6

VALUES AND ATTITUDES

Definition, Nature and Scope of Values

Definition

 

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?

Nature/Characteristics of Values

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

• Enduring
• Relative
• Terminal
• Instrumental
• Transcendence
• Abstractness
• Motivational
• Guiding

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.

Scope

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.

Importance of Values in OB

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.

Determinants of Values

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.

Sources of Values

Let us now examine from where we imbibe our values.

 

Sources of values

• Individual
• Family
• Society
• Community
• Cohorts
• Religion
• National culture
• Environment
• Organisation

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

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

Types/Classification of Values

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.

Basic Values and Value Theory

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.

 

Terminal and Instrumental Values (often referred to as Rokeach’s values)

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 These are values that we cherish and have an end in itself. For example, mature love is a terminal value. Similarly, happiness is a terminal value. People strive to achieve these values because it is extremely important for them.

  Box 6.2
  Terminal and Instrumental Values²⁵ (Rokeach)

  Terminal values

  • True friendship
  • Mature love
  • Self-respect
  • Happiness
  • Inner harmony
  • Equality
  • Freedom
  • Pleasure
  • Social recognition
  • Wisdom
  • Salvation
  • Family security
  • National security
  • A sense of accomplishment
  • A world of beauty
  • A world at peace
  • A comfortable life
  • An exciting life

  Instrumental values

  • Cheerfulness
  • Ambition
  • Love
  • Cleanliness
  • Self-control
  • Capability
  • Courage
  • Politeness
  • Honesty
  • Imagination
  • Independence
  • Intellect
  • Broad-mindedness
  • Logic
  • Obedience
  • Helpfulness
  • Responsibility
  • Forgiveness
• Instrumental Values These are values that help us to reach the terminal values, and therefore, they are not an end in itself. For example, love is an instrumental value that can help us reach mature love. Similarly, forgiveness or helpfulness can also act as instrumental values to reach mature love. Independence, which is an instrumental value, can lead to freedom.

Value survey using these values is a popular method to identify values that people cherish.

Organisational Values form the Foundation of OB

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.

• Values affect both organisational commitment²⁸ and organisational citizenship behaviour²⁹. Research by Finegan, Cohen, Arthaud-Day, Levent, and others also reinforce this idea.³⁰
• Work-related values predict attitude towards change³¹ and organisational learning.³²
• Values influence organisational culture and job satisfaction.³³
• Values enhance work engagement and lower burnout.³⁴
• Team performance and team behaviour are influenced by values³⁵,³⁶ and help to reduce/resolve team conflicts.³⁷
• Values impact organisational integration.³⁸

Values are Central to Organisational Vision

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.

Value Congruence Leads to Better Performance

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.

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

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.

Impact of the Information Age on Values

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.

 

 

Impact of Values on the 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.

Impact of Values on Management Processes

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.

Definition

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:

• Attitude is an orientation that results in behaviour towards people, objects, things situations, events, and issues that surround us.
• It acts as a ready aid to decision-making or in other words, it makes decision-making easy.
• The orientation is learned, rather than genetic.
• Due to memory, some attitudes are more accessible than others. Those which are more accessible, influence behaviour.

 

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.

Differentiating Attitude From Other Terms

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.

Components of Attitude (Also Referred to as Attitude Structure, Attitude Systems, ABC Theory and ABC Model)

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

Nature/Characteristics of Attitude

The important characteristics of attitude are as follows:

 

Nature/Characteristics of attitude

• Latency
• Pervasiveness
• Changeability
• Direction
• Degree/Intensity
• Interconnectedness
• Accessibility

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

Accessible Attitudes

 

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.

Functions/Benefits/Importance of Attitude

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:

• Utilitarian
• Ego defensive
• Value expressing
• Knowledge framing

1. Utilitarian function: It is also called instrumental and adjustive function. It creates tendencies to approach or avoid an attitude object. It helps to avoid unpleasant things and embrace pleasant things.
2. Ego-defensive function: Many situations, especially those that create frustration or misfortune, denigrate our self-esteem, and we immediately deny, project, or rationalise them. We do so instantly by using our attitude towards the attitude object. For example, we develop a negative attitude towards a boss who admonished us. This helps us to protect our self-esteem.
3. Expressing values: It helps us to express our central values and selfconcept. For example, we develop a strong, positive attitude towards other people with similar values. This helps us to establish our self-identity and gain social approval.
4. Knowledge It helps us to frame our knowledge in the light of continuous information flow. For example, you may receive continuous flow of positive and negative information about drinking coffee. Then, having an attitude towards coffee makes it easier to give meaning to the information flow.

