Values and attitudes guide most of our actions. Values are deeply ingrained in us and often shape our attitudes. Like individuals, organisations also have their values. When there is alignment of the values of the organisation and the stakeholders, particularly the customers and the employees, organisations prosper. Since the twin concepts of values and attitudes shape our behaviour in many ways, together, they are central to the career progression of an individual and performance of an organisation. This explains the importance of studying them.
—Winston Churchill
After studying this chapter, you should be able to:
Section I – Basics of Values
Section II – Role of Values and Value Champion
Section III – Implications of Values for Business
Section IV – What is Attitude?
Section V – Theories and Concepts of Attitude
Section VI - Changing Attitudes
Section VII – Implications for Business
Ms Nripen Chaturvedi was set to retire in three years after completing a successful career in the government services. She had slowly risen to become the head of audit and accounts in Ramanpur by 1998, and was responsible for the accounting function of the region. Being unambitious, she did not think that she was the best choice when computerisation of the department was ordered, and she was asked to lead it. However, like all good government servants, she accepted the job with reluctant obedience. The members of employees’ union met her and cautioned her that they would not cooperate with computerisation. They also told that she should not try to change from the existing paper and pen accounting system to a computerised system. She agreed to their demand; but soon, computers arrived in the newly refurbished, large air-conditioned hall, fitted with modular furniture.
She was inquisitive about the power of computers and decided to find out from her much younger junior colleague, Raj Kumar. A computer engineer, Raj, had been specially selected to lead the charge as the head of audit and accounts in the neighbouring region.
While Raj was busy creating systems and writing codes where the vendor’s system was found wanting, Nripen was busy learning the rudimentary things about computers. She undertook a course on the basics of computers and started to speak about the importance of computers to her colleagues with childlike excitement and passion. While Raj was busy scheduling course after course and pressing people to enrol for them, Nripen was busy encouraging the workforce to explore this new machine and teach the use of computers to their children so that they could get good jobs. Nripen recollects, ‘‘Though the workers were against computers, they had heard of Infosys and the good jobs they offered in the colleges and aspired that their children too would join that company’’.
Slowly, Nripen’s staff began to learn computers, largely for fun, to boast to their children that they too are computer specialists, and for playing cards in the office in the computer, which they could do without a partner. Simultaneously, a few younger colleagues gained expertise to handle the accounts using the computerised system. Nripen kept insisting that everyone should learn to use computers so that they could get good post-retirement jobs. She reiterated that old style of accounting is passé and accountants with knowledge of computers would be in high demand in the market. She also envied how easy it was to do the job and churn the numbers sitting in an airconditioned environment free of dust. Meanwhile, Raj Kumar thought, ‘‘What an old lady! She is busy teaching people to play cards on computers rather than accounting’’. Slowly, more people began to adapt to computers. Through her never-tiring ‘post-retirement talk’, she had nudged many to adopt the technology.
On 16 September 1999, when she came to the office later than usual, the union leaders were waiting restlessly. She could smell trouble. ‘‘Yet another strike notice against computerisation!’’, she thought. She had heard a few weeks back how the unions had opposed Raj’s work tooth and nail, and brought his work to a grinding halt. She calmed her nerves, requested the restless union leaders to sit down, and after ordering tea and snacks, encouraged them to voice their concerns. Their demand was unusual, and she thought it was bizarre! They complained that their supporters needed more vacancies in computer courses. They also insisted that she should create a system so that everyone could get an opportunity to learn using computers for their work.
She was speechless!
A good way to understand and define values is by asking what is important to us in our lives. The answer will vary from person to person and may include security, independence, wisdom, success, happiness, etc. Values can be defined as serious and deeply held normative principles, which guide a person’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour 1. Rokeach2, a well-known scholar on values, defines it as an enduring belief that a specific mode of construct (instrumental values) or end-state of existence (terminal values) is personally or socially preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end-state of existence.
Values are serious and deeply held normative principles, which guide a person’s beliefs, attitude, and behaviour.
Values involve choosing, prizing, and acting.
It is well known that the values of each person are different as they involve choosing, prizing, and acting3. Choosing implies choosing between various alternatives after due thought, with free will, and no compulsion. If there is compulsion, the individual may not prize it or cherish it as a value. Thoughtful consideration is also an important concept because it involves cognition and acceptance of the consequences of such choice. Prizing implies that we consider it valuable. Since what is valuable to us changes with situations in life, it is reasonable to conclude that values tend to change. For instance, job security may not be a value for a young person, but as the person becomes a young parent, it could emerge as one. Acting implies taking repeated action on the choice made. Do you think that Nripen changed the values of her employees or she merely changed their attitude towards computers?
Enduring Rokeach considers that a value system is an enduring organisation of beliefs, though they are different from both attitudes and beliefs. Attitudes and beliefs are situational and products of values. For instance, let us take a person with two values—achievement and job security. The person would give precedence for one over the other. However, this situation can change, as in the case of employees of Nripen. In other words, both achievement and security were their values, but the attitudes these values created changed as the situation changed.
Relativity Suppose you have two values, say security and achievement. You will consider one more important than the other. Usually, they would coexist, and you may find it difficult to prioritise. However, when there is a conflict between these, you would act according to the value that is more important to you. Did Nripen’s staff (mentioned in our initiating case) value security more than achievement? Did they decide to learn computers for achievement or to enhance their own security?
Nature/Characteristics of Values
Terminality Some values are an end in itself and are called terminal values. They are the very purpose of our lives. For example, mature love is usually considered a terminal value or an end in itself. You do not value ‘mature love’ to achieve something else.
Instrumentality Some values have instrumentality and not terminality. They are used as a means to achieve terminal values, and are not an end in themselves. They are preferable modes of behaviour. For example, when two people love each other and one makes a mistake, the other tends to forgive. Here, forgiveness is not an end in itself, it is used as an instrument to reach mature love.
Transcendence Values transcend specific actions and situations. For instance, if achievement is your value, you will admire achievement in sports, politics, or education, and make no differentiation between them. Although a value has potential for action, merely because it is a value, you may not take an action to achieve something yourself. This is the reason why many people who admire the achievement of others, do not take actions to achieve those themselves.
Abstractness By nature, values are abstract. You cannot feel and touch them; you can only deduce their existence by observing the behaviour.
Motivational Nature Values are motivational constructs because they create the drive to do something. Therefore, they have action potential. However, as discussed under transcendence, potential does not mean that you take actions.
Guidance Values guide the nature of actions. They lead to actions, inclinations, and impulses, as also restrain you from them. For example, if conservatism is your value, you are not likely to challenge a wrong action in the workplace, even though you may know that the action is detrimental to the organisation.
In the context of organisational behaviour (OB), we can study values at the level of employees, managers, teams, stakeholders, and the entire organisation. Although the fundamentals of values do not differ much across these levels, the values of each of these categories may differ. For example, achievement could be a dominant value for the managers, but job security for the employees. If the values are not aligned across the above categories in an organisation, organisational effectiveness would suffer.
Individual Level We have already discussed the definition and nature of individual values, and shall deliberate more on it later.
Manager Level Managers have individual values and professional values. For example, cooperation could be an individual value, but competitiveness could be their professional value. Therefore, they need to accommodate both values.
Team Level A team is an organisational entity, and its members would have different values. We try to bring the members together using organisational values. Interaction between team members is more intense than interaction between the members of an organisation. This creates unique challenges in balancing the differences between team members.
