Chapter 4: Individual Values, Perceptions, and Reactions
Attitudes
A person’s complexes of beliefs and feelings about specific ideas, situations, or other
people.
our beliefs and feelings about things.
are not as stable as personality attributes
can change
Attitudes contain Three Components
1. Cognition
o the knowledge a person presumes to have about something.
2. Affect
o a person’s feelings toward something
3. Intention
o component of an attitude that guides a person’s behavior
Cognitive Dissonance
is an incompatibility or conflict between behavior and an attitude or between two
different attitudes
How to reduce cognitive dissonance?
1. Change the conflicting attitude
2. Change the conflicting behavior
3. Reason that one of the conflicting attitudes or behaviors is not important in this context
4. Seek additional information to better reason that the benefits of one of the conflicting
attitudes or behaviors outweigh the costs of the other
Key Work-Related Attitudes
1. Job Satisfaction
o reflects our attitudes and feelings about our job.
o strongly influenced by our personality, values, other attitudes, and the work
itself.
2. Organizational Commitment
o reflects the degree to which an employee identifies with the organization and its
goals and wants to stay with the organization.
Three types of Organizational Commitment
1. Affective Commitment
positive emotional attachment to the organization and strong
identification with its values and goals.
2. Normative Commitment
feeling obliged to stay with an organization for moral or ethical reasons
3. Continuance ommitment
staying with an organization because of perceived high economic and/or
social costs involved with leaving.
3. Employee Engagement
o is “a heightened emotional and intellectual connection that an employee has for
his/her job, organization, manager, or coworkers that, in turn, influences him/her
to apply additional discretionary effort to his/her work.”
Engagement is enhanced when employees:
Have clear goals.
Have the resources needed to do a good job.
Get meaningful feedback on their performance.
Are able to use their talents.
Are recognized for doing a good job.
Have positive relationships with coworkers.
Have opportunities to learn and grow.
Have supportive leadership.
Values
Ways of behaving or endstates that are desirable to a person or to a group
Influenced by culture
Types of Values
Terminal
o reflect long-term life goals such as prosperity, happiness, secure family, and a
sense of accomplishment
Instrumental
o preferred means of achieving terminal values or preferred ways of behaving
Intrinsic
o relate to the work itself
Extrinsic
o relate to the outcomes of doing work
Conflicts among values
Intrapersonal
o Conflict between the instrumental value of ambition and the terminal value of
happiness
Interpersonal
o Occurs when two different people hold conflicting values
Individual-organization
o When an employee’s values conflict with those of the organization
Two Major Dimensions of Values that vary across Cultures
Traditional versus Secular-Rational Values
o reflects the contrast between societies in which religion is very important and
those in which it is not
Survival versus Self-Epression Values
o reflects the contrast between societies that emphasize economic and physical
security and those that emphasize subjective well-being, self-expression, and
quality of life, giving high priority to environmental protection, diversity
tolerance, and participation in decision making
Emotions
Intense, short-term physiological, behavioral, and psychological reactions to a specific
object, person, or event that prepare us to respond to it
Are short events or episode that are relatively short-lived.
are directed at something or someone.
are experienced and involve involuntary changes in heart rate, blood pressure, facial
expressions, animation, and vocal tone.
create a state of physical readiness through physiological reactions
do not last as long as attitudes.
influence how we perceive the world
Mood
Short-term emotional states that are not directed toward anything in particular
less intense than emotions and can change quickly
influences how we see and react to work events, which influences our performance.
Can be influenced by others
Affectivity
represents our tendency to experience a particular mood or to react to things with
certain emotions
Positive Affect
o a combination of high energy and positive evaluation characterized by emotions
like elation
Negative Affect
o feelings of being upset, fearful, and distressed
Why is understanding the role of emotions important to organizations?
Because they are malleable, effective employees and managers know how to positively
influence their own emotions and the emotions of others.
Emotions influence both the creation and maintenance of our motivation to engage or
to not engage in certain behaviors.
Research has found that emotion can influence turnover, decision making, leadership,
helping behaviors, and teamwork behaviors
Perception
The set of processes by which an individual becomes aware of and interprets
information about the environment
Basic perceptual processes
Selective perception
o screening out information that we are uncomfortable with or that contradicts our
beliefs
Stereotyping
o categorizing or labeling people on the basis of a single attribute
Errors in Perception
Categorization
o The tendency to put things into groups and then exaggerate the similarities
within and the differences among the groups
Halo effect
o Forming a general impression of something or someone based on a single
(usually good) characteristic
Contrast effect
o Evaluating someone by comparing them with recently encountered people
Projection
o Seeing one’s own characteristics in others
First impression bias
o The inability to let go of first impressions, particularly negative ones
Self-fulfilling prophecies
o Treating people the way we categorize them and having them react accordingly
Attribution
The way we explain the causes of our own as well as other people’s behaviors and
achievements, and understand why people do what they do
Three rules to evaluate whether to assign an internal or an external attribution
Consistency
o Has the person regularly behaved this way or experienced this outcome in the
past?
Distinctiveness
o Does the person act the same way or receive similar outcomes in different types
of situations?
Consensus
o Would others behave similarly in the same situation or receive the same
outcome?
Self-handicapping
When people create obstacles for themselves that make success less likely
Organizational fairness
Employees’ perceptions of organizational events, policies, and practices as being fair or
not fair
Distributive fairness
Perceived fairness of the outcome received, including resources distributions,
promotions, hiring and layoff decisions, and raises
Procedural fairness
Addresses the fairness of the procedures used to generate the outcome
Interactional fairness
Whether the amount of information about the decision and process was adequate,
perceived fairness of interpersonal treatment and explanations received during the
decision-making process
Trust
The expectation that another person will not act to take advantage of us, regardless of
our ability to monitor or control them.
Stress
A person’s adaptive response to a stimulus that places excessive psychological or
physical demands on that person.
affects different people in different ways.
Can have a number of consequence
General Adaptation Syndrome GAS
Identifies three stages of response to a stressor: alarm, resistance, and exhaustion
Eustress
pleasurable stress that accompanies positive events
Distress
unpleasant stress accompanies negative events
Common causes of stress
Organizational stressors
o various factors in the workplace that can cause stress
1. Task demands
o Associated with the specific job a person performs
2. Physical demands
o Associated with the job’s physical setting and requirements
3. Role demands
o Associated with the expected behaviors of a particular position in a group or
organization
4. Interpersonal demands
o Group pressures, leadership, interpersonal conflicts
Life stressors
o life changes or traumas
Consequences of Stress
Individual consequences
o Behavioral consequences
o Psychological consequences
o Medical consequence
Organizational consequences
o Burnout
A general feeling of exhaustion that develops when an individual
simultaneously experiences too much pressure and has too few sources
of satisfaction
Individual Coping Strategies
Exercise
relaxation.
to develop and maintain support groups.
Organizational coping strategies
Institutional programs
o Properly designed jobs and work schedules
o Fostering a healthy work culture
o Supervision—keep workloads reasonable
Collateral programs
o Organizational programs specifically created to help employees deal with stress
o Stress management, health promotion, employee fitness programs, career
development
Work-Life Relationships
Interrelationships between a person’s work life and personal life