Other than these fundamental functions, attitude serves other important functions in an organisation:

• Attitudes Orient Attention If everything that happens around us catches our attention equally, we will be overwhelmed. Accessible attitudes help us in focusing on some stimuli. For example, the attitude of a mother towards the child helps her to focus attention when it cries, even if there is a lot of noise around.⁷⁰
• Promotes Meaningful Categorisation Attitude objects can be categorised in multiple ways. For example, a sword can be categorised as something that protects, destroys, or adorns a wall as decoration. A manager may categorise an employee as a valuable asset or a problem because of the manager’s attitude towards the employee.⁷¹
• Helps in Decision-making Researchers have found that the speed of decision-making increased when people were exposed to situations where they could create attitude towards an object.⁷² For example, the positive attitude towards computers created by Nripen led to the decision by the unions to learn computers.
• Enhances Quality of Decision-making Several experiments by Fazio have also shown that the quality of decisions improve due to accessible attitudes. What did Nripen do to change things in her office? She merely created a positive attitude towards computers, and made them more accessible through her constant communication on the benefits of computers.⁷³
• Frees Resources for Coping with Stressors Using computers were stressful to the staff of Nripen. When the appropriate attitude was created, it freed their cognitive resources, which were earlier used to resist computerisation, leading to stress. An interesting study by Fazio and Powell⁷⁴ shows how students’ attitude towards a course impacts stress created by that course.

Sources of Attitude

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
• Emotional
• Significant others
• Social
• Cultural
• Personality and temperament
• Learning

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

Types of Job-related Attitudes

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:

• Productivity
• Job satisfaction
• Engagement
• Change
• Workplace social system

Let us now have a closer look at some job-related attitudes:

• Productivity-related attitudes result in goal setting, accountability and reporting.⁷⁷
• Job satisfaction-related attitude leads to turnover intentions.⁷⁸ This attitude is usually created by equity, procedural fairness, nature and substance of the work, peers, and management.
• Engagement-related attitudes are job commitment, job engagement, job involvement, participation, coaching, mentoring, growth opportunities, supervisor attitude, cynicism, and organisational justice.
• Change-related attitudes are openness, risk-taking, entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial attitude, willingness to change, and innovation.
• Workplace social system-related attitudes refer to our attitude towards diversity, group work, trust, and support.

Theories of 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:

• Tripartite or ABC Theory
• Consistency theory
• Balance theory
• Affective-cognitive consistency theory
• Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance
• Learning theory
• Social judgment theory
• Functional theory
• Kelman’s Theory: levels of attitude change

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

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

Attitude Formation

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.

Attitude Strength

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,

• Accessibility
• Certainty
• Importance
• Ambivalence
• Elaboration

Implicit and Explicit Attitudes

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.

• The motivation and opportunity as determinants (MODE) model⁹⁶ suggests that implicit measures tap stored associations, whereas the explicit ones tap not only the stored association, but also the immediate context. For example, while the implicit attitude would tap only the cynicism of the supervisor, the explicit attitude will take into account the current situation (supervisor solving a crisis) as well.
• The metacognitive model (MCM)⁹⁷ suggests that attitude object (supervisor in our case) can be linked to positive or negative evaluations (in this case cynicism which is negative) using validity tags. The current situation also acts as a validity tag. When the tag is attached, the implicit attitude becomes explicit. In this case, when the tag of successful handling of a crisis is attached, the implicit negative attitude becomes explicit positive attitude. You can understand this better if you recall that under the heading ‘storage versus construction’, where we discussed that there is a school of thought, which believes that attitudes are spontaneously created rather than stored.

   

  Models of explicit and implicit attitude:

  -MODE or Motivation and
  Opportunity as determinants.

  -MCM or Metacognitive.

  -APE or Associative
  Propositional Evaluation

   

• A third model is the associative propositional evaluation or APE model.⁹⁸ This suggests that implicit attitudes are created from affective associations, and can differ substantially based on the context. After the association happens, propositions are created. These propositions (propositions related to the crisis handling in our case) help to modify the associations created at the time of creating the attitude (cynicism situation). This would result in a positive explicit attitude towards the supervisor in this context. This is a very important concept for managers because it proposes that by creating positive situations, we can change the attitude of a person towards us.

