PART TWO- INDIVIDUAL BEHAVIORS AND PROCESSES IN
ORGANIZATIONS
Chapter Four – Individual Values, Perceptions, and Reactions
Overview
Chapter 3 introduced the concept of individual differences and explored personality, intelligence, and
learning styles. This chapter continues our focus on individual behavior in organizations. We begin with a
discussion of attitudes, examining how attitudes are formed and changed, cognitive dissonance, and three
key work-related attitudes. Next we look at how values and emotions affect organizational behavior. The
role of perception, especially as it relates to issues of fairness and trust, is then discussed. Finally, our
chapter concludes with a section devoted to stress in organizations—its causes and consequences and how
it can be managed.
Learning Outcomes
After studying this chapter, students should be able to:
1. Discuss how attitudes are formed, describe the meaning of cognitive dissonance, and identify and
describe three important work-related attitudes.
2. Describe the role and importance of values and emotions in organizational behavior.
3. Describe basic perceptual processes and how perception affects fairness, justice, and trust in
organizations.
4. Discuss the nature of stress, identify the basic causes and consequences of stress, and describe
how stress can be managed.
Real World Challenge: Attitude is a Choice at Pike Place Fish Market
Summary: John Yokoyama did not plan on owning Seattle’s Pike Place Fish Market. As a manager, he
demanded results from his employees and came down hard on their mistakes. He emulated the previous
owner’s negative attitudes, anger, and fear–based management style. No one working there was having
fun, including Yokoyama. As his business struggled, employee turnover was high and morale was low.
Real World Challenge: Yokoyama asks for advice on improving his employees’ attitudes.
Real World Response: To revive his business, Yokohama decided to share his vision of being world
famous with his employees, and empowered them to pursue this vision. He gave his employees
permission to have fun with their jobs and to perform their best by bringing their whole selves to work
every day. The market has been featured on numerous television shows, and was even named one of the
most fun places to work in America by CNN.
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Chapter Outline
I. ATTITUDES IN ORGANIZATIONS
People’s attitudes obviously affect their behavior in organizations. Attitudes are complexes of
beliefs and feelings that people have about specific ideas, situations, or other people.
A. How Attitudes Are Formed
Attitudes are formed by a variety of forces, including our personal values, our experiences, and
our personalities. Any of the “Big Five” or individual personality traits discussed in Chapter 3
may also influence our attitudes.
Attitudes are usually viewed as stable dispositions to behave toward objects in a certain way.
As illustrated in Figure 4.1, attitudes contain three components: cognition, affect, and intention.
Cognition is the knowledge a person presumes to have about something.
This “knowledge” may be true, partially true, or totally false. Cognitions are based on
perceptions of truth and reality, and, as we note later, perceptions agree with reality to varying
degrees.
A person’s affect is his or her feelings toward something. In many ways, affect is similar to
emotion—it is something over which we have little or no conscious control.
Intention guides a person’s behavior. Intentions are not always translated into actual behavior,
however.
Some attitudes, and their corresponding intentions, are much more central and significant to an
individual than others. You may intend to do one thing (take a particular class) but later alter
your intentions because of a more significant and central attitude (fondness for sleeping late).
B. Cognitive Dissonance
Suppose that you strongly believe that all companies need to be both profitable and
environmentally responsible, and that you are the new CEO of a company that is a terrible
polluter. You learn that reducing your company’s carbon emissions would be so expensive that
the company would no longer be profitable. What would you do?
Cognitive dissonance is an incompatibility or conflict between behavior and an attitude or
between two different attitudes
When people experience dissonance, they often use one of four approaches to cope with it.
Using the scenario above, these would include:
1. You can change your behavior and reduce the company’s carbon emissions.
2. You can reduce the felt dissonance by reasoning that the pollution is not so important
when compared to the goal of running a profitable company.
3. You can change your attitude toward pollution to decrease your belief that pollution is
bad.
4. You can seek additional information to better reason that the benefits to society of
manufacturing the products outweigh the societal costs of polluting.
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Interestingly, though, sometimes people are aware of their dissonance but make a conscious
decision to not reduce it.
This decision would be influenced by these three things:
1. Your perception of the importance of the elements that are creating the dissonance. If
the elements involved in the dissonance are less important to you, it is easier to ignore.