One can study values from different perspectives- individual, manager, team, stakeholder, organisation
Stakeholder Level Every stakeholder would have his/her own values and ideally, these should match the values of the organisation. This ideal situation seldom exists. For example, while security may be high priority in times of economic downturn for employees, it would perhaps be one of the lowest for investors.
Organisational Level Much like individual values, organisations also have values. They are the foundations on which organisations are built. They are unique to an organisation even when their products and services are similar to another organisation, and help to differentiate the way an organisation will behave in the business. Organisational values are enduring, but they undergo shift in relativity/priority in consonance with the external environment that affects the business. For example, conformism was a value in most organisations in India prior to the 1990s. Later, as globalisation and competitiveness became the external environment, most organisations changed their values/the priority of their values.
The critical issues that preoccupy the top management are increasing profits and return of shareholders, delivering quality at low cost, attracting and retaining talent, building brand loyalty, and establishing a resilient and sustainable company. This is done by creating appropriate culture. Values are the underlying force that help to create the culture or make it difficult to do so. For example, trust can create a cohesive group culture, whereas a value such as ‘affinity’ or ‘obedience’ can lead to people compromising their integrity.
Let us look at some hard evidence now. Research shows strong links between financial performance and the alignment of an organisation’s values with value of employees.4 The work of Kotter and Heskett has shown that companies with strong adaptive cultures based on shared values outperform other companies by a significant margin. Over an 11-year period, it was found that companies that cared for stakeholders grew four times faster than companies that did not.5 Collins and Porras showed that companies that consistently focused on building strong value-driven culture outperformed companies that did not, by a factor of six, and outperformed the general stock market by a factor of 156. The works of Sisodia, Wolfe, and Seth show that companies that care for all stakeholders equally—employees, customers, investors, partners, and society—and show a servant leadership style, outperformed the S&P 500. They also out performed the great companies identified by Jim Collins in his work Good to Great by significant margins over the long term7.
These evidences underscore the role of values in performance, which is the most important purpose of OB.
Age is considered an important determinant of values. Age cohorts, physical ageing, and life stages are usually discussed as the sub-determinants of age.
Age, gender, and education determine values.
Cohort By cohort, we refer to people who have undergone profound experiences, which are similar. For example, cohorts are those who faced partition, war, famines, economic boom, and so on. Inglehart suggests that the older generation, which faced great economic deprivation and consequent insecurity, value materialism more than the younger generation that has not faced these situations due to several state measures. As a result, younger cohorts tend to give higher value to hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, and, possibly, to universalism, but less priority to security, tradition, and conformity8.
Physical Ageing Strength, energy, cognitive speed, memory, and sharpness of the senses decline with age. These are irreversible. Therefore, with age, security values may become more important because a safe, predictable environment is more critical. This is because capacities to cope with change wane and hedonism value tends to reduce due to dulling of the senses and reduction of capacity to enjoy sensual pleasure. Similarly, achievement and power values may also reduce among older people.
Life Stage In early adulthood, one is busy establishing oneself in the workplace and in the family. Hence, there is tremendous demand for achievement. Therefore, at this stage, achievement and simulation values tend to overtake values of security, conformity, and tradition. In middle adulthood, people are more focused on preserving what they have achieved. Hence, risk-taking may reduce and people tend to embrace the values of security, conformity, and tradition. With retirement and loss of one of the partners, values of achievement, power, stimulation, and hedonism decrease further.
Overall, we find that age is correlated with values of security, tradition, and conformity.
Gender is another important determinant. Theories suggest that women are more relational, expressive, and community-oriented, and that men tend to be more autonomous, instrumental, and transactional. In general, women are more related and affiliated with others than men and show values related to autonomy and individualism less strongly9. Women show values related to care and responsibility more than men. Even when they do so10, they drive it through the value of justice and fairness than care and responsibility11. Therefore, it is evident that values of care, power, and status are influenced by gender12.
Education promotes openness, flexibility, and self-direction values13. Therefore, more educated people tend to challenge prevailing norms, expectations, and traditions, and these values would be less strong among them. In addition, education tends to make people embrace competitiveness as a value.
Let us now examine from where we imbibe our values.
Sources of values
Individual Even if you live in isolation from birth and are not taught values, you begin to espouse values such as hedonism, power, achievement, and stimulation. How do we come to possess them? There is no clear answer to this. However, research has been able to link conservatism and religiosity to genetic factors. Similarly, genetic influence on intellectualism, harmony, materialism, and conservatism are also documented through twin studies. Perhaps, evolutionary psychology would give us better answers in due course.14
Family The family is a strong social unit, and the values that are held by parents are passed on to children. In fact, family is perhaps the first and the most impactful source of values. A new family, which comes into being through marriage picks up a new set of values and usually tends to pass them to the children. They, in turn, modify the values, when they get married.15
Society and Community A society is a group of people involved with each other through continuous relations. They share distinctive cultures and institutions16 and have distinct values. For example, collectivism may be a value in the Eastern countries and people who live in this culture tend to imbibe that value. However, within that culture, you may belong to a scientific society, so imbibe the value of independence. Indians may be averse to risk but the Marwari community, a business community of India, tends to have risk as one of its values. See Box 6.1 also.
Cohorts Cohorts are groups that get bonded together. They can be based literally on anything. Generation cohorts such as baby boomers, Gen X, and silent generation have their unique set of values.18
Religion and Morality Values are our judgement about what is right and wrong. Although religion and morality are not the same,19 religion is a source for learning values. Religious values, combined with the reverence that society gives for these, act as source of values. For example, individualism is a strong protestant value. Interestingly, though compassion is a value that is propagated by all religions, some research suggest that less religious people tend to be more compassionate.20
Vedanta, a company run by Indian business tycoon Anil Agarwal, proposed mining of bauxite in the Niyamgiri Hills in Orissa. Based on a Memorandum of Understanding with the state government for assured raw materials, Vedanta built a factory at a huge cost. However, the Supreme Court ruled that the villagers of the area had the right to decide through voting whether mining should be done on Niyamgiri hills because they believe that Niyamgiri is the abode of Niyam Raja, a god who gives them everything. The community voted against the mining. The right of the community asserted by the court was based on the value of fundamental right (national value) guaranteed in the Constitution.17
National Culture Hofstead, a pioneer in culture research, has shown that values of individualism, collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, long-time orientation, task completion, and relationship with people are imbibed from culture.21 If you observe a person of Indian origin who has lived in the US for long, we often find that they have a mix of American and Indian values. This is because some values are sourced from the national culture and some from the Indian family environment in which the person grew up.
Environment The environment itself can become a source of values. For example, today, we live in an era of global warming and depleting resources; hence, sustainability is a value for most people.
Organisations and Teams In modern days, when we spend most of our time in organisations, they become strong sources of values. For example, organisations, which enforce integrity or have a strong corporate social responsibility programme affect individual values. In turn, they affect the values of the family and society, and propagate themselves. We can trace many of our values such as achievement orientation, meritocracy, selfdirection, and challenge, to modern organisations. Working in teams tends to have substantial influence on our values. For instance, diversity, collaboration, empathy, and team spirit are strong values in teams.22
Values can be classified in several ways based on the source (individual and family values), finality (terminal and instrumental values), motivational drive (self-transcendence and self-enhancement values), and so on. In this chapter, we look at three types of values, namely basic values, terminal values, and instrumental values. We have already seen terminal and instrumental values.