Measurement of Attitude

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 Study

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.

Methods to Change Attitude

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

• Involvement of the subject is considered an excellent method to change attitude. It is for this reason that when people participate in a camp, live in another culture, or come in contact with other people, their attitudes towards such elements change.¹¹³ Similarly, when employees and managers are sent for training, or if they get involved in an activity or case discussion, their attitude tends to change.
• Preparing a person in advance helps in changing attitude. For example, if a supervisor prepares his/her subordinate prior to attitude training, the change would be more effective.¹¹⁴

Message

• Studies have also shown that a coercive message is not effective when it comes to changing attitudes.¹¹⁵
• Stating the conclusions explicitly is an effective method of changing the attitude of the less educated people; some studies put it as twice as effective.¹¹⁶

   

  Subject, message, and communication are key to attitude change.

   

• Presenting both sides of the argument is very effective when we handle well-educated people, whereas this is not so with the less educated people, wherein it is preferable to give only one side of the argument.¹¹⁷
• Immediate reinforcement of the message with more messages/rewards is more effective than a delayed reinforcement.¹¹⁸ Therefore, if a person comes back from training after learning a new attitude, then deploy the person in a job where such attitudes are required to be used immediately.
• An indirect message is more effective than a direct one and for this reason what is overheard is more effective in changing the attitude than what is directly told.¹¹⁹ Managers can therefore use informal groups and water cooler or coffee machine talks as an effective means to change attitude.

Communicator

• Research has found that high credibility speakers are able to create attitude changes more easily.¹²⁰ Here, credibility means the image of the speaker in the minds of the subject.
• Liked or well-accepted people in an organisation can create better effect on the subjects.¹²¹
• Divergent position of the communicator creates greater change in highly credible situations. For example, no employee would generally have a positive attitude towards pay cut. However, during economic slowdown, when people are losing jobs, if a person or communicator who was originally strongly against a pay cut takes a position for pay cut and communicates that, there will be greater change. Some important research findings are:

• One-on-One One-on-one interaction is more effective than other methods to create attitude change.¹²² Using one-on-one conversation during performance appraisal or taking the group to a resort, which facilitates more intimate interaction are effective methods that a manager can adopt to create attitude change.
• Groups Research in educational field has shown that when discussions are conducted in groups with children and parents, there is a higher degree of change in attitude. Perhaps this happens because of greater empathy.¹²³ A lesson from this can be used in organisations also and discussion in groups with different stakeholders is likely to create greater attitude change.
• Role Playing When protagonists immerse themselves in role play, there is greater change in attitude.¹²⁴
• Debating If you ask a person with a particular attitude to debate on the issue from the opposite perspective, greater attitude change takes place.¹²⁵ For example, if there is a person who believes that women do not make good managers, making him/her debate on the opposite view, can change his/her attitude. This can be an effective classroom strategy.
• Videotaping Some attitudes such as attitude towards dressing or a way of speaking can be more effectively changed by providing a person greater insight into his/her attitude. Often, this can be done effectively through videos.¹²⁶
• Theatre and Art Theatre and art have been used effectively for changing attitude.¹²⁷ Similarly, showing a suitable film can also help in changing attitudes. This is particularly effective when one has to address cultural attitude; for example, to change the attitude of a Western employee towards Asian culture.

Attitude Changing Process

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

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 Processing

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.

• Conditioning In attitude change through conditioning, we associate an attitude object with something desirable/likable. For example, we may change our attitude towards a product because a celebrity endorses it. We shall learn more about in the chapter on ‘Learning’.
  

  Figure 6.5: Low-effort process of attitude change

• Affective Priming This is also called backward conditioning, and is similar to conditioning. For example, if you present a pleasant picture followed by the attitude object, the response to the attitude object tends to be more positive.¹⁵² A simple example is where a happy family is shown in a commercial, prior to the use of product by that family.

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.

