etc. It is reported in a study that the most important goals of an ethical Indian manager are customer satisfaction, achievement of organizational goals within scheduled time, employee motivation and career progress. According to Upadhyay, Indian managers are status and power oriented and considers decision making as their prerogative and consultation as a means of eroding their authority. They tend to take credit for work done by them rather than share it with individual members of the team. It may be noted that while values are stable and enduring, they are not rigid. Therefore, new generations of employees may bring into the organizations new set of values.
In some of the studies age has been found to be a major factor in differentiating employee val¬ues. Young employees give importance to more autonomy at work place, instant gratification, quick growth, individualism, and openness compared to older employees.
As a result, young employees bring a different set of values to the work place. Hence, management should understand those new values and accordingly deal with them for good performance. Managers have to study values because they are the foundations for understanding a person’s attitudes, perceptions, motivation and behaviour in the organization.
Attitudes and their Formation
Having understood the values, let us try to understand the attitudes and their formation. You should recognize that attitudes are evaluative statementsfavorable or unfavorableconcern¬ing objects, people, or events. They indicate how one feels about something. When you say “I like my job,” or “I hate telling lies” they represent your attitudes.
Attitudes are different from values. Values could be a little broader in concept while attitudes are more specific. Values indicate the rightness or desirability of something. For example, a statement like “gender discrimi¬nation is bad” reflects the values one stands for. On the other hand, a statement “I prefer women to be given an equal place with men in recruitment” represents the attitude of a person. Attitudes are learned predispositions towards various aspects of our environment.
While, attitudes and values are different, there are also some similarities. Both are powerful instruments influencing cognitive process
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and behaviour of people. Both are learned and acquired from the same sources – people and objects. Both are relatively permanent and resistant to change. Both values and attitudes influence each other and are used interchangeably. Hence, values people hold can explain their attitudes and, in many cases, the behaviours they engage in. However, we cannot determine which values underlie which attitudes and behaviours.
Sources of Attitudes
As already explained, attitudes, like values, are acquired from the environment - parents, teachers, friends, and colleagues. It may be noted that they are only acquired but not inherited. We begin modeling our attitudes after those we admire and respect. We observe the way family members and friends behave and we shape our attitudes and behavior to align with theirs. You tend to imitate the attitudes of famous persons or those you admire and respect. Attitudes may also be developed from a personally rewarding or punishing experience with an object or event. If employees are rewarded for being regular in an organization, you are likely to believe that you will also be rewarded if you are regular.
In contrast to values, attitudes are less stable. That is why advertising messages attempt to change your attitudes toward a certain product or service. If Maruti Company is able to create a favorable opinion towards their car, that attitude may lead to a desirable behavior i.e., the purchase of Maruti car.
Therefore, sound understanding of attitudes is important for managers because they affect job behavior. Manager’s knowledge can serve two purposes. Firstly, it helps him in understanding and predicting how a person is likely to behave. Secondly, it helps him in changing unfavorable attitudes into favorable attitudes.
Types of Attitudes
A person may have a multitude of attitudes, but for the purpose of our study let us know about the job-related attitudes. These job-related attitudes are positive or negative evaluations held by employees about various aspects of their work environment. Essentially, there are three important attitudes concerned with job: job satisfaction, job involvement,
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and organizational commitment.
Job Satisfaction
One of the tasks of a manager is to provide job satisfaction to the employees. Job satisfaction refers to an individual’s general attitude toward his or her job. A person with a high level of job satisfaction holds positive attitudes toward the job, while a person with low job satisfaction holds negative atti¬tudes towards the job. When we talk about employee attitudes, mostly we mean job satisfaction. As a matter of fact, the two are closely related.
Job Involvement
The term “job involvement” is relatively a recent concept in the litera¬ture. There is no complete agreement over what the term means. Generally, it refers to the degree to which a person identifies with his job, actively participates in it, and considers his perfor¬mance important to his self-worth. Individuals who express high involvement in their jobs are likely to be more productive, have higher satisfaction, and are less likely to resign than employees with low involvement.
Organizational Commitment
Commitment reflects an individual’s orientation toward the organization by tapping his or her loyalty to, identification with, and involvement in the organization. Individuals who are highly committed see their identity as closely attached to that of the organization. Like job involvement, highly committed employees will be better performers and have lower turnover than those with low levels of commitment to the organization.
It may be understood that when people talk about job attitudes and their impact on behav¬ior, obviously they are referring to the positive or negative appraisals that people make about their job or organization. Job satisfaction is the most popular attitude measured in organizations, but more recently there has been increased attention given to job involvement and organizational commitment. All these attitudes are measured with a view to predict employee behaviours like performance, productivity,
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absenteeism, turnover and unionization.
Implications of Attitudes
Attitudes and Productivity
The attitude-productivity relationship is not very clear. Bradfield and Crock¬ett in 1955 made an extensive study of this relationship and concluded that there was minimal or no relationship between attitudes and performance. However, two years later, Herzberg and his associates concluded from the review of studies that there was gen¬erally a positive relationship between attitudes and productivity. However, they noted that in many cases the correlations, although positive were low. Similarly, a review in 1964 of twenty-three separate studies revealed that, except in three cases, there was a low but positive relationship between satisfaction and performance. It is clear that the studies on the relationship between attitudes and productivity give rise to mixed findings.
Attitudes and Withdrawal Behaviors
It was found in earlier studies that employee satisfaction is inversely related to absen-teeism and turnover. The higher the job satisfaction on the part of an employee, the lower is the scope for employee’s withdrawal behavior. Bradfield and Crockett found a significant but complex relationship be¬tween attitudes and both absenteeism and turnover. Vroom found a consistent negative relationship between job satisfaction and turnover, but a less consistent negative relationship between satisfaction and absenteeism. A few studies have also found that satisfaction has a consistent impact on absenteeism, but an even more profound and consistent relationship on turnover. However, the conclusion that employee satisfaction and absenteeism are inversely related has come under attack in the recent times.
There is also a view that organizational commitment is a better predictor of voluntary resignations than job satisfaction. If this is true, efforts to develop valid measures of organizational commitment may be of greater importance to managers. In conclusion, the evidence is fairly clear that organizations with committed and satisfied em¬ployees have lower rates of both turnover and absenteeism.
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Attitudes and Satisfaction
Attitudes towards job and job satisfaction are closely related. In many research studies, these terms are used interchangeably. In studies of job attitudes, it is generally thought that the result is some measure of job satisfac¬tion or dissatisfaction. Job satisfaction, however, is not a behavior but rather a general feeling of contentment with the job. As a result, if attitudes are positive, job satisfaction tends to be positive. On the other hand, if the attitudes are negative, satisfaction tend to be low. Therefore, if a manager wants to have employees satisfied with their jobs, he should strive to create in them positive attitudes toward their job and the organization.
Review Questions
1.What are values? How are they important?
2.What do you know about the values at work place?
3.What factors influence the formation of attitudes?
4.Explain the implications of job attitudes in organisations.
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