The value theory proposes that human beings have values and that they express linguistically. Linguistic expression enables them to communicate and propagate their values. Human beings have three distinct universal drives/requirements, namely biological, social, and survival. To these three drivers, we can link the values as tabulated in Table 6.1.23,24 Schwartz’s value theory dominates the literature on human values. We can convert these 10 values into a structure based on how competing or complimenting they are as given in Figure 6.1. For example, the value of self-direction and stimulation can be complimentary, whereas they compete with conformity, tradition, and security. Similarly, achievement and power are complimentary and compete with complimentary values of universalism and benevolence. The structure of this theory is very useful to predict behaviour. For example, those with high achievement value would also have power as a value, but they may not have universalism or benevolence as strong values.
Table 6.1 Basic values (from the work of Schwartz)
Figure 6.1: Competing and complimenting sets of values based on Schwartz’s value theory
Milton Rokeach studied the structure of values and classified them into two categories, namely terminal and instrumental (see Box 6.2). These values are created and influenced by culture, stages of life, and other factors.
Terminal values
Instrumental values
Value survey using these values is a popular method to identify values that people cherish.
Organisational values form the foundations of OB because they can predict individual behaviour. Values are more stable and define the purpose of the existence of a person.26 Values are learnt in isolation in an ‘all or nothing’ mode. For instance, either one has the value of self-direction or one does not have it. In addition, people undergo some discomfort to learn the values, which make them enduring.27 Let us now look at some evidences.
Organisations have purpose(s), which are usually articulated in the vision. A vision is reached when an organisation accomplishes its missions. Accomplishing the mission is done by the behaviour of its people. If an organisation did not have values, the individuals in the organisation might, by default, behave as per their own values, which may or may not fulfil the purpose of the organisation. This explains the need to have organisational values. To summarise, the values of the organisation should provide a guide or framework for the members of the organisations in accomplishing their part of the organisation’s mission.39 Hence, the role of value in creating and accomplishing the vision of an organisation needs special emphasis.
Values influence Organisational commitment, citizenship, learning, culture as also job satisfaction, burnout, team performance, team conflict and organisational integration.
Studies show that the congruence between the individual and the organisational values results in better performance than work supervision.40 Congruence is created by a systematic design of values. Organisational values do not emerge as naturally as personal values. They are deliberately created and designed so as to make them enduring. To be meaningful, these values should be accepted by the members of the organisation. What should organisations do to achieve this? To achieve value congruence, an organisation must have written values, and publicise and sell them to its members.41 People learn values through initial socialisation, and hence the need to include values in the initial onboarding. Since employees change frequently, there should be a mechanism to educate new members on the values. Senior leaders of the organisation must demonstrate the values and live by them,42 and older members must hold to the stated values.43 The organisation must demonstrate its values to the members through rules and policies.44
Systematic design of values is the answer to create value congruence between the individual and the organisation.
Figure: 6.2: The McKinsey 7S model and the central role of shared values
The 7S model is a framework for enhancing organisational performance and has stood the test of time. The framework is used to improve the performance of a company, examine the likely effects of future changes within a company, align departments and processes during a merger or acquisition, and determine how best to implement the proposed strategy. The model essentially shows that seven key elements in an organisation should be aligned for better and sustained performance (see Figure 6.2). The elements are strategy, structure, systems, staff, style and skills. However, the important point is that shared values connect the other six elements and therefore, have a linking role. Therefore, the model gives the framework to explain that without shared values, organisations are not likely to accomplish their vision.
Value champions are those who champion the cause of organisational values. They believe in them, help in their communication, volunteer to educate the newly inducted employees, act as the fulcrum for socialisation, function as value auditors, and point out policies that are not in alignment with the values of the organisation. They also challenge actions that are contradictory to the values of the organisation, provide feedback; in sum, own the responsibility for propagating and perpetuating the values of the organisation. They may belong to any department and any level, but a judicious mix from different levels of hierarchy in an organisation would help. They are selected carefully for their own values and congruence of these to the organisational values. They are then trained and given appropriate status. Managers who work directly with employees can become effective value champions. In most organisations, the HR department owns the responsibility of creating and monitoring the functioning of the value champions.
To embed values in an organisation, create value champions.
We have already discussed how the external environment can be a source of values. Let’s now have a look at how the information age can influence our values.
From Table 6.2, it is evident that the information age influences our values. We have greater tendency to give importance to values of achievement and universalism as against conformity, security, and tradition.
Table 6.2 Impact of the information age on values
Table 6.3 Impact of values on services business
The services business is the largest sector in India. It has unique characteristics, and many of our values influence the outcome of this business. Table 6.3 explains this, using Rokeach value framework that we have discussed earlier in this chapter.
Although values impact all management processes, their impact on planning and decision-making, organising, or creating structure and leading are perhaps the most pronounced. The value of conformity, security, and tradition would lead to less change-oriented decisions, whereas values of self-direction and stimulation would lead to more entrepreneurial decisions. Values of power, conformity, security, and tradition would lead to hierarchical structure, whereas self-direction, simulation, achievement orientation, and benevolence would lead to flat or matrix organisations. Similarly, values of universalism, benevolence, stimulation, and self-direction would lead to more democratic or empowering style of leading.
Analyse the following instances:
On 2 October 2009, The Times of India reported that property owners in upwardly mobile Bangalore were asking single female tenants to provide them with character certificates from the companies before the property was rented to them. The issue came to the fore when a 29-year single working lady was asked for the certificate.51 | On 14 June 2013, The Times of India reported another interesting incident. A co-education city school in Bangalore has separate classrooms for boys and girls … an arrangement to allegedly avoid students from getting distracted.52 | On 3 September 2013, Mail Online carried some interesting news and pictures. Apple’s iPhone 5 is four days away from release and people have lined up outside New York’s 5th Avenue Branch in full gear to slog it out. The phone certainly has some cool features such as an eight-megapixel camera, eight hours of talk time, and so on. However, why would people spend three nights out on the street in a queue to buy the phone?53 |
The common factor across the aforementioned, seemingly disconnected, news reports is ‘attitude’. An attitude can be defined as a positive or a negative evaluation of an attitude object. An attitude object is a generic term; it can be a person, an object, a situation, groups, objects, an event, places, activities, ideas, and so on.
Hogg and Vaughan define attitude as a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events, or symbols.54 Way back in 1935, Allport defined it as a mental and neural state of readiness, organised through experience, exerting a directive or dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related.55 Rokeach’s definition is similar to these, but he suggests that this orientation is learned. From these definitions, four important aspects related to attitude emerge:
Attitudes are orientations that help in appraising. These are learned and differ in accessibility.
Attitudes are cognitive schemas, which are woven in a complex way.
Attitude is a mental construct. For example, the requirement that single female tenants should provide character certificate is based on the mental construct about single females. An attitude is usually expressed as negative or positive towards the attitude object; for example, the negative attitude towards single female tenants. Attitudes are created through cognitive schemas. These schemas are complex and get intertwined to create an attitude that ultimately results in a behaviour. For example, in the aforementioned case, the interrelated schema can be neutral or slightly negative attitude towards women, negative attitude towards single status, negative attitude towards the morality of single women, and positive attitude towards the company they work for.
The creation of attitude involves three steps—attention, interpretation, and reconstruction. Attention leads to selection of some factors for creating the attitude. In this case, it is gender and marital status. Interpretation leads to making meaning out of these factors. For example, making meaning that single female tenants may lack moral values. Reconstruction leads to finding a reason for the action, which is renting conditionally to single female tenants.