2. The amount of influence you feel you have over these elements. If the Board of
Directors blocks your plans, it is easier to rationalize the dissonance and not take
action.
3. The rewards involved in the dissonance. Rewards for dissonance tend to decrease our
reactions to it.
C. Attitude Change
Attitudes are not as stable as personality attributes. For example, new information may change
attitudes.
Likewise, if the object of an attitude changes, a person’s attitude toward that object may also
change.
Attitudes can also change when the object of the attitude becomes less important or less
relevant to the person.
Finally, as noted earlier, individuals may change their attitudes as a way to reduce cognitive
dissonance.
Deeply rooted attitudes that have a long history are, of course, resistant to change.
D. Key Work-Related Attitudes
People in an organization form attitudes about many different things. Of course, some of these
attitudes are more important than others.
Especially important attitudes are job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and employee
engagement.
1. Job Satisfaction
Our job satisfaction reflects our attitudes and feelings about our job.
As illustrated in Figure 4.2, the factors that have the greatest influence on job satisfaction
are the work itself, attitudes, values, and personality.
Satisfaction with the nature of the work itself is the largest influence on job satisfaction.
Challenging work, autonomy, variety, and job scope also increase job satisfaction. As a
manager, if you want to increase your subordinates’ job satisfaction, focus first on
improving the nature of the work they do.
Our attitudes and values about work also influence our job satisfaction.
Someone with a negative attitude toward work is less likely to be satisfied with any job
than someone with a positive attitude toward work.
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Interestingly, our job satisfaction is somewhat stable over time, even when we change jobs
or employers.
Research evidence suggests that differences in job satisfaction are due in part to differences
in employees’ genetics and personality. In particular, core self-evaluation,
extroversion, and conscientiousness influence job satisfaction.
Are happy employees really more productive employees? The answer is yes. And the
positive relationship between job satisfaction and job performance is even stronger for
complex, professional jobs.
Job satisfaction positively influences employees’ attitudes and organizational citizenship
behaviors. Conversely, job dissatisfaction is related to higher absenteeism and turnover, as
well as to other withdrawal behaviors such as lateness, drug abuse, grievances, and
retirement decisions.
2. Organizational Commitment
Organizational commitment reflects the degree to which an employee identifies with the
organization and its goals and wants to stay with the organization.
There are three ways we can feel committed to an employer:
a. Affective commitment
Is a positive emotional attachment to the organization and strong identification with
its values and goals. Affective commitment leads employees to stay with an
organization because they want to, and is related to higher performance.
b. Normative commitment
Occurs when an employee feels obliged to stay with an organization for moral or
ethical reasons. Normative commitment is related to higher performance and leads
employees to stay with an organization because they feel they should.
c. Continuance commitment
Refers to an employee staying with an organization because of the perceived high
economic and/or social costs involved with leaving. Continuance commitment
leads employees to stay with an organization because they feel that they have to.
3. Employee Engagement
Employee engagement 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.”
Engaged employees give their full effort to their jobs, often going beyond what is required
because they are passionate about the firm and about doing their jobs well.
Rather than wanting to do the work and wanting to do their best, disengaged workers feel
they have to do the work, and generally do only what they have to do as a result.
High employee engagement is related to superior business performance.
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As a manager, remember that the drivers of employee engagement can differ from the
drivers of employee attraction and retention—what gets employees into an organization is
not the same as what keeps them engaged and keeps them from leaving.
Engagement is enhanced when employees:
Have clear goals and roles
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
II. VALUES AND EMOTIONS IN ORGANIZATIONS
Values are ways of behaving or end-states that are desirable to a person or to a group. Values can be
conscious or unconscious.
Work values influence important individual and organizational outcomes including performance
and retention, and are often considered to be important work outcomes in themselves.
A company leader’s personal values affect the firm’s business strategy and all aspects of
organizational behavior including staffing, reward systems, manager–subordinate relationships,
communication, conflict management styles, and negotiation approaches. Personal values also
influence ethical choices.
A. Types of Values
Values can be described as terminal or instrumental, and as intrinsic or extrinsic.
1. Terminal and Instrumental Values
Terminal values reflect our long-term life goals, and may include prosperity, happiness, a
secure family, and a sense of accomplishment. Terminal values can change over time
depending on our experiences and accomplishments.
