Introduction

Attitudes are our feelings, thoughts and behavioral tendencies towards a specific object or situation. Attitude is a predisposition to respond to a certain set of facts. Attitudes are evaluative statements – either favorable or unfavorable, concerning the objects, people or events.  In the language of the layman, we may describe an attitude as the way we feel about something. This may be a feeling towards college, cricket team, temple, democracy, parents, things, ideas, policies and so on.

Definition

 “An attitude is mental state of readiness, learned and organized through experience, exerting a specific influence on person’s response to people, object and situations with which it is related.”

 “Attitudes are learned predispositions towards aspects of our environment. They may be positively or negatively directed towards certain people, service or institutions”

 “By attitudes we mean the belief, feelings and action tendencies of an individual or group of individuals towards objects, ideas and people. Quite often persons and objects or ideas become associated in the mind of individuals and as a result of attitudes become multi-dimensional and complex”

Nature of Attitude

• Attitude are a complex combination of things we tend to call personality, beliefs, values, behaviors, and motivations.

• Attitudes are learned

• An attitude exists in every person’s mind. It helps to define our identity, guide our actions, and influence how we judge people.

• Attitude refers to feelings and beliefs of an individual or groups of people, although the feeling and belief components of attitude are internal to a person, we can view a person’s attitude from his or her resulting behavior.

• Attitude helps us define how we see situations, as well as define how we behave toward the situation or object.

• Attitude endures, unless something happens. For example if X is transferred to day shift, his attitude may become positive

• Attitudes can fall anywhere along a continuum for very favorable to very unfavorable. Example “This B school is good”

• Attitudes are organized and are core to individual

• Attitude provides us with internal cognitions or beliefs and thoughts about people and objects.

• Attitude cause us to behave in a particular way toward an object or person.

• All people, irrespective of their status or intelligence, hold attitudes

Characteristics of attitude

1. Affective Cognitive consistency

The degree of consistency between the affective and cognitive components influences the attitude—behavior relationship. That is, the greater the consistency between cognition and evaluation, the greater the strength of the attitude-behavior relation.

2. Strength

Attitudes based on direct experience with the object may be held with greater certainty. Certainty is also influenced by whether affect or cognition was involved in the creation of the attitude. Attitudes formed based on affect are more certain than attitudes based on cognition

3. Valence

It refers to the degree or grade of likeliness or unlikeliness toward the entity/incident. If a person is fairly unconcerned toward an object then his attitude has low valence.

4. Direct Experience

An attitude is a summary of a person’s past experience; thus, an attitude is grounded in direct experience predicts future behavior more accurately. Moreover, direct experience makes more information available about the object itself.

5. Multiplicity

It refers to the amount of features creating the attitude. For example, one may show interest in becoming a doctor, but another not only shows interest, but also works hard, is sincere, and serious. Relation to Needs: Attitudes vary in relative to requirements they serve. Attitudes of an individual toward the pictures serve only entertainment needs, but attitudes of an employee toward task may serve strong needs for security, achievement, recognition, and satisfaction.

Components of attitude

The following diagram depicts the three components of attitude viz., affective, behavioural, cognitive 

1. Affective component

This involves a person’s feelings, sentiments, moods, and emotions about some idea, person, event or object.

For example: “I am scared of spiders”.

2. Behavioral (or conative) component

This is the way the attitude we have influences how we act or behave. It is predisposition to get on a favorable or unfavorable evaluation of something For example: “I will avoid spiders and scream if I see one”.

3. Cognitive component

This involves a person’s belief, opinion, information or knowledge about an attitude object. For example: “I believe spiders are dangerous”.

These three components do not exist or function separately. An attitude represents the interplay of a person’s affective, cognitive and behavioral tendencies with regard to a person, group, an event or an issue.

For example, suppose that an individual holds a strong, negative attitude about the use of nuclear power. During an employment interview with the representative of a large firm, he discovers that the company is a major supplier of nuclear power generation equipment. He might feel a sudden intense dislike for the company’s interviewer (the affective component). He might form a negative opinion of the interviewer based on beliefs and opinions about the types of person who would work for such a company (the cognitive component). An important element of cognition is the evaluative beliefs held by a person. He might be tempted to make an unkind remark to the interviewer or suddenly terminate the interview (the behavioral component)  

The ABC model

The three components of attitude described above constitute, what is called, the ABC models, the three letters respectively standing for affect, behavior and cognition. The significance of the model is that to thoroughly understand an attitude, one must assess all the three components. Suppose for example, one wants to evaluate one’s employee attitudes towards flextime (affect), whether they would use flextime (behavior) and what they think about the policy (cognition). Unfortunately most techniques of measuring attitudes focus only on cognitive component

Following diagram represents the three components of attitude in terms of work environment factors. These stimuli trigger cognitive (thoughts), affective(emotional), and behavioral responses.