Download Modern Management, 9e (Certo)

PRINCIPLES OF
MANAGEMENT
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MGT101
CHAPTER 18:
Understanding People:
Attitudes, Perception, and
Learning
Certo, S. C. Modern Management (9th
Ed.) Prentice Hall © 2000
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Learning Objectives
Upon successful completion, the student will be able to:
Understand employee workplace attitudes
Analyze insights into how to change employee attitudes
Describe an appreciation of the impact of employee
perceptions on employee behaviors
Explain employee perceptions of procedural justice
Understand adult learners are different from younger students
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
Attitudes are a predisposition to react to a situation, person,
or concept with a particular response.
The response can be either positive or negative.
Three types of attitudes:
Cognitive: beliefs about a person
Affective: positive or negative feeling about a particular person
Behavioral: an intent to behave a certain way toward a
particular person
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
A person’s attitude is a result of values and beliefs held by
an individual.
Beliefs are internalized and accepted “facts” or “truths” about
an object or person that have been gained from either direct
experience or a secondary source.
Example so beliefs include
Religious faith
Political ideology
Arguments about religion and politics have no place at work.
Values are levels of worth placed on various factors in the
environment.
Beliefs, attitudes, and values interact with and guide
behavior in the workplace.
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
Situation: Based on personal attitudes, beliefs, and values,
a manager decides to deny a request for new software
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Figure 18.1
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Theory of Reasoned Action
The Theory or Reasoned Action posits that behavior is a
matter of choice, and the best predictor of behavior is
intention to perform.
Intention is predictable by knowing the following:
The person’s attitude toward performing the behavior
The person’s subjective norm or the expectation that the
person will perform a certain behavior
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
Theory of reasoned action
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Figure 18.2
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Employee Attitudes
Academic research and the hands-on experience of
managers have produced three relevant theories.
The first focuses on the design of the job and stresses task
design, work autonomy, and level of challenge.
The second stresses social influence, holding that attitudes
toward jobs are affected by the attitudes toward peers.
The third focuses on a dispositional approach that stresses
personal characteristics that are fairly stable over time.
This theory holds that people are generally predisposed to like
or dislike both the overall quality of their jobs and such specific
job characteristics as the work itself, supervision,
compensation, and work rules.
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
Three theories of job attitudes applied to the
theory of reasoned action
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Figure 18.3
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CHANGING ATTITUDES
Behaviors and attitudes can be predicted by knowing two
factors:
A person’s beliefs
The social norms that influence a person’s intentions
Managers may strive to change attitudes, intentions, and
behaviors by changing
Compensation
Job design, and
Work hours.
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Human Resource Approach
The human resource approach is one in which those
activities that are highly valued by employees are provided
by the organization to improve attitude, intentions, and
behaviors.
Human resource specialists have identified four major
causes of behavioral problems:
Lack of skills: this can be remedied through training, transfer, or
termination
Lack of positive attitude: find out what motivates the employee
and offer it as a reward for good behavior
Rule breaking: best handled with positive discipline
Personal problems: troubled employees have problems may
extend to emotional, financial, physical, and social issues that
negatively affect work performance
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WHAT ARE ATTITUDES?
Table 18.1
Basic Principles of the Human Resource Approach
Providing employee training
Communicating about human resource programs and policies
Helping new employees learn about their job and the company
Providing advancement opportunities within the company
Providing job security
Hiring qualified employees
Having enough people to get the job done
Asking my opinions about how one can improve one’s own job
Asking my opinion about making the company successful
Asking for employee suggestions
Acting on employee suggestions
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PERCEPTION
Perception and the perceptual process is a series of actions
in which an individual selects stimuli, organizes data, and
interprets the resulting information.
Perception links the person to his/her environment.
Thus, the perceptual process links the individual with his or
her environment.
Since we can only select and process a limited number of
the stimuli, we are never aware of everything that occurs
around us.
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PERCEPTION
Process of perception
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Figure 18.4
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Attribution Theory
Attribution is the process of trying to interpret the behavior of
others by assigning to it motives or causes.
But we seldom, if ever, are able to know the real motives or
causes of others.
Few of us know the motives and causes of our own behavior.
The attribution process can be avoided by:
Making the effort to see the situation as perceived by the
employee
Guarding against perceptual distortions
Paying attention to individual differences.
Managers trying to understand the causes—which can be
internal, attitude, motivation, ability, lack of knowledge or
external, difficulty of the task or actions of others.
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PERCEPTION
Researchers tend to focus on three factors of attribution:
Consensus: the belief that a person's actions are consistent
with those of his/her peers
Consistency: the extent to which a person behaves in a similar
fashion when confronted with various situations
Distinctiveness: the extent to which a person behaves
consistently when faced with different situations.
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Perceptual Distortions
Stereotypes
A fixed, distorted generalization about members of a group
Halo Effect
Allowing one particular aspect of an employee’s behavior to
influence his or her evaluation
Projection
Unconscious tendency to project our own traits, motives, or
attitudes on others
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Perceptual Distortions
Self-serving Bias and Attribution Error
The identification of external causes as to the cause for one’s
own performance is self-serving bias.
The tendency to overestimate internal and external causes is
called attribution error.
Selective Perception: the practice of collecting information that
supports our perceptions and minimizes emotional distress
Recency: only the most recent data seems to be relevant
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Perceptions of Procedural
Justice
Procedural justice is the perceived fairness of the process
used to decide things such as merit pay and promotions.
Employees actually form separate perceptions about the
organization’s process for deciding outcomes on the one
hand and the consequences on the other hand.
Procedural justice examines the fairness of the process itself:
Are decisions made according to clear standards?
Is the process used consistently for everyone?
