ATTITUDE

Attitude is another Cognitive process like Personality. While personality is usually thought of as the whole person, attitude is said to be individual’s mental state of readiness, learned and organized through experience exerting a specific influence on a person’s response to people, object or situation with which it is related. It is frequently used in describing people and explaining their behaviour. Attitude can be defined as a persistent tendency to fell and behave in a particular way toward some object, person or situation. e.g. Mr. Sen does not like to work in night shift. He has a negative attitude toward his work assignment.

Characteristics : Following are the characteristics of attitude – Relation to individual’s need – Attitudes tend to persist unless something is done to change them. e.g. if Sen is transfer to the day shift, his attitude may become positive. Valence – Attitude can fall anywhere along a continuum from very favourable to very unfavourable. e.g. presently Sen’s attitude may be moderately unfavourable however, if he is transferred to the day shift, his attitude may be highly favourable. Centrality – Attitudes are directed towards some object about which a person has feelings and beliefs. e.g. in Sen’s case this is the work shift.

Multiplicity – Is the number of element constituting the attitude. e.g. an employee may be truthful to an organization but an other employee may be truthful, respectful, fearful and dependent to the said organization. Components : There are three basic components of attitude, those are – Emotional – It involves the person’s feelings or affect – positive, neutral or negative about an object. The expression of emotions – either positive, like a customer service representative; negative, like a bill collector; or neutral, like an academic administrator or Govt. servant. Informational – It involves the beliefs and information the individual has about the object. It makes no difference whether or not this information is real or correct.

A supervisor may believe that two weeks of training is necessary before a worker can effectively conduct a particular process. In reality, the average worker may be able to perform successfully after only four days of training. Yet the information the supervisor is using ( that two weeks is necessary) is the key to his attitude about training. Behavioural – It consists of a person’s tendencies to behave in a particular way toward an object. e.g. the supervisor in this case may assign two weeks training schedule of training for all his new people. However, it is important to remember that of the three components of attitudes, only the behavioural component can be directly observed.

While one cannot see another person’s feelings (emotional component) or beliefs (informational component). These two components can only be inferred. e.g. when the supervisor assigns a new employee to two weeks of training on the process, it is only inferred that (1) the supervisor has strong feelings about the length of training required and (2) the individual believes that this length of training is necessary. Formation of attitude : Attitude does note arise from birth time of an individual but developed through learning process. The individual attitude includes – Experience - From the time of joining individual gains knowledge about an organization with respect to factors like salary, performance reviews, job design, work group, affiliation and managerial capacity. These all experience will help him to build up his attitude towards the organization and the job.

Family – The family is the one which initially influence the attitude of an individual. Parents, brothers, sisters are all contributing in this factor. Peer Group – The individual at their adulthood mostly relies on their peer group for attitude. It is common that individual look for others in the group having similar attitude to him otherwise he will change his attitude who influence him most. Situation – There is a great impact of the situation on an individual’s attitude since he has to show his ability to adjust the situation for his own benefits. Personality – Personality difference of individuals have a great impact on attitude build up.

Measurement of Attitude : The most widely used method of attitude measurement involves questionnaire which requires the respondent to respond favourably or unfavourably about his belief regarding the attitude object and thereby asses his attitude level. Following are the different methods of attitude measurement – Thurston’s scale – The method proposes to collect statement from a particular area in large number to measure the attitude. The statement may be on any object such as education, religion, war, peace etc. The favourable and unfavourable statements are placed into eleven scale. Most favourable is represented as 1 and most unfavourable is represented as 11. Then the individual is asked to check the statement with which he is most satisfied. If the score is low, it indicates that the individual has a favourable attitude.

Likert’s scale – He developed a scale for measuring the attitude through summed rating scale, as several statement are collected in a particular area, such as ones attitude about job. Likert developed a five point scale as Strongly Agree (5), Agree (4), Undecided or neutral (3), Disagree (2), Strongly disagree (1). Under each statement of attitude the respondent has are allowed to select one among the five and these rates are summed up finally. Individual attitude towards a particular object can be measured through summed rating scale. Guttmans scale – In this case to measure one’s attitude towards work, an employee must be presented with six statements consisting of higher degree of dissatisfaction. If the employee reaches some point beyond which he cannot agree. Than, it is considered to be the degree of satisfaction.