Positive Influence

A Plan for Positive Influence

A Plan for Positive Influence that can be applied in a Business Setting and Increase a Team’s Motivation, Satisfaction, and Performance

Raul N Reyes

Attitudes is how one feels about something. Researchers have suggested there are three components to attitudes: cognitive, affective and behavioral. Cognitive relates to evaluative statements like “the death penalty is wrong”, which is considered an opinion. Affective is the emotional or feeling part of attitudes. Saying “I hate people who favor the death penalty” and it’s considered a more critical part of an attitude ( ). Affect can lead to behavioral outcomes which are an intention to behave in a certain waytoward someone or something ( ).

In organizations or teams, attitudes play an important role because of how they influence behavior. If an organization or team believes that their leadership is seeking cost reductions that will result in loss of jobs it can result in a negative attitude towards leadership along with a lack of trust. A person can have many attitudes, but for the purpose of this paper we will focus on work-related attitudes. Work-related attitudes can be positive or negative about an employee’s work environment. Most research related to organizational behavior focuses on three aspects: job satisfaction, job involvement, and organizational commitment. The first is job satisfaction which can be defined as a positive feeling about one’s job. Secondly, there is job involvement which is how people identify psychologically with their job and consider their perceived performance level important to self-worth. The last aspect is organizational commitment which is defined as how an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals and desire to be part of the organization ( ).

Knowledge of employee attitudes can be useful to leadership in predicting employee behavior; the challenge is in measuring their behavior. One of the most popular methods is...