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Module 2 Lesson 2
Chapter 4: Individual Values, Perceptions, and Reactions

Attitudes in Organizations

• Attitudes
o A person’s complexes of beliefs and feelings about specific ideas, situations, or other
people.
o Mechanism through which most people express their feelings
o Formed by variety of forces, including our personal values, or experiences, and our
personalities.
• Structural components of attitudes
o Cognition
▪ the knowledge a person presumes to have about something
▪ based on perceptions of truth and reality
o Affect
▪ a person’s feelings toward something
▪ similar to emotion which we have little or no conscious control
o Intention
▪ component of an attitude that guides a person’s behavior

Cognitive dissonance

• An incompatibility or conflict between behavior and an attitude or between two different

attitudes
• Occurs when a person behaves in a fashion that is inconsistent with their attitudes
• How to reduce cognitive dissonance?
o Change the conflicting attitude
o Change the conflicting behavior
o Reason that one of the conflicting attitudes or behaviors is not important in this context
o Seek additional information to better reason that the benefits of one of the conflicting
attitudes or behaviors outweigh the costs of the other
o Recognize that attitudes can change

Key work-related attitudes

• Job satisfaction
o Reflects our attitudes and feelings about our jobs
o The extent to which a person is gratified or fulfilled by his or her work
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▪ Contrary to what a lot of managers believe, however, high level of job

satisfaction does not necessarily lead to higher levels of productivity
o Influences on Job Satisfaction
▪ Personality
▪ Values
▪ Attitudes
▪ The work itself
• Organizational commitment
o Reflects the degree to which an employee identifies with the organization and its goals
and wants to stay with the organization
o Sometimes called job commitment
▪ Highly committed person see herself as a true member of the firm and
overlooks minor sources of dissatisfaction.
▪ Less committed person is more likely to see herself as an outsider to express
more dissatisfaction about things.
o Types of organizational commitment
▪ Affective commitment
➢ Positive emotional attachment to the organization and strong
identification with its values, and its goals; employees want to stay with
the organization
▪ Normative commitment
➢ A feeling of moral or ethical obligation to the organization; employees
stay because they believe it would be wrong to leave
▪ Continuance commitment
➢ Staying with the organization because of perceived high economic
and/or social costs; employees stay because they feel they have to
• Employee engagement
o 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

Values and Emotions in Organizations

• Values
o Ways of behaving or end-states that are desirable to a person or to a group
o Types of values
▪ Terminal
➢ reflect long-term life goals such as prosperity, happiness, secure family,
and a sense of accomplishment
▪ Instrumental
➢ preferred means of achieving terminal values or preferred ways of
behaving
▪ Intrinsic
➢ relate to the work itself
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▪ Extrinsic
➢ relate to the outcomes of doing work

Conflict 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

Major Dimensions of Values

• 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-expression 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

The role of emotions in behavior

• Emotions
o Intense, short-term physiological, behavioral, and psychological reactions to a specific
object, person, or event that prepare us to respond to it
• Moods
o Short-term emotional states that are not directed toward anything in particular
• Affectivity
o The tendency to experience a particular mood or to react to things with certain emotion
o Positive affect
▪ Reflects a combination of high energy and positive evaluation characterized by
emotions like elation
➢ People with higher degree of positive affectivity are more upbeat and
optimistic.
➢ They have an overall sense of well-being and that they usually see
things in a positive light.
o Negative affect
▪ Comprises feelings of being upset, fearful, and distressed
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➢ People with more negative affectivity are generally downbeat and

pessimistic.
➢ They usually see things in a negative way.

Perceptions in Organizations

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

Perception errors

• 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
• We attribute causes to behavior based on our observations of certain characteristics of that
behavior. (Attribution theory)
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o Are they due to the individual because of internal factors such as effort and ability?
o Or are they due to the environment because of external factors such as luck, resources,
and other people?
o
• Three rules to evaluate whether to assign an internal or an external attribution
o Consistency
▪ Has the person regularly behaved this way or experienced this outcome in the
past?
o Distinctiveness
▪ Does the person act the same way or receive similar outcomes in different types
of situations?
▪ the extent to which the same person behaves in the same way in different
situations.
o Consensus
▪ Would others behave similarly in the same situation or receive the same
outcome?
▪ the degree to which the same person behaves in the same way at different
times
o Self-handicapping
▪ When people create obstacles for themselves that make success less likely
• Perceptions and fairness, justice, and trust
o Organizational fairness
▪ Employees’ perceptions of organizational events, policies, and practices as being
fair or not fair
o Distributive fairness
▪ Perceived fairness of the outcome received, including resources distributions,
promotions, hiring and layoff decisions, and raises
o Procedural fairness
▪ Addresses the fairness of the procedures used to generate the outcome
o 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
o Trust
▪ The expectation that another person will not act to take advantage of us,
regardless of our ability to monitor or control them.

Stress in Organizations

Stress

• A person’s adaptive response to a stimulus that places excessive psychological or physical

demands on that person
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The stress process (Selye)

• General adaptation syndrome (GAS)

o Identifies three stages of response to a stressor:
▪ Alarm
➢ Person may feel some degree of panic and begin to wonder how to
cope.
➢ The individual may also have to resolve a “fight-or-flight” question
▪ resistance,
▪ exhaustion
➢ At this stage, the person literally gives up and can no longer fight the
stressor.
• Sources of stress
o Eustress
▪ pleasurable stress that accompanies positive events
o Distress
▪ unpleasant stress accompanies negative events

Common causes of stress

• Organizational stressors
o various factors in the workplace that can cause stress
• Task demands
o Associated with the specific job a person performs
• Physical demand
o Associated with the job’s physical setting such as the adequacy of temperature and
lighting and the physical requirements the job makes on the employee.
• Role demands
o Associated with the expected behaviors of a particular position in a group or
organization
▪ Role ambiguity arises when role is unclear
▪ Role conflict occurs when the messages and cues constituting a role are clear
but contradictory or mutually exclusive
▪ Role overload occurs when expectations for the role exceed the individual’s
capabilities
• Interpersonal demands
o Group pressures, leadership, interpersonal conflicts
• Life stressors
o life changes or traumas
▪ Life changes are any meaningful changes in a person’s personal or work
situation.
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▪ Life trauma is any upheaval in an individual’s life that alters his or her attitudes,
emotions, or behaviors.

Consequences of Stress

• Individual consequences
o Behavioral consequences
o Psychological consequences
o Medical consequence
• Organizational consequences
o Decline in performance
o Withdrawal
o Negative changes in attitude
▪ Burnout
➢ A general feeling of exhaustion that develops when an individual
simultaneously experiences too much pressure and has too few sources
of satisfaction

Managing and Controlling Stress

• Individual Coping Strategies

o Exercise
o Relaxation
o Time management
o Role management
o Support group
• Organizational coping strategies
o Institutional programs
▪ Properly designed jobs and work schedules
▪ Fostering a healthy work culture
▪ Supervision—keep workloads reasonable
o Collateral programs
▪ Organizational programs specifically created to help employees deal with stress
➢ Stress management, health promotion, employee fitness programs,
career development

Work-life balance

• Fundamental work-life relationships

o Interrelationships between a person’s work life and personal life
• Balancing work-life linkages
o Importance of long-term versus short-term perspectives
o Balance needs of both wage earners in double-income families
o Accept that there’s a work-life integration