MGT5313 Chap.3 Managing Attitudes, Values and Emotions
Managing Attitudes, Values and Emotions
Attitudes have a structure, and it runs in one direction
An attitude is the bundle of beliefs and feelings a person holds about one particular idea, situation or person, and it is built from three structural components. Cognition is what a person takes themselves to know about the thing, affect is the feeling toward it, and intention is a deliberate plan, or a firm inner decision, to act in one particular way.
Attitudes generally form in that sequence: a person comes to believe something is true, that belief triggers a feeling, and the two together shape how the person intends to behave.
Knowing the order matters because it tells you which link a proposed intervention is trying to edit, and most workplace interventions aim at the first link while the organization only controls the third.
Three work attitudes pointing at three different objects
Job satisfaction is how far the work itself gratifies or fulfils the person doing it.
Organizational commitment is how strongly a person identifies with an organization and feels bound to it. Employee engagement is a raised emotional and intellectual tie to the job, strong enough that the person spends effort nobody required of them. Satisfaction is about the work, commitment is about the organization, and engagement is about effort beyond the role, so a firm can raise one and move neither of the others.
Of all the job related attitudes, satisfaction is the one the material singles out, and it names four things that move it: the person's personality, their values, their attitudes and the work itself.
Three of those four sit inside the person and only one sits in the job, so an organization treating satisfaction purely as a design problem has assumed away most of its own model.
Dissonance, and the three ways out
Cognitive dissonance is the anxiety a person experiences when their behaviour contradicts their attitudes, or when they hold two contradictory attitudes at once, with stress, frustration, restlessness and anxiety given as its emotional symptoms.
Three exits are published: change the conflicting attitude, change the conflicting behaviour, or seek additional information to reason that the benefits of one side outweigh the costs of the other. The first is the route managers reach for and the one they control least. The second is usually the route the organization can actually take, because the behaviour is often produced by a target or a rule that somebody owns.
The third is repricing rather than resolving, and it is the route that hardens into cynicism when the information is thin.
Values underneath, in four types and three conflicts
Personal values are the beliefs and inner principles that guide behaviour.
Terminal values reflect long term life goals such as happiness or accomplishment; instrumental values reflect the preferred means of reaching them; intrinsic values relate to the work itself, such as the job being meaningful; extrinsic values relate to the outcomes of doing the work, such as pay. Value conflicts come in three forms, and each has a different owner. An intrapersonal conflict is held within one person.
An interpersonal conflict is between two people who each hold a defensible position.
An individual to organization conflict is a fit question, and the culture material is blunt that people who do not fit leave at markedly higher rates, so prescribing a conversation for what is really a fit problem is a predictable misfire.
Emotions, events and the labour of display
Emotions are intense, short term and event driven, and the material claims they shape motivation, decision making and team culture and can drive either high performance or severe burnout depending on how they are managed.
Affective Events Theory is invoked to connect them: specific events on the job cause different people to feel different emotions, and those emotions inspire actions that benefit or impede others. Emotional labour then supplies four terms that a good answer keeps apart. Display rules are the organizational standards dictating which emotions are appropriate to show.
Surface acting hides true feelings by changing outward expressions. Deep acting works on the internal feeling so the expression becomes more genuine.
Emotional dissonance is the stress that arises when felt and displayed emotions do not match, and it is the measurable cost of a display rule nobody funded.
Six dimensions, and how to cite one honestly
The chapter closes on six cultural dimensions, with culture treated as a property of a collectivity rather than of an individual.
Power distance is how far a population accepts that power inside its institutions is unequally held, read as the felt distance between staff and the people above them. Uncertainty avoidance is how far members feel threatened by ambiguous or unstructured situations. The femininity and masculinity axis contrasts the pursuit of financial success and strong performance with a preference for life quality, modesty and relationships.
Individualism and collectivism concerns how far individual initiative is preferred to the extended group. Long term orientation covers endurance, persistence and high savings against expectations of quick profit. Indulgence and restraint concerns how far a culture satisfies desires rather than holding them back to meet social norms.
Two causal claims are drawn that are fair game to test: that high power distance societies accept hierarchical structures, and that weak uncertainty avoidance cultures are more likely to produce fundamental innovations because they tolerate deviant thinking.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Cognition, affect and intention, and which link an intervention edits
- 02
Job satisfaction, commitment and engagement as three separate objects
- 03
The four named influences on job satisfaction
- 04
Cognitive dissonance and its three published exits
- 05
Terminal, instrumental, intrinsic and extrinsic values
- 06
Three types of value conflict, and who owns each
- 07
Affective Events Theory and the six emotions it studies
- 08
Display rules, the two kinds of acting they force, and the strain left over
- 09
The six cultural dimensions, and the two causal claims attached to them
Emotional labour, mistaken for a bad attitude
- 3Name the emotional labour mechanism and the term for the mismatch.
- 3Name the second mechanism operating on the agent's own attitude.
- 3Identify which of the three exits the refresher uses, and which one the organization controls.
Key terms
- Affect
- The feeling component of an attitude: a person's emotional response toward the object of the attitude, as distinct from what they believe about it.
- Behavioural Intention
- The conscious plan or strong inner choice to take a specific action, formed after cognition and affect and treated as the third structural component of an attitude.
- Terminal Values
- Values reflecting long term life goals such as happiness or accomplishment, as opposed to instrumental values, which reflect the preferred means of reaching them.
- Surface Acting
- Masking what is actually felt by altering the outward expression, such as smiling while angry. It changes only the external behaviour and is the cheaper and less sustainable of the two acting strategies.
- Deep Acting
- Working on the feeling itself until it matches what the organization requires be shown, which makes the resulting expression feel more genuine.
Managing Attitudes, Values and Emotions FAQ
Why separate job satisfaction from organizational commitment if both are about being happy at work?
Because they point at different objects and can move in opposite directions. Satisfaction concerns the work itself, commitment concerns identification with and attachment to the organization, and after a merger or a change of ownership it is common to see high satisfaction sitting beside falling commitment. Treating them as one number hides exactly the pattern a retention decision needs to see.
How do I tell emotional dissonance from ordinary stress?
Emotional dissonance has a specific cause: the gap between what an employee feels and what the organization requires them to display. Ordinary workload stress does not need a display rule to exist. The diagnostic question is whether removing the requirement to present a particular emotion would relieve the pressure, and if it would, the problem sits with the display rule and its funding rather than with the individual.
Can I use a published cultural index value to predict how a colleague will behave?
No, and doing so is a level error the first chapter warns against. The course material treats culture as a property of a collectivity rather than of an individual, naming family, occupational, regional and national groups as the relevant collectivities. An index describes a population, so it can support an argument about how an institution is likely to be received and cannot support a prediction about one person.
Assessment move
Rank the four named influences on job satisfaction for yourself, in writing, then write the sentence that would have to be true for your ranking to change in another country. The class discussion for this week asks exactly that pair of questions, and having the second sentence already written is the difference between contributing and agreeing.
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