There are a number of terms similar to attitude. Let us now differentiate between the terms.
Values Although Campbell suggests that there is little to differentiate between attitude and values,56 many authors identify values as more basic, and underlie attitudes. In other words, values are at least partially responsible to cause attitudes. A person may have only a few values, but may have hundreds of attitudes.
Belief System This refers to ideas about the universe in general. It represents a much larger system than attitude. An attitude is considered a subsystem of belief that is centred on an object or situation. For example, you may believe that senior citizens should be respected and cared for, but your attitude towards your old mother may not be very positive.
Ideology This represents something narrower than the belief system. It is organised around some institutions such as a political or religious organisation. An ideology is something that is shared by members within that institution, whereas attitude can be more individualistic. You may believe in communist ideology, yet at an individual level, you may believe in capitalist methods of doing business.
Opinion An opinion is a verbal expression of beliefs, attitudes, and values. It may not reflect the beliefs, attitudes, or values. For example, you may be inept or unwilling in expressing an opinion or deliberately flex it to convey something different.
Faith It is an evaluated assessment. Although its genesis may be in some belief or attitude, it reflects one’s acceptance that it is true and good. Delusion is quite the opposite of faith. Rather, it is an idiosyncratic faith maintained despite evidence to the contrary. Often, it is an indication of mental disorder.
Stereotype We had discussed this term in the chapter on perception. It refers to categorisation of something based on some assumed correlation; for example, judging a person to be drunkard merely because he was found among drunken people.
Sentiment It is closely related to attitude and values. However, it is seldom used in formal studies though the term still finds a place in casual conversation. It reflects a sense of understanding and empathy with a situation.
William J. McGuire57 hypothesised that attitude contains three components, namely cognitive, affective, and behavioural. This is usually referred to as the ‘ABC’ model.
The cognitive component of an attitude is conceptualised as a person’s factual knowledge of the attitude object; for example, how a person knows about a single woman seeking to rent an apartment. The affective component of attitude is said to consist of a person’s evaluation of the attitude object. In other words, it refers to the liking of the object or the emotional response towards the attitude object. An affective component creates a sensation such as pleasure or sadness or physical arousal such as blood rushing to your face when seeing a person towards whom you have a negative attitude. The behavioural component of an attitude involves the person’s overt actions directed toward the attitude object.
In sum, we can say that cognition, affect, and behaviour result in attitude. In other words, unless there is behaviour, it is difficult to identify the existence of an attitude. However, behaviour or lack of it should be seen in the light of intentions and the situation.
Let us examine the model using an example. You are a manager and observe that an employee comes late often, though she is known for achieving her target. You might make a mental note of the late coming. This is cognition. If you do not take note, there is no cognition and nothing more happens. Although you may take note, you may not take action because you like the person. In other words, when cognition is combined with affect, behaviour varies.
Does the manager taking no action mean that the manager has a negative attitude towards punctuality? This question is not so easy to resolve. The manager may have had intent to act because of his positive attitude towards punctuality, but did not do so because of his strong liking for the person or the productivity of the person.58 This suggests that the ABC model is complete only if we include the intention to behave. In addition, the model does not consider ‘situation’ as a component of attitude. However, both cognition and affect are influenced by situation. Recent research has begun to include situation as an important component of attitude.59
If we dig deeper and ask why we have positive or negative attitude towards attitude objects such as persons, objects, or situations, we may find that the reason lies in our values, beliefs, environment, or emotions. This means the ‘affect’ that we referred to in the ABC model is not so straight forward. It is influenced by several other factors, which make attitude a complex construct.60
The important characteristics of attitude are as follows:
Nature/Characteristics of attitude
Latency Attitudes are latent, and not directly observable. They can be observed only through behaviour.61
Pervasiveness Attitudes are pervasive because we have an attitude towards almost anything.62
Changeability Attitudes are changeable. This can be done if the knowledge about the attitude object or the affect towards it changes. If you have a negative attitude towards a strict boss, but then see the person taking a stand for your promotion, you are likely to change your attitude towards the boss.
Direction Attitudes can be positive, negative, or neutral. However, when asked to express your attitude about an object, you tend to give either a positive or negative tag to it, even if your attitude is neutral.63
Degree/Intensity Attitudes have degree. In other words, it is possible to classify positivism or negativism towards an attitude as strong or weak.64
Interconnectedness We have different attitudes, which are all interconnected, and also connected to deeper psychological processes such as values, ideologies, and so on. This interconnectedness affects how our attitude is manifested. For example, attitude towards a supervisor who is often sarcastic would be affected by our attitude towards his/her gender, our perception of what sarcasm is, our value of respect for individuals, and so on.65
Accessibility As attitudes have direction, degree, and intensity, all attitudes do not work the same way always. We are able to access some attitudes more readily than others, and this influences our behaviour.66
Accessibility of attitude depends on its direction, degree, and intensity.
We discussed accessibility as one of the characteristics of attitude. Let us dwell on it a little more. Let us say that whenever you purchase an ice cream, you opt for chocolate flavour. You seldom notice that there are other flavours displayed. This is because of a combination of the direction (positive or negative) and intensity (strongly positive or weakly positive) of attitude towards chocolate ice cream. In other words, you can access your attitude towards chocolate ice creams more easily than your attitude towards other ice creams. This concept is important because you can change the direction and intensity of your attitude towards other types of ice creams and make them more accessible. By doing so, you can change your behaviour.67 We shall learn more about attitude change later in this chapter.
Attitudes are important because they serve several functions for an individual.68 Daniel Katz identifies four fundamental functions of attitude as follows:69
Fundamental functions of attitude:
Other than these fundamental functions, attitude serves other important functions in an organisation:
Attitudes are largely learnt. We have also seen that attitudes have three important components, namely cognition, affect, and behaviour. Therefore, sources that create these components are largely responsible for forming attitudes. Let us discuss some of these here.
Sources of attitude
Cognitive Sources These include information that we receive every day, personal experiences, and experiences as member of a group. Today, social media is a very important source.
Emotional Sources Anger, indignation, frustration, love, and other emotions also contribute to forming attitudes. Have you ever observed students developing a positive attitude towards mathematics because the teacher is a likable person?
Significant Others Significant others mean people who are important to us. Parents, close friends, teachers, influential uncles, immediate supervisors, and leaders are examples of significant others. They influence attitude creation.
Social and Cultural Source These include the family, social groups, social media, and informal groups. Many of us would have observed how our college social group shapes our attitude towards smoking or copying in examinations. In the initiating case, young people who took to computers became a source for creating the attitude of others towards computers.
Personality and Temperament Personality factors such as openness, extroversion, and conscientiousness form our attitude towards work, change, and so on.75
Learning Learning, including self-learning, is at the root of attitude formation. For example, continuous exposure to some knowledge can form or change our attitude. This is the logic for the presence of the statutory warning on a cigarette packet.76
Using direction, we can classify an attitude as positive or negative. Using tendency, we can classify it as optimistic or pessimistic. Using source, we can classify it as family attitude, political attitude, social attitude, religious attitude, or job-related attitude.
Key job attitudes are related to:
Let us now have a closer look at some job-related attitudes:
That attitudes create altitudes is a common quotation with several variants. This statement underscores the importance of attitude and attitude change. Perhaps attitude change is the most crucial topic in OB. Hence, we dedicate considerable space for this feature in the subsequent section. Before we embark on the discussion on changing attitudes, it is important to understand theories related to attitudes. In this section, there is more focus on theories that relate to attitude formation and change. Some of the important theories are as follows:
Figure 6.3: Heider’s balance theory
Tripartite or ABC Theory As we have already discussed this theory earlier in this chapter under the head ‘ABC Model’ in Section IV, let us skip the discussion here.