• Balance This is based on balance theory.¹⁵³ It suggests that people do not want to create unpleasant situations such as disagreeing with someone they like. Therefore, they change their attitude.
• Attribution This theory suggests that people make inferences about themselves and others after observing behaviours and situations that surround those behaviours.¹⁵⁴ If you are working in a team, you can observe your own attitude towards the work in relation to that of others; then you may change your attitude. Here, the change is attributed to others in the team and the environment; not to any effortful cognitive process.
  • A variant of the above is based on self-perception theory. When people know their own behaviour well, they can infer their attitudes from those behaviours and then change the attitude. For example, a person who becomes self-aware of obesity may simply change the attitude towards food without going through any elaborate cognitive process.¹⁵⁵ If an organisation helps a person to increase self-perception of himself/herself on an issue like punctuality, the person is likely to change his/her attitude towards punctuality without going through any elaborate cognitive assessment of punctuality.
  • Over justification is another process of attribution. For example, if you reward people with money for doing something every time, they might attribute that they are doing the job for money and may simply stop doing it. This is the precise reason why excessive rewards tend to become weary.¹⁵⁶
• Heuristics People often use heuristics or the simple rule of thumb to change their attitude; for example, people simply accept what an expert says and change their attitude without using any cognitive effort to evaluate the information that an expert disseminates. This is the reason why talks by experts often lead to attitude change easily.¹⁵⁷
• Priming This means exposing a person to a situation so that the person changes the attitude. Suppose you ask a person about the importance of training when he/she is in the training centre as against when she/he is on the shop floor, he/she is likely to express more positive attitude towards training when in the training centre than when on the shop floor. ¹⁵⁸

High Effort Processing

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

Contemporary Thoughts on Attitude Change

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.

• Content in thought means that for changing attitude, there should be more favourable thoughts than unfavourable ones.¹⁷⁴ Good mood and messages from experts are considered effective ways to change attitudes. An offshoot of this is inoculation. If you tell someone that a speaker is going to persuade him/her, typically, he/she counter argues.¹⁷⁵ Therefore, if you give him/her an easy to ‘counter argue’ message, his/her resistance tends to decrease. In other words, give easy-to-counter argue messages before making a forceful argument.¹⁷⁶ This method is called inoculation. For example, if you tell the employees that an expert is going to persuade them that it is better to leave the food in the canteen to the canteen manager than to a committee, employees will counter argue. If you tell them that it is better to leave the festival celebration to an event manager, they will counter argue. However, after inoculating them this way, if you tell them that an expert is going to discuss with them the benefits of a union-free organisation with internal mechanisms for correction of grievances, the resistance is likely to be lower than if the inoculation method was not used.What should a manager do? Plan inoculation messages well and use them when you expect strong opposition.
• Amount of thoughts means that as people develop more positive thoughts to a message, possibility of attitude change increases, and the vice versa is also true. If the amount of positive thought-based messages is increased, people tend to think more about them and you can induce high elaboration route.¹⁷⁷ What should a manager do? Create positive messages, talk of the attractive future, and communicate in a positive environment.
• Confidence in thoughts means that if the message elicits a thought in people and they have confidence in that thought, they tend to take the high elaboration route. Similarly, if a person has confidence in the negative aspects, the chances of not changing the attitude are equally high.¹⁷⁸ Confidence in thought comes from several variables such as expertise, feeling of power, emotions, self-affirmation, body postures, and many others.¹⁷⁹ What should a manager do? In the message, reassure people of their expertise and ability. Remind them of the challenges they have overcome, and gently remind them how much people admire them because they can support change.

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.

• Role playing is a typical method for self-persuasion. Attitudes change when the role player takes the role seriously and develops a compelling cognitive argument in support of the role.¹⁸⁰
• Mere thought occurs when you might have attended some workshop in which the facilitator may have asked you to think of one behaviour that you want to change and write that down. You may also have observed that the facilitator does not give you too much of time to do that. As a result, you focus on something and quickly write down something. The purpose of this exercise is to create thoughts that polarise your attitude.¹⁸¹ In other words, you create a message for yourself on what you need to change. Research shows that people tend to focus on a selective subset of thoughts when given adequate time, but not when given too much time to do so.¹⁸² It is this insight that your facilitator is leveraging.
• Self-persuasion is seen as a result of dissonance process. We have discussed dissonance earlier in different contexts. When a person holds two different cognitive schemas about an attitude object, there is an inherent conflict and consequent discomfort. This makes people think of the dissonance and changes their attitude. Cognitive dissonance-based attitude change is one of the most researched and discussed topics in social psychology. What should a manager do? Create training programmes with a lot of role plays, have frequent workshops, and ask lot of open-ended questions that create dissonance.

