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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
• 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.