Consistency Theory The basic assumption of this theory is that we do not like to be inconsistent. Therefore, if there is any inconsistency between various attitudes we hold, we try to achieve a balance by creating new ones or changing existing ones.
Balance Theory Heider’s balance theory is one of the earliest consistency theories.79 (see Figure 6.3). It explains attitude creation in a person (P) through a tripartite model. It has the person P and two other attitude objects namely, O and X. O and X can be another person, event, situation, or thing. For ease of explanation, let us take P as Shyam, O as Ram, and X as movies. If Shyam (P) has positive attitude towards Ram (O) and negative attitude towards movies (X), and Ram (O) has positive attitude towards movies (X), there is imbalance. To create balance, we can persuade Shyam to like movies. This might look bizarre to you but just replace movies with studies, and the situation would become very different. Let us take another situation. Shyam (P) has positive attitude towards Ram (O) and movies (X); but Ram (O) has negative attitude towards movies (X). This is also a state of imbalance. Now, if we can persuade Shyam to dislike movies (X), we can create balance. This too looks like a bizarre suggestion, but just replace movies with use of drugs and you will see the difference.
From the theory, it is possible to see that there are eight possible states—four balanced and four imbalanced states as given in Figure 6.4 and we can use this to create change in attitude.
Extensions to Balance Theory There are some important extensions to the balance theory. The first theory is by Newcomb who showed that the framework explains attitudinal change in groups because of group pressure for uniformity. It follows that the attitude of an individual can be influenced by including the persons in an appropriate work group.80 The second is by Abelson and Rosenberg who suggested that balance is restored not only by changing the attitude, but also through denial, bolstering or padding up strength, differentiation, and transcendence (a state of being above and beyond limits of material experiences). Organisations can use these as well. For example, strong organisational values such as change the world espoused by Microsoft in its initial stages, help in creating transcendence.81
Figure 6.4: Eight possible states of Heider’s balance theory
Affective-cognitive Consistency Theory This is another balance theory. Proposed by Rosenberg, it suggests that since people strive to get into balance, providing an individual with new information that changes the cognitive component of attitude, will tend to cause that individual to change the attitudes toward an object.82 This theory has wide application. For example, by providing data on the dangers of not changing, we can modify the attitude of employees towards change. It is one of the important methods suggested by Kotter in his book Leading Change to create a sense of urgency for change.
Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance It suggests that when faced with dissonance, the individual seeks to avoid situations or information that may increase dissonance. For example, if the business is changing, some people may have a negative attitude towards it because it causes a dissonance. In other words, the negative attitude is created to avoid the dissonance. How can we apply it? If, for example, you ask a person who has a negative attitude towards flexible working hours to write an essay on the benefits of flexible working hours, then, that person would have a new input, which is quite the opposite of his/her attitude. This would create dissonance and slowly, the attitude towards flexible working hours can be changed. In training programmes, we encourage people with negative attitude towards something to try doing it. For example, it could be making the person use statistics to interpret and/or forecast results. When the person does so and finds it useful, the result is dissonance about the negative attitude towards statistics. We can use this to change the attitude of the person towards use of statistics.83
Learning Theory Insko’s work on attitude and attitude change was done from classical conditioning perspective. We will discuss this theory in the chapter on ‘Learning’. The theory proposes that if new stimuli are paired with old stimuli and the new stimuli can create a positive emotional response, the attitude can be changed.84 For example, Nripen’s staff had negative attitude towards the use of computers for work. However, the new stimuli she created were that computers were useful, you can play cards using computers, and knowledge of computerised accounting can get you good post-retirement jobs. The new stimuli had positive emotional impact, which changed the old attitude towards use of computers for work.
Social Judgement Theory The core proposition of this theory is that a person’s current attitude serves as a judgemental anchor for new attitude. There is latitude between these aspects, which can be categorised into three as zone of acceptance, zone of rejection, and zone of non-commitment. Ego involvement or a high degree of attachment to the current attitude reduces the latitude of acceptance, increases latitude of rejection, and makes latitude of noncommitment virtually non-existent. Changing attitude of a person is a gradual process and therefore, it is prudent to target those in appropriate zone.85 Attitude surveys help to identify the zones. Let us imagine that Nripen conducted such a survey. Then, she would have found out those members in her staff with larger latitude of acceptance for computers, and targeted them first. Although she may not have adopted such scientific methods, intuitively, she targeted the young workforce, which she thought would have a larger zone of acceptance in its attitude towards use of computers. Perhaps she also knew that union leaders would have a large zone of rejection; hence, did not focus on them or negotiate with them to accept the change. It appears that her intuitive understanding of this theory was the key for her success.
Functional Theory In Section IV, we discussed the four functions of attitude, that is, utilitarian, knowledge, ego defensive, and value expressive. The central theme of functional theory is that changing an attitude requires understanding its motivational basis or its function for the individual. Knowing what function an attitude performs for a person, helps the person who wants to create the attitude change to design the message and actions. For example, if an attitude has the utilitarian function for Ms ‘A’, then the persuasive message should have utilitarian content, and not a value expressive content. Nirpen’s message of post-retirement employment scope for those with computerised accounting knowledge is an example. Therefore, we should identify groups of people, who have similar function, that the attitude serves, and design the attitude changing communications accordingly.86
Kelman’s Theory (levels of attitude change) Another model of attitude change was proposed by Kelman. He identified three levels at which attitude change can be observed, namely compliance, identification, and internalisation. Compliance results in change only at the surface level change. Here, the attitude change is intended only for the sake of others, usually the boss in the workplace context. The changed attitude is displayed only when the person is present. For example, you may display positive attitude towards ‘completing the work before leaving the workplace’, only with the boss. At identification level, the attitude is displayed both in private and public, but only when the source (your boss) is present. Therefore, you might tell everyone that you would never leave the office without completing the job, but would not hesitate to leave immediately after the boss leaves, irrespective of completion of work. At the next level, the attitude is internalised, and it becomes a part of the individual.87
We had discussed earlier that people have attitude on almost anything. These are formed from various sources such as the individual’s genetic make-up, the family, society, culture, and the organisation. In organisations, we have to reinforce desirable attitudes and change the undesirable ones. In fact, managers would spend most of their time doing exactly this—change attitude towards compensation, lay-off, performance management, targets to be achieved, technology induction, unions, other managers, and subordinates, among others.
Attitude Storage It is generally accepted that attitudes are stored in our memory. This means that managers have to deal with attitudes, which have been created before the individual joined the organisation.
Attitude Construction Another school of thought suggests that attitudes are spontaneously constructed88 because they depend on a variety of contexts. For instance, Nripen’s staff had positive attitude towards computers when their children at home used it for their work, but had negative attitude when they used it for their work at office. This means that attitude towards computers changes when they are at home with their children and at office, which gives some credence to the spontaneous construction school of thought.
Despite this anomaly, most people accept that attitudes are stored. It is important to understand this while attempting to change attitudes because we should address the stored components, and not merely the immediate situation, if we have to bring about an enduring change in attitude and ensure its internalisation.