Interrelationship Between Perception, Values and
Attitudes

• Perception, values, and attitudes are closely related. Hence, there is always some confusion between them. Values act as gatekeepers and drivers for acceptance of information and action. Let us take the example of an excellent employee, Ms ‘A’ who is graded below average because of the bias of a manager. Ms ‘B’, another employee, who has ‘equality’ as her value observes it and this becomes a stimulus. Ms ‘B’ would then create a percept about the manager. Percepts have cognitive content; bias in this case. This cognitive content becomes the primer to create an attitude towards the manager or the organisation. Depending on how important the value of ‘equality’ is to Ms ‘B’, she might ignore it, bring it up in a survey, talk about it to others and may even complain about it to the officials even though she is not the one who suffered the consequences of the bias.

   

  Values are key to attitude change as they act as gatekeepers and drivers for acceptance of information and action.

   

• If Ms ‘B’ does not have equality as a value, the incident would be just a passé and would not create a percept of injustice. There would be no input for creating an attitude based on the value of equality.
• Now, if Ms ‘B’ likes the manager who did this injustice, then, despite the percept creation, she may not develop a negative attitude towards the manager because her ‘affect’ would block creation of such an attitude.
• On the contrary, if Ms ‘B’ did not like that manager, this input from the percept could create a stronger negative attitude towards the manager. Yet, she may not talk about it or complain or report about it unless equality is a value for her. Her actions would also depend of how strong that value is for her. Thus values inhibit or accentuate behaviour created as a result of some attitude.
• We can easily spot this behaviour in the society. Equality may be an important value to most of us and most of us also know about the glass ceiling. However, all of us do not talk about it, write about it, or support a group, which attempts to create awareness about it or resist it.
• In sum, stimulus creates a percept and it leads to some behaviour. However, the nature of that behaviour depends on our values. Perception, attitudes, and values are linked, but distinct. Together, they inhibit or accentuate an action.

Do Attitudes Change Behaviour or do Behaviours
Change Attitudes?

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.

Behaviour Changes Attitude

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.

Impact of Information Age on Attitudes

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.

 

Impact of Attitudes 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.

Impact of Attitudes on Management Processes

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.

Summary

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.

Test Your Understanding

1. Which of the following statements explains transcendence, a characteristic of values, the best?
   1. Transcendence means that we always apply a value to a specific situation.
   2. Transcendence means ability to switch values at will.
   3. She admires people who achieve in sports, medicine and business.
   4. None of the above statements explains transcendence appropriately.
2. Which of the following statements is untrue in the case of values?
   1. Values are influenced by gender.
   2. Values of care and responsibility are better associated with female gender than male gender.
   3. Age has an influence on values.
   4. Values of power and status are gender neutral.
3. In Schwart’s value theory, there are ____ contenting value sets/groups.
   1. 4
   2. 5
   3. 6
   4. None of these
4. Organisational values emerge automatically much like personal values. State true or false.
5. Which of the following is not a terminal value set?
   1. Mature love, happiness, and freedom
   2. Pleasure, social recognition, and wisdom
   3. True friendship, equality, and self-control
   4. Social recognition, family security, and a comfortable life
6. The three key components of attitude are ____, affect, and ____.
7. It is usual to come across people selling roses at the traffic lights in Delhi. Mr Rajan always notices that and often buys some, whereas he seldom notices other street vendors. This can be best explained by,
   1. Accessible attitudes
   2. Random attitudes
   3. Aberrant attitude
   4. None of these
8. Nandita had used insulting language towards Soloman; he instantly disliked her and avoided her thereafter. This attitude of Soloman can best be explained from,
   1. Utilitarian function of attitudes
   2. Value expressing function of attitudes
   3. Ego defensive function of attitudes
   4. Knowledge function of attitudes
9. Mr Gopal asked one of his subordinates, who smokes, to write an essay on ‘cancer and smoking’. He hoped that this would change his attitude towards smoking. Mr Gopal was trying to apply,
   1. Learning theories
   2. Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance
   3. Social judgement theories
   4. Kelman’s theory
10. Mr Raghupathy is the most cynical manager one can work with. One day, Ranjit heard one of his colleagues speak about the prompt action of Raghupathy, which prevented a fire in the factory. Ranjit’s head reeled at the very name ‘Raghupathy’. This can best be explained using,
    1. Implicit attitude
    2. Explicit attitude
    3. Theory of automatic selection
    4. None of these
11. You are trying to create a change in your organisation. All other factors being the same, the people you select to help you create this change should be those who,
    1. Challenge the basic premises in the organisation
    2. Ruthlessly focused
    3. Well-liked people
    4. None of them suit the bill
12. In high-effort elaboration likelihood model,
    1. One must use vivid description and imagination.
    2. Use cognition and evaluation.
    3. Use longer time to achieve elaboration.
    4. None of the above statements fully explains ELM.
13. Professor ‘X’ had developed a negative attitude towards Student ‘A’ because she came late to the class a couple of times. She made one strong argument to defend her case, which she thought would convince him; but this did not move him. Her friend had also come late several times and the professor had the same negative attitude towards her. She too met him and gave a long list of arguments, though all of them were rather flimsy. Surprisingly, the professor changed his attitude towards her. From an attitude changing perspective, this can be best explained by,
    1. Friend was more beautiful.
    2. Professor could have been slightly hard of hearing.
    3. Professor tends to be one who uses Low ELM.
    4. Professor tends to be one who uses High ELM.
14. Which of the following is the most appropriate statement in relation to attitude change? Attitude can predict behaviour better,
    1. When the attitude gained is general in nature.
    2. When the attitude gained is from some specific action.
    3. There is no strong or forceful experience behind developing the attitude.
    4. When other influences are maximised.
15. You have apps (applications) in your mobile for almost everything—apps to book a taxi, book rail ticket, listen to music, and so on. Due to this facility, people tend to use mobile phones for various services. This is an example of,
    1. Globalisation influencing attitudes
    2. Innovation influencing attitude
    3. Information flow influencing attitude
    4. None of these