Instrumental values are our preferred means of achieving our terminal values or our
preferred ways of behaving. Terminal values influence what we want to accomplish;
instrumental values influence how we get there. The stronger an instrumental value is, the
more we act on it.
2. Intrinsic and Extrinsic Work Values
Intrinsic work values relate to the work itself. Most people need to find some personal
intrinsic value in their work to feel truly satisfied with it.
Extrinsic work values are related to the outcomes of doing work. Employees who work to
earn money or to have health benefits are satisfying extrinsic work values.
B. Conflicts among Values
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Intrapersonal, interpersonal, and individual-organization value conflicts all influence employee
attitudes, retention, job satisfaction, and job performance.
At some point in their career, many managers experience an intrapersonal value conflict
between the instrumental value of ambition and the terminal value of happiness. People are
generally happier and less stressed when their instrumental and terminal values are aligned.
Unlike intrapersonal value conflicts, which are internal to an individual, interpersonal value
conflicts occur when two different people hold conflicting values. Interpersonal value conflicts
are often the cause of personality clashes and other disagreements.
As a manager, it is important to remember that people’s constellations of instrumental and
terminal values differ. These differences can lead to differences in work styles, work
preferences, and reactions to announcements or events.
Finally, just as two different employees’ values can conflict, an employee’s values can conflict
with the values of the organization, creating individual-organization value conflict. Lower
individual-organization value conflict leads to greater job satisfaction, higher performance,
lower stress, and greater job commitment.
C. How Values Differ around the World
Global differences in values can also lead to different managerial behaviors. For example,
Latin Americans tend to hire competent family members whenever possible. Managers in the
U.S. tend to strongly value individual achievement rather than family ties.
Values are influenced by culture. Research has found that a large number of basic values can
be condensed into two major dimensions that vary across cultures:
(1) traditional/secular-rational values reflect the contrast between societies in which
religion is very important and those in which it is not.
(2) survival/self-expression values. emphasize economic and physical security.
Figure 4.3 illustrates how these two major dimensions of values differ in a variety of
countries.
D. The Role of Emotions in Behavior
Emotions also play an important role in organizations. Employees who effectively manage
their emotions and moods can create a competitive advantage for a company.
We all experience emotions at work. Our behaviors are not guided solely by conscious, rational
thought. In fact, emotion often plays a larger role in our behaviors than does conscious
reasoning.
Emotions are intense, short-term physiological, behavioral, and psychological reactions to a
specific object, person, or event that prepare us to respond to it.
Let’s break this definition down into its four important elements:
1. Emotions are short events or episodes and relatively short-lived.
2. Emotions are directed at something or someone; differentiating them from moods.
3. Emotions are experienced; we feel emotion.
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4. Emotions create a state of physical readiness through physiological reactions.
Why is understanding the role of emotions important to organizations?
First, because emotions are malleable, effective employees and managers know how to
positively influence their own emotions and the emotions of others.
Second, emotions influence both the creation and maintenance of our motivation to engage or
to not engage in certain behaviors.
Third, research has found that emotion can influence turnover, decision making, leadership,
helping behaviors, and teamwork behaviors. Effective leaders use emotion to generate positive
follower behaviors.
E. Affect and Mood
Although the cause of emotions tends be obvious, the cause of mood tends to be more
unfocused and diffused.
Moods are short-term emotional states that are not directed toward anything in particular.
Our mood at the start of a workday influences how we see and react to work events, which
influences our performance.
Our moods can be influenced by others. Workgroups tend to experience shared group moods
when they can display mood information to each other through facial, vocal, and behavioral
cues. Changing group membership in a way that changes the manner in which coworkers
interact can change the amount and type of mood information members get from each other and
influence employees’ moods.
Affectivity represents our tendency to experience a particular mood or to react to things with
certain emotions
The two dominant dimensions of mood are positive affect, which reflects a combination of high
energy and positive evaluation characterized by emotions like elation, and negative affect,
which comprises feelings of being upset, fearful, and distressed.
As shown in Figure 4.4, positive and negative affect are not opposites, but are two distinct
dimensions. Affect tends to be somewhat dispositional and fairly stable over time.
Negative affect is related to lower organizational citizenship behaviors, greater withdrawal and
counterproductive work behaviors, lower job satisfaction, and greater injuries.
Higher positive affect is related to increased creativity, openness to new information, and
efficient decision making. Positive affectivity also increases the likelihood of cooperation
strategies in negotiations, improving the results.
