Changing Employees Attitude

Changing Employees’ Attitude

Attitude is an important concept in psychology. Several kinds of behaviors like beliefs, opinions, stereotypes, prejudice are closely connected with attitudes It may be defined as a learned orientation or disposition towards an object, person, situation or issue which makes an individual to react to them in favorable or unfavorable manner. Attitudes are general evaluations people make about themselves, other persons, objects or issues. There are three components of attitude, namely, evaluative component, cognitive component and behavioral component.

One’s attitude is normally permanent but they are also amendable to change. The organizations have become interested in changing the attitude of their employees because, attitudes and work performances are considerably related and we want to improve the work related attitudes. There are two types of attitude change, such as changing other’s attitude and changing our own attitude.

There are two methods of changing other’s attitude:

A. Traditional Approach and

B. Cognitive Approach.

In an organization set up an attempt is often made to change employees’ attitude for better performance and results. Changing other’s attitude is a serious business and requires great skill and tact. We usually change other’s attitude through persuasion. In the persuasion process, a target person (the individual whose attitude is to be changed) is given a message (either written or spoken) in which the information presented is designed to change his or her attitude.

Persuasion is the process of changing attitudes through the various types of information. Research studies have demonstrated that some forms of persuasion are much better and much more likely to succeed than others. Research on this issue has continued for several decades and has identified many factors that play a role in the impact of persuasive messages. The most important of these, seems to fall under three major headings, i.e., characteristics of the communicators. (Who delivers the massage?), characteristics of the communication (what does it say and how?) and characteristics of the recipients (who are the people who receive it?).

There are two methods of changing others attitude through persuasion,

A) Traditional Approach

The traditional approach to persuasion focuses primarily on identifying crucial characteristics of communicators, communications and audiences, including sleeper effect. It is an increase in attitude change over time, so that a persuasive message actually generated more attitude change, sometimes after it has been presented than immediately afterward. The findings of early research studies with regard to traditional approach can be summarized briefly as under:

1. Experts are more persuasive than non-experts (Hovland and Weiss). The same argument carry more weight when delivered by people who seem to know what they are talking about and have all the facts than when made by people lacking such experience.

2. Messages that don’t appear to be designed to change our attitudes are often more successful than ones that seem intended to manipulate us (Walster and Festinger). In other words, we don’t trust and we refuse to be influenced by those who deliberately set out to persuade us. This is one reason why many efforts at persuasion adopt the kind of soft fell approach.

3. Popular and attractive communicators (Sources) are more effective in changing attitudes than unpopular or unattractive one (Kiesler and Kiesler). This is one reason why politicians devote so much effort to the task of exchanging their personal appeal to voters.

4. People are sometimes more susceptible to persuasion when they are distracted by some extraneous event than when they are paying full attention to what is being said (Allwyn and Festinger). This is why political candidates often arrange for spontaneous demonstrations during their speeches.

5. Individuals relatively low in self-esteem are often easier to persuade than those high in self-esteem (Janis). Lacking in self-confidence, the farmer are more susceptible to social influence from others.

6. When an audience holds attitudes contrary to those of a would be persuader, it is often more effective for the communicator to adopt a two-sided approach, in which both sides are presented, rather than one-sided approach. Apparently, strongly supporting one side of an issue while acknowledging that the other side has a few good points in its favor serves to disarm audiences and make it harder for them to resist the source’s conclusions.

7. People who speak rapidly are generally more persuasive than those who speak slowly (Milleretal). This idea is contrary to the popular view that people distrust fast-talking sales persons and politicians. One reason why rapid speech is more persuasive is that it seems to convey the impression that the communicator knows what he or she is talking about (i.e. high in expertise).

8. Persuasion can be enhanced by messages that arouse, strong emotions (especially fear) in the audience, particularly when the message provides specific recommendations about how a change in attitudes or behavior will prevent the negative consequences described in the fear-provoking message (Leventhal, Singer and Jones). Such fear-based appeals seem to be especially effective in changing health-related attitudes and behavior (Robberson and Rogers).

Most of the above research findings have withstood the test of time and appear to be accurate.

B) Cognitive Approach

The cognitive approach to persuasion focuses on the cognitive processes that underlie persuasion. The cognitive approach attempts to find out what cognitive processes determine when someone is actually persuaded? This approach focuses on what many researchers term a cognitive response analysis efforts to understand-

1. What people think about when they are exposed to persuasive appeals and

2.  How their thoughts and related cognitive processes determine whether and to what extent they experience attitude change.

3.  According to Baron and Greenberg, persuasive communication involves two elements:

            i) Communicator characteristics: What makes certain individuals more persuasive?

            ii) Communication: What makes a message persuasive?

These two elements can be discussed as under:

i. Communicator Characteristic

According to Baron and Greenberg, three characteristics of communicator play an important role in changing attitudes, these are:

• Individuals we like:

We are more influenced and change an attitude when we like others. We tend to ignore whom we dislike. The people whom we like can play an important role in changing our attitudes.

• Presentation Style:

Effective communicator who changes our attitude is one who presents himself in a smooth and elegant style who speak fast and convincingly.

• Credibility:

We are more likely to change our attitude when requested or confronted by a person who has considerable credibility. Credibility have means the extent to which we believe or trust others. The more credibility a person has, the more he/she will be influential in changing an attitude.

ii. Communications

This has to do with the content of the message. What is the content of persuasive message and its characteristics. Research studies have shown that there are several such characteristics, but the two most important are as under:

• The communication should be presented in a manner and at a level that is clear and intelligible to the tangents. If the message is not clear and if it does not make sense then the attitude change would not occur.

• The other factor that determines the persuasiveness of message is how different they are from the views already hold by the target persons, i.e., the size of the attitude discrepancy.

Sometimes people are asked to change their attitudes completely, moving from being totally against something to being totally for it. At other times, people are asked to change their attitudes only a little, or a moderate amount. As you might imagine, it is easier to change attitudes when the change represents a small discrepancy from the individual’s initially held opinions than when the discrepancy is longer. This is, in LARGE part, due to the tendency people have to dismiss highly discrepant views as unreasonable and unworthy of their consideration, whereas more moderate views are not believed to the unreasonable and are not rejected out of hand.