Can I appeal the decision? Will I be able to have input?
Distributive justice examines only the outcome of a decision or
policy:
Did I receive the promotion?
Did I get the raise?
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Perceptions of Procedural
Justice
Dispute Resolution
A critical factor in this evaluation process is how managers
resolve disputes.
Mediation of disputes is found to be the fairest of all
techniques used.
Employee Responses to Perceptions of Unfairness
Those with seniority usually decide that they have invested too
many years in the organization either to leave or to cause a
disturbance.
Instead, they may respond by performing marginally until
retirement.
Newer employees are more likely to leave for (perceived) better
opportunities elsewhere.
The costs of unfair employee treatment are difficult to compute.
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LEARNING
Learning can be a permanent change in behavior resulting
from practice, experience, education, or training.
In organizations, people learn specific job-related
knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs).
They also learn about organizational norms: what is
expected of them and how things are accomplished.
Both learning situations are affected by beliefs, attitudes,
and values.
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LEARNING
Two major classifications of learning
Operant Learning—behavior that is a function of its
consequences
Cognitive Learning—employees choose behaviors that will
enable them to achieve long-range goals.
Cognitive learning is based on goal setting.
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GOAL SETTING
Managers use goal setting to correct problems and to achieve new
objectives. Some strategies for setting goals include:
Directed behavior—Goals help people focus their daily decisions and
behaviors in specific ways.
Challenges—Individuals are more motivated, and thus achieve higher
levels of performance, when given specific objectives instead of such
nondirective responses as “keep up the good work”
Resource allocation—Critical decisions involving resources (people,
time, equipment, money) are more consistent with organizational goals
when goal-setting strategies are used.
Structure—The formal and informal organizational structure can be
shaped to set communication patterns and provide each position with
a degree of authority and responsibility that supports employee and
organizational goals.
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Learning Strategies
Positive Reinforcement
Anything that causes a behavior to be repeated is a positive reinforcer.
Common examples are praise, recognition, and pay. It is essential that
the reinforcer directly follow the desired behavior.
Avoidance
Behavior that can prevent the onset of an undesired consequence
often results from avoidance learning.
Escape Strategy
When a manager provides an arrangement in which a desired
response will terminate an undesired consequence, that manager is
using the escape strategy.
Punishment Strategy
When an undesired behavior by an employee is followed by an
undesired response by management, a punishment strategy is being
used.
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Summary
Attitudes are a predisposition to react to a situation, person,
or concept with a particular response.
The response can be either positive or negative.
There are generally three types of attitudes:
Cognitive—beliefs about a person
Affective—a positive or negative feeling about a particular
person
Behavioral—an intent to behave a certain way toward a
particular person
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Summary
A person’s attitude is a result of values and beliefs held by
that individual.
Beliefs are accepted facts based on experience.
Values are levels of worth placed on environmental factors.
Employee’s attitudes toward their jobs are usually quite
stable over time.
Managers trying to change employee attitudes should try
first to understand the concept of reasoned action.
When behavior is a matter of choice, the best predictor of
behavior is intention to perform.
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Summary
Intention is predictable by knowing the following:
the person’s attitude toward performing the behavior
or the person’s subjective norm, or the expectation that the
person will perform a certain behavior.
Job factors are also an important predictor of attitudes.
Three theories are used to explain the primary determinant
of employee attitudes:
design of the job
social influence
dispositional approach
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Summary
Managers can best predict behavior and attitudes by
knowing the following:
a person’s beliefs,
or the social norms that influence a person’s intentions.
Managers use compensation, job design, and work hours to
try and change employee attitudes.
Another approach to job satisfaction is the human resource
approach, in which those activities that are highly valued by
employees are provided by the organization.
Bad attitudes are generally not the problem, but just a matter
of unacceptable behavior.
Attitude, although an influence in behavior, is internal and
cannot be accurately measured.
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Summary
Since beliefs and values affecting attitudes can be complex,
managers should not focus too hard on this aspect.
Human resource specialists have identified four major
causes of behavioral problems:
lack of skills—this can be remedied through training, transfer, or
termination
lack of positive attitude—this can be resolved by finding out
what motivates the employee and offer it as a reward for good
behavior
rule breaking—this is best handled with positive discipline; and
personal problems—the troubled employee syndrome
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Summary
Perception and the perception process is a series of actions
in which an individual selects stimuli, organizes data, and
interprets the resulting information.
Perception links the person to his/her environment.
Managers try to interpret the behavior of others through a
process known as attribution.
Attribution can be avoided by making the effort to see the
situation as perceived by the employee, by guarding against
perceptual distortions, and finally, by paying attention to
individual differences.
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Summary
Managers try to understand the causes, which can be
internal or external, of employee behavior.
Researchers tend to focus on three factors of attribution:
consensus
consistency
distinctiveness
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Summary
Managers tend to make judgments based on their
perceptions but must avoid the following distortions:
stereotyping
halo effect
projection
self-serving bias and attribution error
selective perception
recency
Employees continually evaluate the fairness of a system or
process through a concept known as procedural justice.
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Summary
A critical factor in this evaluation process is how managers
resolve disputes.
Mediation of disputes is found to be the fairest of all
techniques used.
Learning can be a permanent change in behavior through
one of the following methods:
operant—behavior is a function of its consequences
cognitive—employees choose behaviors that will enable them
to achieve long-range goals.
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Summary
Cognitive learning is based on goal setting.
Some strategies for setting goals include:
directed behavior
challenges
resource allocation
structure
Managers use goal setting to correct problems and to
achieve new objectives.
The primary objective of any disciplinary action is to show
that undesired behavior can and will invoke penalties, and to
motivate employees to comply with rules and regulations.
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