The Importance Of Attitude In The Workplace – Positivity Leads To Success

What is attitude?

Question:

Discuss About The Environment Either Negatively Or Positively?

Attitude, in simple terms can be defined as the feeling or opinion about something or someone. An attitude can be defined as the ways a person responds to his or her environment which may be either negatively or positively. Some attitudes are dangerous elements which when exhibited by individuals may lead to affecting others performance while many be positive and influences other person to work in a better way (Young et al. 2015). Rosenberg as well as Hovland had produced three component models to explain how attitudes are formed and influences the behaviour. Attitudes are made of three important components which are cognitive, affective and behavioral. The cognitive component is developed from values as well as beliefs and the second component is about how one feel about something as well as someone. Third component is behavioral component which decides how we behave with others like towards person, object as well as place. Attitudes are infectious which affect any people who are near that person who is exhibiting a particular attitude. This in turn can influence their behaviour as well. Therefore it is often important for the every employee to understand different types of attitudes as well as their likely implications. This is useful as it helps in predicting the pattern about how different individual’s patterns influence their behaviour (Christina et al. 2014). Daniel Katz has helped in the identification of the four important attitudes which determine the type of formation of behaviors at workplace.

These four categories are utilitarian, ego defensive, value expressive as well as knowledge. Utilitarian may be defined as individual’s attitude which is mainly derived by the individual form self or may be from community interest (Woodrow and Guest 2014). These can be explained with example where an individual gets a raise in his salary. This will help him develop a positive attitude which will positively affect his behaviour in some circumstances and will make him more responsible for work. He next is knowledge which can be logical or rationalizing and this component of attitude can develop distinct behavior. For example, if an organization is developing new workplace strategies for performing a particular task, individual should find the logic in the task which will help them to display a positive behavior in workplace. If their attitude is negative towards the task due to the failure of getting the logic, it will lead to improper behaviour (Norton, Zacher and Askanasy 2014). Another is ego defensive where people have a tendency to support their ego to defend themselves which results in showing negative behaviour. There are certain an employee who cannot accept criticism from managers regarding their work and subsequently shows a negative attitude by stating that the manager is foolish and unnecessarily escalating his work. This leads to defensive behavior in the workplace which affects his path in his career and never allows him to develop his skills as his defensive behavior does not allow him to strive for better. Another form of attitude is value expressive where people develop central values over time that becomes the foundation of the attitudes they exhibit. Personal values are people’s internal conception about what is beneficial, useful, desirable, important, and beautiful as well as constructive. Therefore the person who has the right values will show positive behavior and those with the negative values lead to negative behavior.

The three components of attitude

A positive attitude in workplace helps the employees to accomplish tasks much faster and in a better manner. The performance of the employees mainly depends on the good relationship they share with other colleagues and this can be only established when employees have positive attitude towards their colleagues and work. When a person shows positive energy, work becomes pleasure which keeps the employees satisfied and they find it easier to reach goals. A positive attitude can lead to much usefulness for an individual in an organization. One of them is experiencing career success. A person with positive attitude will always think of strategies to accomplish the work properly in a well defined manner in place of complaining as well as finding excuses and playing blame games for non performance.  This will either lead to increased compensation or to promotion. Another is productivity where employees with positive attitude tend to take more interest in what they deliver with high quality and minimum errors that improve their overall output in comparison to those who shows defensive or negative behaviour. Moreover a leader who is positive is love and respected and looks up to as role model (Gregory Smith et al. 2015). He or she can make his or her team productive with the maintenance of immunity and proper team working skills. A leader who is showing negative attitudes will never be able to make his team perform in the above mentioned way which will lead to loss of productivity, little or no job satisfaction and stress among the workers. Moreover, an individual with positive attitudes will help himself and other colleagues in correct decision making by triggering the right though process helping employees to choose wisely and logically. They would also be highly motivated in overcoming obstacles in comparison to those who have negative altitudes and complain constantly with excises about different barriers. Moreover, an employee who is showing positive attitude will be able to share better rapport with customers, earns customer royalty, increases sales and therefore increases productivity (Blok et al. 2015). This chain of achievements can never be reached by a man with negative outlook in his attitudes. Stress management is also higher in person with positive attitudes as they tend to think positively which reduces stress making them enjoy their job with less health complications mentally and physically.

