Definition
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Attitude is a way one think, feel and act towards some object.
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It is a mental state of a person exerted to a situation.
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Attitudes represent beliefs, feelings, and action tendencies towards objects, ideas or people.
According to Munn “Attitudes are learned predispositions towards aspects of our environment. They can be positively or negatively directed towards certain people, service or institute”.
An attitude is a mental state of readiness, learned and organized through experience, exerting a specific influence on person’s response to people, object and situations with which it is. related.
For example: Even upon knowing that drinking alcohol is bad to health, some people continue drinking. It is a summary of a person’s past experience.
Characteristics of Attitudes
> Attitude tends to continue unless something is done to change it.
> Sometimes people behave in a manner they want towards an object and repeat the same if they find something favorable to them. If the returns become unfavorable then they will think of change.
Attitude can further be characterized as:
The Three Components of Attitudes
These psychological attitudes can be called as ABC model of attitudes. It begins with affective components followed by behavioral components and finally the cognitive components.
Let us see one by one with examples how these three components impact the workplace.
> Affective Components of Attitudes:
Relates to an individual feeling, mood towards an object. Emotions towards an object or event could be fear etc. Example; there are people who are afraid of cockroaches, afraid of crackers, afraid of huge sound, it is also involves the behaviour of an individual. Like how one behave towards the object he experience. It is the belief of an individual that has led to underlying reason for the emotion towards the object or events.
An individual or more people could have thought or believed (cognitive) about managers in general, and those thoughts or beliefs could manifest themselves in not trusting a manager (affective), and thus would never want to develop a close relationship with a manager (behaviour).
> Behavioral Components:
It refers to the way one behaves when exposed to an object. For example when someone has fear over snakes, then wherever they come across this situation they will behave differently either screen or crying. Since, the attitude is determined by observing our own behavior, this is the example which suits to behaviorally based attitude.
> Cognitive Components:
It refers to the thoughts and beliefs of one’s behaviour towards an object. For Example, one believes that all snakes are dangerous and venomous; hence the exhibit the same behaviour when they are exposed to snakes in general. This behaviour towards an object is called cognitive behaviour because it is the mindset of a person exposed about an object.
Formation / Sources of Attitude
Attitudes may be learned by experience. It is a basic human process. Attitudes are learned from our experience of the social context around us. The influence of our parents, society and peer groups will have larger impacts on our attitudes.
The two major influences on attitudes are direct experience and social learning.
a. Direct Experience:
Direct experience is a powerful and strong influence on attitudes. It is strong because there is a person who demonstrates the attitude. Where there is someone who plays their attitude those the person who learns it will form more confident in his mind and adopt. It is very difficult for such attitude to get changed.
Learning through indirect manner. An individual develop attitudes by mere observation. There are four process that takes place for an individual to learn by observation.
✓ The learned and practiced attitude must be motivated to continue again and again.
Thus, social learning occurs through family, peer groups and modeling.
Measurements of Attitudes
> The measurement of behaviour is the most important aspect because it reflects the attitude of both individuals and the organization in which they involve. Individual and organizational behaviour are interrelated and they influence each other. Whatever the people do is the organization of their attitude and beliefs.
> It is the behaviour that can be read and measured through proper scaling mechanism. Measuring the attitudes of people at work is essential to check whether they truly and rightly exhibit the desired behavior. Exhibiting the desired behaviour is essential for an organization to achieve the best results. It is the standards that organization fit and expects. The standards of behaviour are mostly in written formats in an organization.
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