows at least that attitudes are often conspicuous to those who wish to listen out for them. This may be helpful in building up a picture of an individual or group. Introduction Whilst managing people can be complicated at least one aspect of human psychology is fairly conspicuous – attitudes. They have entered the daily discourse of managing. You hear references to them every day. A manager reflects on selection ‘skills are one thing, but give me the person with the right attitude’. A manager senses things are not quite right with the workforce ‘right now we could do with an attitude survey’. Even American slang has entered the language in the form of ’… the problem with him is that he's got attitude’ meaning of course, a bad attitude. In a sense there is good and bad news here because the fact that attitudes are talked about illustrates their defining quality, that is, that they are positive or negative but, being conspicuous it is too easy for others, in this case managers, to generalize the overall personality from the apparent attitude. This is the bad news because attitudes are more complicated and more important than simple guides to employees’ personality. People do not walk around with their attitudes printed on T-shirts. We can observe behaviour because it is always there but attitudes appear only from time to time to be ‘spotted’ in the manner of ‘bird spotting’...