Although attitudes as enduring constructs are stored, they can change over time, as discussed in the opening case. The attitude can become stronger or weaker over time, depending on the context. Hence, attitudes fall in continuum from non-attitudes to strong (positive/negative) attitudes.89 Strong attitudes influence thought and behaviour, are persistent, and resistant to change.90 Attitude strength can be identified through several indicators such as accessibility,91 certainty, importance,92 ambivalence,93 and elaboration.94 The strength of an attitude may depend on a combination of these indicators. The attitude of the staff of Nripen changing over time from strongly negative to strongly positive is an example. It is possible to measure the change using appropriate attitude surveys.
Attitude strength depends on,
Although most of us consider attitude as explicit, there are implicit attitudes. Implicit attitudes come to mind automatically as soon as the attitude object is presented. For instance, if you have a supervisor who is cynical all the time, the moment someone speaks of him/her in the cafeteria, you will feel the negative attitude even though the discussion may be on how he/she overcame a crisis. You would be unaware how this negative attitude presented itself. This happens because of automatic attitude activation or, in other words, the associative process and a more reflective or deliberate process.95 Knowing this helps us to move beyond the automatic attitude activation and arrive at a more reflective process. If we shift to a deliberate process, we will probably congratulate the supervisor for handling the crisis. From this discussion, it is evident that we have to guard against implicit attitudes, especially the negative implicit attitudes.
Attitudes can be explicit and implicit. Implicit ones manifest quite unconsciously.
There are three important models that explain the implicit-explicit paradigm.
Models of explicit and implicit attitude:
-MODE or Motivation and
Opportunity as determinants.
-MCM or Metacognitive.
-APE or Associative
Propositional Evaluation
Measuring attitude is very important to analyse if there is any change. Researchers have developed several scales for measurement.99 These measures can be direct or indirect. Direct measures are those in which a person is asked to report his/her attitude. Semantic differential scale100 and Thurstone scale101 are used here. A job attitude survey or a survey of your attitude towards a product is an example. In indirect scales, the individual is not asked to report his/her attitude, but the attitude is inferred from judgements and reactions. Methods such as thematic appreciation test or TAT102, the information error test103, implicit association test104, facial electromyography105, electroencephalogram or EEG,106 and physical behaviours such as non-verbal gestures, eye contact, or seating distances107 are used as indirect measures.
The Yale Communication Research programme by Hovland, Janis, and Kelley was an important experimentation in attitude change through communication. The study found that attitude change takes place because emphasis is placed on attention, comprehension, and acceptance. An individual must attend to and comprehend the communication, before acceptance can occur. Acceptance is faster if there are rewards, which could be extrinsic or intrinsic. The Yale study is of particular importance for OB since it indicates that organisations can create several learning and development programs to create the required attitudinal change.108 Further, by intelligent use of rewards, we can make attitude change more effective.
Attitude is a pattern of behaviour; it is forged out of previous learning and experience.109 It is an enduring organisation of one’s beliefs and is a predisposition.110 It follows that changing attitude is about changing the predisposition.111 Hence, it is difficult to change a well-embedded attitude.112 Attitude can be changed through persuasion or coercion. However, internalised changes in attitude are possible only through persuasion. Here, we focus on attitude change through persuasion.
In the context of attitude change through persuasion, there are three basic elements that come into play, namely the subject (whose attitude is to be changed), the message that intends to create the change, and the communicator or the person who is attempting to change the attitude.
Subject, message, and communication are key to attitude change.
In the earlier discussion, we saw various methods of attitude change. In this section, we look at the attitude-changing process namely elaboration Likelihood model, Low Effort processing and High Effort processing.
Elaboration likelihood model (ELM)128 is a theory about the process of attitude change. It suggests that the process of attitude change is based on the motivation and ability to assess the central merits of an issue or a proposition. Elaboration is a continuum comprising low to high motivation and the ability to think.
When the elaboration (motivation and ability) is high, people will assess the information related to the attitude in the light of knowledge they already have. They will arrive at a reasoned attitude which is well supported by information and are well-articulated to change their attitude. The process used is rigorous. When elaboration is low, people still change their attitude, but they use a less rigorous process. This leads us to two basic processes—low effort process of attitude change and high effort process of attitude change.
ELM caters to qualitative and quantitative distinction.129 Suppose people are shown a product in a television show along with several arguments for its purchase, they can make a judgement in two ways. One, they can judge the veracity of the arguments on the merits (qualitative). Alternatively, they can simply count the number of arguments (quantitative) and form an attitude towards the product. The former is high elaboration as it takes more cognitive effort. The latter is low elaboration as counting the number of arguments takes less effort. You should not think that it is an either or situation. Both high and low elaborations take place to create an attitude, but there is a tradeoff between the two. In other words, some attitude changes would involve more high elaboration than low elaboration, and vice versa.
Low-effort attitude change is possible through associative process or inference-based process. Let us now have a look at these processes (see Figure 6.5).
Associative process means we change the attitude by associating the attitude object with another positive or negative stimulus. We had a look at this under ‘Heider’s balance theory’. Associative process can be executed through conditioning, affective priming, or mere exposure. A celebrity in an advertisement is a classic example of this process.
Figure 6.5: Low-effort process of attitude change
In inference-based processes Sometimes people base their attitudes and also change them based on simple inferences, rather than high level of cognitive evaluation. Suppose you are sitting with a colleague whom you like a lot and he/she states that too much of workplace flexibility is not good. When he/she also states that flexible work time should be done away with, you might agree with him/her merely because you like that person, or disagree merely because you do not like that person. You do that without any elaborate cognitive analysis of the issues involved. This is a case of inference-based processing. Inference-based process of attitude change can take place through balance, attribution, heuristics, and priming.
In addition to the low-effort attitude change discussions, people tend to change their attitudes through effortful cognitive process, involving both motivation and ability to think (See Box 6.3 also). This happens when the issue is of high personal relevance or when people are directly accountable. It also needs good knowledge of the issues. There should not be any distraction if the high effort process is to take place. The high-effort process is vital for all major change initiatives. Initially, it was hypothesised that high-effort process included attention, comprehension, learning, acceptance, and retention of the information in a persuasive communication.159 Later, a model called reception and yielding became popular.160 This model assumed that attitude change is related to message recall, and that it can be demonstrated through such recall. However, message recall does not mean that one changes one’s attitude.161 After all, those who do not change the attitude can also recall messages. This led to focus on an individual’s subjective assessment of the desirability of the consequences linked to an attitude object.162
We have learnt that for high elaboration, a person should be both motivated and able to think. Motivation is created by the situation and the individual. When a situation affects a person individually, motivation for high elaboration is also high. Therefore, using first person pronouns or matching the message to someone’s self-concept can lead to high elaboration.130 Similarly, a message can be framed at individual variable too. For example, separate messages can be created for extroverts and introverts.131 People are also more motivated to examine information when they are personally accountable for the outcomes.132 Similarly, motivation to process information increases when people have lost control133 as would happen after someone receives a pink slip or when they are made to feel powerless134 as in an economic downturn. You might now understand why people quickly change their attitude under these conditions.