III. PERCEPTION IN ORGANIZATIONS
Perception is the set of processes by which an individual becomes aware of and interprets
information about the environment
People perceive the same things in very different ways. Moreover, people often assume that reality
is objective and that we all perceive the same things in the same way.
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Since perception plays a role in a variety of workplace behaviors, managers should understand
basic perceptual processes. Through perceptual processes, the receiver assimilates the varied types
of incoming information for the purpose of interpreting it.
A. Basic Perceptual Processes
Two basic perceptual processes are particularly relevant to managers—selective perception and
stereotyping.
1. Selective Perception
Selective perception is the process of screening out information that we are uncomfortable
with or that contradicts our beliefs.
2. Stereotyping
Stereotyping is categorizing or labeling people on the basis of a single attribute. Certain
forms of stereotyping can be useful and efficient.
Common attributes from which people often stereotype are race and sex. Of course,
stereotypes along these lines are inaccurate and can be harmful.
B. Errors in Perception
As you might expect, errors may creep into how we interpret the things we perceive.
Stereotyping and selection perception are often the underlying causes of these errors, but other
factors may also come into play. Perception shortcuts, for example, may play a role.
One perception shortcut is categorization, which reflects our tendency to put things into groups
or categories. We then exaggerate the similarities within and the differences between the
groups.
After we put people into categories, selective perception leads to selectively interpreting what
we see based on our interests, expectations, experience, and attitudes. Selective perception
reinforces stereotypes as the perceiver focuses on information and behaviors that confirm rather
than negate the assigned stereotype.
Managers need to be aware of this bias in order to evaluate subordinates more objectively and
accurately.
The halo effect is when we form a general impression about something or someone based on a
single (typically good) characteristic.
The contrast effect occurs when we evaluate our own or another person’s characteristics
through comparisons with other people we have recently encountered who rank higher or lower
on the same characteristics.
Projection occurs when we project our own characteristics onto other people.
First impression bias may also be relevant. Research has found that not only do we tend to
avoid people after we have had a negative reaction to, but also negative impressions are harder
to change than positive ones. First impressions are formed quickly. Once we form wrong
impressions, they are likely to persist.
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Our impressions and expectations of others also can become self-fulfilling prophecies. If we
categorize a person as untrustworthy, we are likely to treat that individual with suspicion and
distrust. These actions then evoke appropriate guarded reactions from the other person, whose
reactions serve to confirm our initial impressions.
C. Perception and Attribution
Attribution refers to 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.
As shown in Figure 4.5, we rely on three rules to evaluate whether to assign an internal or an
external attribution to someone’s behavior or outcome:
1. Consistency – leads to internal attributions
2. Distinctiveness – low distinctiveness leads to internal attributions
3. Consensus – a low consensus points to internal attributions
A related aspect of attribution is self-handicapping. Self-handicapping occurs when people
create obstacles for themselves that make success less likely. Examples include using drugs and
alcohol, refusing to practice, and reducing effort.
These behaviors may sound silly, but they are very real and serve to protect the person’s sense
of self-competence. Focusing on effort attributions and developing feelings of self-efficacy
help overcome this behavior.
Attributing success to internal causes builds self-efficacy and increases the motivation to try
hard and persist in the face of failure.
D. Perception and Fairness, Justice, and Trust
Perception and perceptual processes play a major role in how people feel about fairness, justice,
and trust.
In organizations, perceptions of unfairness (also referred to as injustice) can exist in numerous
situations such as layoffs and downsizings, hiring and promotion decisions, union negotiations,
and even simple organizational change.
The term organizational fairness refers to employees’ perceptions of organizational events,
policies, and practices as being fair or not fair.
Why should you care about fairness? You should care because perceptions of fairness affect a
wide variety of employee attitudes and behaviors including satisfaction, commitment, trust, and
turnover.
A number of negative behaviors can result from perceptions of unfairness, including theft,
sabotage, and other unethical behaviors. Perceived unfairness also increases the chances that
employees will file lawsuits against their employers.
As a manager, it is critical to remember that it is insufficient to just be fair; you must also be
perceived as fair by your subordinates.
Understanding fairness is important for ethical reasons as well. Failure to meet employees’
fairness expectations can lead them to engage in unethical behavior