Attitude and behavior at work

Introduction

In this assignment, the main focus was drawn to the attitude and behavior of a typical employee in an organization.  The discussion here is done on the group behavior of a workplace and the main areas of Human Resource Management studies. Each employee in an organization has a belief or attitude towards different aspects of the workplace, which differs from one individual to another.  Similarly, work attitude is related to how an individual employee feels about his work and shows certain loyalty and commitment towards it. The assignment dealt with different theories of attitude and behavior and ended with an appropriate conclusion.

Main Body

Definition of attitude

The attitude can be defined as a way of feeling or action towards a job, a person or situation, etc. interest regarding certain sports, liking for a certain actor or positive outlook of a person towards his work is known as Attitude. An individual worker may tend to react positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation; this is attitude. Moreover, attitude can be both positive and negative. Attitude can influence the choice of an individual’s action, responses towards incentives, rewards and challenges, etc. Attitudes mainly have three components as Cognitive, emotional, and behavioral (Sinha et al.  2016).

Cognitive dissonance theory

Cognitive dissonance mainly refers to the situation, which involves conflicting attitudes and behavior in the employees. This can eventually lead to discomforting in the mental well-being of an individual leading to the change of any existing attitude of the individual. The alteration of the behavior thus leads to a reduction of discomfort in the individual to reach a calm of self (Tam et al.  2018).

For example, when an employee smoke (which is a behavior) by knowing that smoking can cause cancer to him (that is cognition), that means they are in the state of cognitive dissonance (Schilpzand et al.  2016).

In the given case study, when the employees are exposed to a developed form of performance management, the attitudes of the employees became the concerned matter. The measured and review that was done for the first time, it pointed towards two key performance indicators. There were lots of mistakes occurring in the work of the employees in the department of picking of orders from the warehouse and its loading into the trucks. When the results from the reviews were checked, it indicated some issues among the behavior of the employees, which eventually brought down their performances. The relationship between the workers 1 &2 has started deteriorating from the last couple of months though they were comfortable working with each other in the past. This is an example of Cognitive dissonance theory, where because of some conflicting attitude between the employees, their attitude towards working with each other changed completely, resulting in an alteration of their attitude. This has eventually hampered the productivity of their work, and their performance ability reduced (Dumont et al. 2017).

Theories of reasoned action and behavior

The theories of reasoned action and behavior explain the relationship between the attitude and behavior of an individual. The theory mainly predicts the behavior of an individual studying his pre-existing attitudes. An individual decides to engage in a particular behavior comes only the individual expects certain outcomes from it. In the case study as the Individual worker 1 & 2 was not satisfied working with each other, their performance deteriorated which the individuals could also feel that their work expectations could not be reached (Lyu and Zhu, 2019). Whereas worker 3, being a nervous guy, told that he was stuck in between the conflict of the two, where his behavior and attitude towards work also deteriorated. As they were not satisfied happy or comfortable with each other and their work, did not only their performance detoriated but also their number of absenteeism increased simultaneously. Though worker 1 &2 never complained against each other, they used to talk behind each other’s back and has had disagreements on lots of topics in front of others which has disturbed the whole working environment. First, these two workers had clashed in their personality which has to bring about a change in their attitude and behavior, which has given rise to different work-related issues between them hampering the work environment of the organization, this has led to demotivation in both of their mental well-being resulting in poor performance and frequent absenteeism. The errors which were made as they were not comfortable working with each other and their clash of egos and change of attitude the whole organization has to suffer (van Dick et al.  2019). It would not have been such an issue if they could talk to each other and thought of solving the matter. They would have preferred to work as a team rather than working independently. The only thing that both workers 1 & 2 agreed that they both do not want to open up in the KPIs (Hanisch et al. 2016).

As the company was recently introduced to the new operational manager, all the issues of the employees were discovered where it was found that the main reason for work failure and errors and degrowth of the employee motivation and performance are nothing but their internal issues among themselves. It has as the company grown they did not have time to look after their employees on day to day basis which results in the employees being dissatisfied with each other in the absence of any direct management ir support, us they were left to themselves where they had guidance to look after them or to help them sort other mistakes between the won individual employees (Warmerdam et al. 2018).

Typical work-related attitudes

When a concept of attitude is applied to work-related settings, there is a variety of work-related attitudes that can be identified, one of such most common attitude is job satisfaction and organizational commitment.

Job satisfaction and organizational commitment

Job satisfaction can be explained as to the extent an employee can feel motivated and satisfied with their job. Job satisfaction significantly occurs when an employee feels that his work is at stability, where he experiences career growth and balance in the work-life. All these criteria prove that the employee is having satisfaction in his work as the work is meeting the expectation of the person.  A job satisfied employee is required for an organization as the person then would aim to deliver the best of his capability. All employees want career growth and balance in the workplace. When an employee feels good about his company and work, they also prefer to give back to the company putting 100% of their dedication. The importance of job satisfaction can be reached on two perspectives, either from an employee or perspective of the employee. Hence when an employee is satisfied with his work, he would be more likely to stay in the same company, which makes it less obvious for the employees to leave. Hence the turnover of the company decreases (Wells et al.  2016).

A study has been conducted over 247 managers where it was seen how job satisfaction helps in employee retention. This resulted that the happier the employees were, the more the rate of turnover and absenteeism decreases. Still, here both the workers 1 & 2 were not job satisfied as they had conflicts between them, which overall hampered their whole job experience (Wesselink et al.  2017).

Conclusion

It can be concluded from the theories cited in the assignment and the case study that attitude is particular and it changes from one person to the other .in the theories of reasoned action and behavior and cognitive dissonance theory it was also seen how the attitude of worker 1 and 2 changed eventually against each other after the personality clash.

Reference List

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Hanisch, S.E., Twomey, C.D., Szeto, A.C., Birner, U.W., Nowak, D. and Sabariego, C., 2016. The effectiveness of interventions targeting the stigma of mental illness at the workplace: a systematic review. BMC psychiatry, 16(1), p.1.

Lyu, Y. and Zhu, H., 2019. The predictive effects of workplace ostracism on employee attitudes: A job embeddedness perspective. Journal of Business Ethics, 158(4), pp.1083-1095.

Schilpzand, P., De Pater, I.E. and Erez, A., 2016. Workplace incivility: A review of the literature and agenda for future research. Journal of Organizational behavior, 37, pp.S57-S88.

Sinha, S., Priyadarshi, P. and Kumar, P., 2016. Organizational culture, innovative behaviour and work related attitude. Journal of Workplace Learning.

Tam, V.W., Le, K.N., Wang, J.Y. and Illankoon, I.M., 2018. Practitioners recycling attitude and behaviour in the Australian construction industry. Sustainability, 10(4), p.1212.

van Dick, R., Crawshaw, J.R., Karpf, S., Schuh, S.C. and Zhang, X.A., 2019. Identity, importance, and their roles in how corporate social responsibility affects workplace attitudes and behavior. Journal of Business and Psychology, pp.1-11.

Warmerdam, A., Newnam, S., Wang, Y., Sheppard, D., Griffin, M. and Stevenson, M., 2018. High performance workplace systems’ influence on safety attitudes and occupational driver behaviour. Safety science, 106, pp.146-153.

Wells, V.K., Taheri, B., Gregory-Smith, D. and Manika, D., 2016. The role of generativity and attitudes on employees home and workplace water and energy saving behaviours. Tourism Management, 56, pp.63-74.

Wesselink, R., Blok, V. and Ringersma, J., 2017. Pro-environmental behaviour in the workplace and the role of managers and organisation. Journal of Cleaner Production, 168, pp.1679-1687.