Motivation and ability to think are also affected by increasing the number of messages, especially if the messages come from multiple and independent sources.135 However, message repetition must not be too much as to create tedium/boredom.136 Incongruities increase processing; for example, if an expert puts forth weak arguments,137 you wonder if there is any case for change at all. Similarly, if the information does not come in a form that was expected, people have to face incongruity.138 When people have ambivalent attitudes, they process information more; perhaps to get rid of the ambivalence.139 Similarly, if there is an incongruity between an individual’s automatic and deliberate attitude, it increases the tendency to process more.140 Some people enjoy cognitive effort or thinking and such people form attitudes based on the quality of the information.141 However, those who do not enjoy thinking or use of cognitive effort, can be encouraged to do so by using a little ruse; for example, presenting the arguments after telling them that the message is simple to understand and process.142 In addition, people think more when the information is about their accessible attitudes and more so when it is counterintuitive to the existing attitude.143
Some factors that decrease processing are external distractions,144 fast-paced presentation,145 poor pacing of messages which we often see on television,146 time pressure to process,147 excessively increasing the recipient’s physiological arousal through exercises/other means,148 placing/seating the recipient in an uncomfortable posture,149 making the message more difficult to understand,150 and when the individual has no prior ‘generalised’ knowledge about the information.151
Some people tend to link the use of less high elaboration to bias. This is not so. Use of high elaboration or inability to do so, whether due to lack of motivation or ability, should not be confused with bias.
Let us now discuss some contemporary thoughts on the high elaboration mode.
Theory of Reasoned Action It suggests that attitudes will change if our perceptions about the likelihood of consequences associated with the new attitude are desirable. This theory accepts that attitude can change due to low elaboration models; for example, a good mood can create a positive attitude towards the attitude object,163 mere exposure can create attitudes,164 some people automatically believe whatever they hear and create or change attitudes165, repeated hearing increases validity of a piece of information166 even when such exposure is subliminal167, and some people perceive things positively in an automatic way or by nature.168 The theory of reasoned action accepts these and argues that all these can happen only if a person has some motivation and ability to retrieve information. Therefore, some proponents of this theory further argue that attitude change takes place only through thoughtful consideration.169 This is the crux of reasoned action. What should a manager do? This means that a strong data-based approach is very useful to create attitude change. Managers should make it a point to ensure that their communication has adequate data, presented in an easy-to-understand format.
Information Integration Approach This approach proposes that attitudes change when various attributions (mentioned under the high and low in earlier paragraphs) combine and integrate.170 There is very little clarity on how the combining process takes place. Some feel that the sum (or adding) of the attribution leads to integration when elaboration is low.171 When attribution is high, the average of the attribution results in integration.172 This means that greater the number of attributions we create, greater is the probability of change in attitude. What should a manager do? Mangers should focus on frequent communication, one-on-one discussions, meetings, conferences, expert talks, and informal group discussions, and work together to create attitude change.
Cognitive Response Approach In the cognitive response approach, when a message is received, people reflect on it and evaluate it in the light of prior attitudes that exist, and not merely on the contents of the message.173 They do so through three main processes, namely content of thoughts, amount of thoughts, and confidence in thoughts.
Self-persuasion with no Message People can be made to develop their own message by asking them to think of an attitude object in depth. For example, you can be coaxed to think about your attitude towards productivity or relation building with the team. The thoughts that you generate act as messages that change attitude.
Values are key to attitude change as they act as gatekeepers and drivers for acceptance of information and action.
Consider these cases where attitudes and behaviours do not match. Students have a negative attitude towards cheating in exams, yet most do so in subtle ways. Smokers have a negative attitude towards smoking, yet they smoke. Obese people have a negative attitude towards obesity, yet they do little to get on with exercise and diet. People have a positive attitude towards exercise, yet a few exercise regularly. Just because you have a positive attitude towards charity, you do not start donating money. It follows that changing attitudes may not necessarily end up in changed behaviour. The reason for this is moral hypocrisy.183
Let us now address this vexed problem. Research has shown that often, there is little relationship between attitude and behaviour. Studies show that attitudes predict behaviour when other influences are minimised, when the attitude is specific to an action rather than a general one, and when we are reminded of it often or when the attitude is formed through some unique and forceful experience. Minimising other influences is a yeomen task. Some authors have identified as many as 40 such influences that could have a bearing on behaviour. For example, though you may have negative attitude towards bribing, you may still bribe a train ticket conductor for a seat. In other words, greed wins when there is no physical control. Similarly, your specific attitude towards recycling rather than general attitude towards environment predicts recycling behaviour.184 Attitude also predicts behaviour when we are reminded of it.185 This is the reason why despite your positive attitude towards studies, you do so only when your parents remind you of it.
So far, we looked at how attitudes create behaviour and the challenges involved in it. There is also strong evidence that behaviour changes attitude. This is because one’s behaviour acts as input to oneself to change an attitude. This is the reason why role plays tend to change the attitude of a person. Have you heard that acting before a mirror can change our attitude? Forcing yourself to sit near a person you do not like or forcing yourself to talk to someone about whom you have a negative attitude also changes your attitude towards that person. George Kelly, an eminent psychologist, is a key proponent of the ability of behaviour to change attitude.186 According to him, each individual looks at the world through his/her own preconceived notion about the world. He called it constructs. Individuals attempt to gain new experiences through behaviour. For example, you might be obese and go to a gym reluctantly. The instructor there encourages you to try out some interesting exercises and these experiences change your attitude towards exercises. Adult behaviour is usually in line with attitude; however, this is not so in children. They role model their behaviour on others, and this creates their attitude over a period.
The information age has been responsible for shaping many of our attitudes. Attitudes towards globalisation, diversity in the workplace, work from home, attitude towards entrepreneurship, and risk-taking are just a few examples. Here, we look at how various characteristics of the information age influence attitudes.
Globalisation Studies have shown that globalisation creates both positive and negative attitudes. Attitude towards globalisation varies across countries. Richer people and the younger generation have more positive attitude towards globalisation.187 In 2013, the Confederation of Indian Traders launched a protest against FDI in retail. As a result, FDI could not be rolled out smoothly.188 Due to people’s attitude towards globalisation, WTO, and the FDI, such protests occur frequently.
Information Flow and Constant Changes of Images and Messages The information age facilitates high- and low-effort process of attitude change. It is possible to give an affect-driven commutation through visuals to enhance the effect. The frequency and intensity of the messages can also be controlled. The numerous messages that you get on your mobile phone is a good example of the impact of the information age on the efforts to change your attitude. If you are in India, nowadays you get messages even from the Prime Minister’s office aimed at changing your attitude.
Social and Economic Networks Networks, especially the social media networks, increase the ability of the crowd to influence your attitude. The overthrowing of the president of Egypt or the social media effort of the Indian Prime Minister’s office, pressure of economic networks such as the G8 forcing us to revise our attitudes towards globalisation and FDI including the ranking on ease of doing business published by the World Bank have powerful impact on our attitudes.
Innovation Innovations can influence our attitude towards technology and way of doing things. Apple has user-friendly innovations that shape people’s attitude towards it and this makes them queue up the whole night to buy their newly launched products. The Indian railways has developed a smooth online reservation system, and changed our attitude towards the railways.
Table 6.4 Impact of attitude on service economy
In India, the services economy is a dominant sector. Table 6.4 describes how some of the important characteristics of services economy can be affected by attitude.
The attitude of managers towards the business environment is perhaps the most important factor that goes into planning and decisions in business investment. If managers have negative attitude towards the economic environment, chances are that they would never decide on a high target. They may also shy away from taking bold decisions. If the manager has an attitude that employees are lazy and need constant supervision, it would be natural to find a mechanistic structure in the organisation. If the attitude towards the employee is vice versa, you can expect a flat and empowered structure. A manager’s attitude towards diversity, gender, age, competency, and experience would have a major impact on staffing policies and decisions. A positive attitude towards trusting people is the greatest predictor for designing control measures in an organisation. This attitude also determines the leadership style—whether it is task-oriented, people-oriented, or both. Although people have attitudes on almost anything, it is possible for managers to write down some of their own attitudes related to management functions and predict how they are likely to behave.