Need some help with this? Go to Answers to Test Your Understanding given at the end of the book.

Assimilation Questions

1. Why are values important in an organisation?
2. What are the determinants of values? Illustrate with examples how community values can affect business.
3. What do you understand by Schwartz’ framework of basic values? Illustrate one pair of the dimension with examples from your experience.
4. On 22 December 2015, when Ms Theresa, a trainer who prepares young nurses to take up assignments abroad came out of her usual class, her student, Ms Rajeshwari, was waiting outside in tears. She had just been picked up for an assignment abroad. Assuming that the young lady was afraid to go abroad, Theresa picked up an encouraging conversation with her and asked her why she was crying. Rajeshwari replied that she was crying thinking of what Ms Theresa had said to the students while starting her training of the batch. Rajeshwari recounted with remarkable memory the words of Ms Theresa, ‘you are here to study and go abroad so that your families who are financially struggling will have better days. Keep that in mind always and work hard’. Then Rajeshwari added, ‘you must be a blessed one for pulling up so many of us so that we can go abroad and help our families. Imagine how many parents will bless you’. Explain this incident from Rokeach’s value perspective.
5. What is the impact of globalisation on values? Illustrate with an example.
6. Values impact services business. Justify this statement with examples.
7. Define attitude and differentiate it from belief, ideology, and opinion.
8. What is the tripartite or ABC theory of attitude? Illustrate with an example.
9. Identify one of your most accessible attitudes and how it has led to behaviour?
10. What are the fundamental functions of attitudes?
11. What do you understand by job-related attitudes? Select one of them and describe how it could affect productivity.
12. Describe Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance, with an example.
13. Gopal is an intelligent person and likes to think a lot, unlike his friend Sudheer. Both work under you and both hold a negative attitude towards women who are competitive. What strategy will you follow to change their attitudes?
14. Can attitudes be measured and if so, how?
15. As a manager, how will you apply some of the contemporary thoughts on attitude in the workplace? Give examples.

Need some help with this? Go to Answers to Test Your Understanding given at the end of the book.

Application Challenges

1. Meet in small groups of five. Discuss the instrumental and terminal values and Schwartz’s value framework. Identify five values, which are important to each person in the group in the order of their priority. Discuss the same in the group. Is the priority list the same for all? Why not? In relation to each of the values you have identified, identify at least one action/decision that you have taken in the past to justify that you have lived that value. Identify the most uncomfortable/difficult decision that you have taken in your life and identify which value it violated. Discuss your input in the group to gain greater insight.
2. Follow up a discussion you have had on Facebook or any other social media in the last one year. Then identify which of these discussions have created an attitude change in you. Analyse the process of the attitude change. Did it happen through the low or high ELM?

Approach to Teaching/Learning

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.