Chapter Four
Individual Values, Perceptions, and Reactions
Chapter Overview …………………………………………………….. Error! Bookmark not defined.
Learning Outcomes …………………………………………………………………………………………. 1
Real-World Challenge: Attitude Is a Choice at Pike Place Fish Market ……………….. 2
Chapter Outline ………………………………………………………………………………………………. 2
I. ATTITUDES IN ORGANIZATIONS …………………………………………………………….. 2
Chapter 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.
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. But when the
owner of the business decided to get out, Yokoyama decided to buy the business. 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
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.
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
When people experience dissonance, they often use one of four approaches to cope with it.
Using the scenario mentioned earlier, 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
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.
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
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.
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
b. Normative commitment
Occurs when an employee feels obliged to stay with an organization for moral or
c. Continuance commitment
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.”
Engagement is enhanced when employees:
• Have clear goals.
• Have the resources needed to do a good job.
• Get meaningful feedback on their performance.
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.
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
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.
B. Conflicts among Values
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.
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 United
States tend to strongly value individual achievement rather than family ties.
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.
Let’s break this definition down into its four important elements:
1. Emotions are short events or episodes and relatively short-lived.
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.
E. Affect and Mood
Although the cause of emotions tends be obvious, the cause of moods 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.
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.
III. PERCEPTION IN ORGANIZATIONS
Perception is the set of processes by which an individual becomes aware of and interprets
information about the environment.
A. Basic Perceptual Processes
Two basic perceptual processes are particularly relevant to managers—selective perception and
stereotyping.
1. Selective Perception
2. Stereotyping
Stereotyping is categorizing or labeling people on the basis of a single attribute. Certain
forms of stereotyping can be useful and efficient.
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.
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.
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. The strongest
attribution people tend to make is whether their own or others’ behaviors or outcomes are due
to the individual (internal factors) or to the environment (external factors).
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
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
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,
Global Issues: How Culture Can Influence Attributions
Summary: In intercultural interactions, the interpretations of behaviors are often more important than the
actual behaviors. Because Western cultures emphasize individualism, people prefer dispositional
explanations, whereas people from collectivist cultures prefer situational explanations. One study showed
American and Chinese participants a picture of a fish swimming in front of a group of fish. More
1. Distributive Fairness
Distributive fairness refers to the perceived fairness of the outcome received, including
2. Procedural Fairness
Procedural fairness addresses the fairness of the procedures used to generate the outcome.
Why does procedural fairness matter so much? There are two reasons. First, employees use
3. Interactional Fairness
Interactional fairness is whether the amount of information about the decision and the
process was adequate, and the perceived fairness of the interpersonal treatment and
explanations received during the decision-making process. Deception or abusive words or
actions can be seen as having low interactional fairness.
Interactional fairness describes two specific types of interpersonal treatment.