In this chapter, we looked at values and attitudes, which are the two important factors that influence our behaviours at a fundamental level. Values can be defined as serious and deeply held normative principles which guide a person’s beliefs, attitudes, and behaviour. Values are abstract, enduring, have some finality or terminality, and help to guide and motivate us. Individuals, teams, stakeholders, and organisations have their own values. When there is congruence between the values of various stakeholders, the organisation gains strength. Although enduring, values change, over time. They are determined by age, gender, education, stage of one’s life, and cohorts. The source of our values are our family, society, organisation, national culture, and of course, our genetic make-up.
Values can be classified as instrumental or terminal. Instrumental values act as tools to achieve terminal values. Rokeach identifies 18 instrumental and 18 terminal values. Schwartz, another scholar, has proposed the value theory in which he identifies five dimensions, namely openness to change, conservation, self-enhancement, self-transcendence, and hedonism. There can be many values under each of these dimensions. Value is a central component in the organisational vision. The information age has a unique influence on our values. Values also impact all businesses, particularly the services business and the management process; hence, the need to have an excellent understanding of values.
Attitude is a relatively enduring organisation of beliefs, feelings, and behavioural tendencies towards socially significant objects, groups, events, or symbols. We have attitudes on almost anything. Most attitudes are learnt, and they have an orientation—positive, negative, optimistic, and pessimistic—just to name a few. We can access some attitudes more easily than others and these influence our behaviour more. Attitude is created in three steps—attention, interpretation, and reconstruction. The ABC model is the most influential in explaining attitude. It means that cognition comes into play and we mentally recognise something. This is further influenced by affect which leads to behaviour. It follows that by changing the cognition through information or changing our affect for something, we can change our attitude.
We can classify attitudes in many ways such as political attitude, religious attitude, and so on. In workplace, we classify them as attitude towards productivity, job satisfaction, engagement, change, and workplace social systems such as teams and groups. There are several theories, which explain attitude and attitude change such as ABC model, and balance theory. The latter is widely used to understand attitude change. In essence, the balance theory means that people like to remain in a state of balance. If there is an imbalance either because of holding on to two differing attitudes or for any other reason, people tend to change the attitude to revert to a balanced position. Festinger’s cognitive dissonance is a variant of this theory, which suggests that when there is a cognitive dissonance, people tend to change the attitude to remove the dissonance. Kelman’s theory explains the difference between peripheral and more permanent change in attitude. He uses compliance, identification, and internalisation to explain the degree of permanence.
Managers spend most of their time changing their own attitudes or the attitude of others. Fortunately, we can measure attitude in different ways to see if our effort to change attitude is bearing fruit. Communication is central to attitude change. The nature of the subject whose attitude is to be changed, the content of the communication, and the credibility of the communicator have a bearing on attitude change. The elaboration likelihood model (ELM) is the most influential model that explains the attitude change process. Some change attitude through deliberate and rigorous mental effort, and this is called high elaboration model. Some do it with little rigour, and it is called low elaboration model. There are many methods under each category that a manager can adopt. As in the case of values, the information age has a significant impact on our attitudes. Our attitudes impact business, particularly, the services business, and management functions.
Perception, values, and attitudes are closely linked and have a tremendous influence on our behaviour. Hence, you must learn these concepts very well. You must systematically follow up the applications discussed in the chapter as they will make you an effective leader in the workplace. A number of contemporary research findings are included in this chapter. Although they were not deliberated in depth, you should follow them up as they will help you groom yourself into a competent manager and a popular and effective leader.
What do you understand by transgenders and what is your attitude towards them? Would you recruit a transgender into your company and treat the person as equal to others? Your answer may be positive; but hurdles to make this happen will be plenty.
The Supreme Court of India gave its verdict that a transgender is to be considered as a third gender and brought the curtain down over the go-slow tactics the government had adopted, probably fearing public repercussions. However, does a law change attitudes? That is the question we need to answer.
Such issues are plenty in organisations today; more so in a globalised work context. Homosexuals and people’s attitude towards them in organisations is another vexing issue. On 30 October 2014, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, one of the most venerated companies, is a homosexual. In fact, Tim had announced it because he felt that he had to do so to help people change their attitude towards homosexuality. Shortly after this, the monument to Steve Jobs, the iconic former CEO of Apple who passed away in October 2011 was taken down in Russia, and Vitaly Milonov, a lawmaker in St. Petersburg in Russia called for banning Tim from travelling to Russia.
In many countries, organisations are creating systems to support diversity in which acceptance of homosexuals, transgenders, and other such hitherto untouchables are welcomed and encouraged. However, most organisations are still struggling to create a positive attitude towards them. When young leaders join organisations, they will be faced with a new reality in the globalised world—this is diversity in its widest sense or acceptance of different culture, gender, homosexuals, and transgenders as part of such diversity.
Prepare your attitudes to face such challenges and lead your organisations.
Who changes their attitude more—younger or older people? This is an important question for a business graduate student who will soon join the workforce and be responsible for change and productivity. Many subordinates and peers may be older than you in age in the workplace, though they are your subordinates.
There are two basic models to understand the age versus change paradigm. The first one is called the ‘impressionable years’ model. This suggests that young people are especially open to attitude change, primarily because they are more impressionable at a young age. The second model suggests that attitude change takes place throughout life, and this is called ‘lifelong openness’ model.
Studies in the US have shown that attitudes of older people are more stable.189 The first possible explanation is that younger people are more impressionable or are more open to change. A second explanation is that they have more change inducing experiences than older people. The former is called psychological explanation and the latter is called lifestyle explanation. In other words, there are two issues here—one is the ability or openness to change, and the other is the opportunity to change.
Some researchers have found that older people are less prone to change their attitude; but they also do not resist change. In other words, they do not resist considering information opposing their attitudes. Hovland, a noted researcher, commented that people change more in the laboratory than in real life because the former exposes them to a variety of experiences than real life. In other words, experiences lead to attitude change rather than age.
Tom Tyler of the University of California and Berkley and Regina Schuller of the York University have literally punched holes in the traditional thinking. They found that older people are as open to change as younger people and that older people possibly have fewer experiences that induce attitude change, but younger ones have less positive experiences than the elderly. This is an important study because most organisations complain that older generations are not willing to change. Perhaps organisations too fail to create adequate experiences that induce change.190
Need some help with this? Go to Answers to Test Your Understanding given at the end of the book.
Need some help with this? Go to Answers to Test Your Understanding given at the end of the book.
For Lecture-driven Teaching Those institutions which use lecture method can follow the standard pattern of lecture and quizzes. Thereafter, they can go to the experiential learning mode by attempting the application challenges.
For Case-driven Teaching Institutions that follow case method (participant-centred learning) may use the case mentioned below. To enhance the experiential learning, they can attempt one or both the application challenges.
Title of the case: Development of a Multinational Personnel Selection System
Originator of the case: Harvard Business School
Case No: 9067C41-PDF-ENG
Source/available through: Harvard Business School publishing
Brief description: This is a case on selection but the discussion of developing it highlights intercultural differences in values and workplace attitudes. In addition, this case highlights how attitudes can influence organisational work. Focus on the attitude aspects rather than on the process of creating a selection system.