A large number of factors that lead to job satisfaction as well as      job commitment should be noted by leaders as well as the employers so that they can enhance the performance of the workers, reduce turnovers and increase retention rates. The employer should introduce training and development opportunity so that employees get the scope of developing their skills as well as knowledge so that the workers also look forward to promoting themselves to the next level. Career opportunities as well as promotion also encourage the employees to be more enthusiastic and hence they try to perform better so that they can gain more advantages and be selected for promotion (Mowday, Porter and Steers 2013). Moreover employers or leaders who are providing rewards as well as recognition to the employees make them feel that they are loved and respected for their dedication to work and this making his dedication aware to other colleagues gives them a boost in self confidence increasing his job commitment. Moreover researchers have seen that those organizations which make sure that they provide flexibilities to their employers regarding work life balance has help to increase their productivity and the job satisfaction level also increases (MacDonald and Levy 2016). Moreover those leaders who are able to maintain a work environment of trust, unity, shared decision making, and helping attitudes and similar others also makes the employees dedicate more of themselves and these reduce stress and increase job satisfaction. This also shows that better compensation and performance appraisal makes the employees perceive that their performance is liked and respected which in turn encourage them to be more helpful and urge them to thrive for much better. This zeal leads to high job commitment. Proper leadership and supervisor support help them to be constantly encouraged and develop the working pattern, skill and knowledge by providing a clear objective and goal. This kind of support helps them to overcome any new issues they face and thereby make them feel less stressed and more dedicated to work (Guay et al. 2016). Another important factor is autonomy of the employees where their voice is heard and paid attention too. This also makes them feel that their suggestions are respected and they indeed feel important which increases job satisfaction. A proper role clarity as well as better leave policies also make the employees more dedicated towards their jobs (Nie et al. 2015).

Four important attitudes for workplace behavior

Organisational commitment is the bond that employees experience with their organization. Employees, who are committed to the organization feel connected with the organization, feel that they fit in and understand the objectives as well as mission and vision of the organization. They are more determined to their work show higher productivity and are more proactive whenever support from them is required (Anitha 2014). Therefore managers should make sure that each and every employee develops organizational commitment so that the productivity is increased and maintained. Managers should thereby make effort to collect data form employee surveys as well as from correlation analysis. This would help them to discover the extent of the factors that are affecting the employee’s organizational commitment. After finding out about the definite factors, the managers should take definitive steps to make it certain that the employees overcome the factors so that organizational commitment can be ensured. The managers should mainly make it sure that four important things are clear in the mind of the workers to ensure them to be committed to the organization (Pineau et al. 2015). These are clearing the company goals to them so that they know what to achieve, provide strategies so that they can gain energy form the work, making them feel accepted in the organization helping them to fit in within the organization and to provide them with a challenging environment with constant feedback, performance reviews, discussions and others so that they always remain active and productive. Such dedications form managers will ensure that all hi employees are committed to the organization to meet the vision and mission of the organization.

References:

Anitha, J., 2014. Determinants of employee engagement and their impact on employee performance. International journal of productivity and performance management.

Blok, V., Wesselink, R., Studynka, O. and Kemp, R., 2015. Encouraging sustainability in the workplace: a survey on the pro-environmental behaviour of university employees. Journal of cleaner production, 106, pp.55-67.

Christina, S., Dainty, A., Daniels, K. and Waterson, P., 2014. How organisational behaviour and attitudes can impact building energy use in the UK retail environment: a theoretical framework. Architectural Engineering and Design Management, 10(1-2), pp.164-179.

Gregory-Smith, D., Wells, V.K., Manika, D. and Graham, S., 2015. An environmental social marketing intervention among employees: Assessing attitude and behaviour change. Journal of Marketing Management, 31(3-4), pp.336-377.

Guay, R.P., Choi, D., Oh, I.S., Mitchell, M.S., Mount, M.K. and Shin, K.H., 2016. Why people harm the organization and its members: Relationships among personality, organizational commitment, and workplace deviance. Human Performance, 29(1), pp.1-15.

Macdonald, J.L. and Levy, S.R., 2016. Ageism in the workplace: The role of psychosocial factors in predicting job satisfaction, commitment, and engagement. Journal of Social Issues, 72(1), pp.169-190.

Mowday, R.T., Porter, L.W. and Steers, R.M., 2013. Employee—organization linkages: The psychology of commitment, absenteeism, and turnover. Academic press.

Nie, Y., Chua, B.L., Yeung, A.S., Ryan, R.M. and Chan, W.Y., 2015. The importance of autonomy support and the mediating role of work motivation for well?being: Testing self?determination theory in a Chinese work organisation. International Journal of Psychology, 50(4), pp.245-255.

Norton, T.A., Zacher, H. and Ashkanasy, N.M., 2014. Organisational sustainability policies and employee green behaviour: The mediating role of work climate perceptions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 38, pp.49-54.

Pineau Stam, L.M., Spence Laschinger, H.K., Regan, S. and Wong, C.A., 2015. The influence of personal and workplace resources on new graduate nurses’ job satisfaction. Journal of nursing management, 23(2), pp.190-199.

Woodrow, C. and Guest, D.E., 2014. When good HR gets bad results: Exploring the challenge of HR implementation in the case of workplace bullying. Human Resource Management Journal, 24(1), pp.38-56.

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