Attitudes

Session Objectives

• To understand attitudes, their components

and how they affect our behaviours • Compare and contrast the major job attitudes. • Define job satisfaction and show how it can be measured. • Summarize the main causes of job satisfaction.

Attitudes are evaluative statements- either favourable or unfavourable- about objects, people or events. Jung's definition of attitude is a "readiness of the psyche to act or react in a certain way" (Jung, [1921] Most attitudes are the result of either direct experience or observational learning from the environment.

Mainly there are 3 components of Attitudes-

Cognitive

Affective

The emotional or feeling segment of an attitude

The opinion or belief segment of an attitude

Behavioral

Attitude

An intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something

Moderating Variables

 The most powerful moderators of the attitude-behavior

relationship are:

 Importance of the attitude-reflects fundamental values,

self interest or identification with groups or individuals have strong relation with behaviour  Correspondence to behavior- closer the attitude and behaviour, stronger the relationship  Accessibility- the more we talk, the more we remember and more its effect on behaviour

 Existence of social pressures- in accord with the attitude facilitates expression and vice versa  Personal and direct experience of the attitude.

 Leon Festinger (1957)

– No, the reverse is sometimes true!  Cognitive Dissonance: Any incompatibility between two or more attitudes or between behavior and attitudes

 Individuals seek to reduce this uncomfortable gap,

or dissonance, to reach stability and consistency

 The stronger the dissonance, the greater the urge to

reduce it or actively avoid situations and information that create awareness of dissonance existing

Ways to reduce dissonance

- Consistency is achieved  by changing the attitude causing dissonance ...