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  • Work Attitude – Job Satisfaction

    In the last byte, we looked at work attitudes and how it is could be influenced by the work environment. In today’s byte, we look at specific work attitude – Job Satisfaction.

    Job satisfaction refers to a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting from the appraisal of one’s job or job experience. In many ways it is a general attitude, but creates a satisfactory feeling through the combination of five specific dimensions:

    1. The Pay
    2. The Work itself
    3. Promotion opportunities
    4. Supervision
    5. Coworkers who work with you

    Given that job satisfaction has different dimensions, it is possible that one would be satisfied with one of these dimensions but be dissatisfied with other dimensions. As an employee you could possibly be satisfied with the pay but not the promotion policy and the work that you do could be thoroughly hated while the coworkers could be extremely cooperative and give you satisfaction of working with them.  It is generally seen that Challenging work, competent supervision, opportunities of advancement, valued rewards along with supportive coworkers are dimensions that lead to satisfaction.

    It is a commonly held belief that happy or satisfied employees are more productive at work. It is also true that most of us feel satisfied when we believe we are performing better than usual. If the first one true, the all that a manager would need to do is keep the workers happy and this would automatically improve the performance. In the latter case the manager would need to ensure that the employee performs well, and this would lead to satisfaction. It is clear from our argument above that the relation is not so straight forward.

    The possible reason why this is not so straight forward could be

    • the inherent difficulty in demonstrating the attitude – behavior link
    • the dimension of “reward” is one of the main sources that make this relation difficult to answer.

  • Attitude in Work a Environment Setting

    In the last blog we looked at the predictability of a behavior based on the attitude. In today’s blog, we attempt to understand attitude in the context of work environment and the impact it is able to create.


    Imagine a situation where you are working with a “boss” who is not from the domain of the company you have been working for the last 1 year almost. He is recently joined your company and has taken over just a couple of weeks earlier. Your project has been in development stage for more than 2 years now, most of the team members who started working on the project have now moved out of the company, and there are many fresh faces around you. You are in fact the oldest resource of the project, which also has a US team working on it. There are over hundred defects that have been raised in the project which have been pending at various stages since no one has a clear idea of the source of these defects. Conditions seem to be completely against you – How would you react to a situation like this?


    Definitely the situation like this wouldn’t be getting you excited working on the project. The lack of control over the project, the demanding requirements of the project etc all create an attitude in the mind of the employee that is negative and this would affect the work. On the other hand a positive climate at work would lead to a positive attitude and good performance. This positive performance could in many cases lead to a better return for the company. Take the following example in the hospitality industry:


    You go and stay in a hotel and invariably meet a lot of employees out there. The employee gestures, facial expressions, and words used. If you had an unpleasant experience when in contact with the employee of the organization, would definitely put you off and you might decide never to visit the hotel again!


    There are many such work attitudes that we observe. In the forth coming bytes, we shall discuss some of these.

  • Attitude and Behavior Relationship – 2

    In the last byte, we looked at the components that help us understand the relation between attitude and the behavior that follows. In today’s blog we continue to understand when this prediction of the behavior is possible.

    In a working environment like Bangalore there are people who come from all parts of the country. Let us assume for the time being that you come from a part of the country where there is a negative attitude held in the society towards women and the prevailing attitude is that women wouldn’t be in positions of power. If as a new employee an organization, you are supposed to report to a female supervisor; the inconsistency in the behavior with your attitude and cultural belief becomes clearly visible. Thus we see that the social context is an important provider of information that would define the outcome of the relation between acceptable attitudes and behavior.

    We have already learnt about self-monitoring in an earlier byte. The people who are low self-monitors relay on their internal states to make decision about behavior, while the high self-monitors are extremely responsive to the situational cues. Given the versatile nature of the people who are high self-monitors, there would be a lower degree of predictability of behavior from the attitude that is held, compared to those who are low self-monitors.

    Timing of the measurement also affects attitude-behavior correspondence. If the time is shorter between the attitude measurement and the observed behavior, the relationship would be stronger. This is exactly the benefit that the surveys before the actual voting reap on.

  • Attitude – Behavior Relationship – 1

    In the last blog, we looked at the way an attitude gets formed. In today’s blog we look at the possibility of understanding if we can have a relation between the attitude we carry and the behavior show.

    It is extremely difficult to predict by knowing one’s attitude what that person’s behavior would be, given this, a lot of the research has been focused on understanding when attitude could predict a behavior and when it wouldn’t. To get a strong grasp of this, we could look at 5 components

    1. Attitude Specificity
    2. Attitude Relevance
    3. Timing of Measurement
    4. Personality Factors
    5. Social Constraints

    As individuals, we have both specific and general attitudes. For example if I am against “black money laundering” (this is a general attitude) and I support Baba Ramdev in his agitation (a specific attitude) but I don’t attend the rallies etc. Since I do not join the rallies, my attitude could be seen as having little relation with my behavior. However, if I were to choose between a contestant who promises to get back the “black money” and one who doesn’t, it would be easier to predict that I would definitely vote for the first candidate and not the second. Thus, we can conclude – greater the attitude specificity, the stronger its link to behavior.

    Let’s consider another situation – Temporarily assume we are undergraduate students, the finance minister decided to reduce the tax slabs of the first 2 lakhs from being tax free to 1.5 lakh only to be tax free. We invariably would just not give this issue a lot of importance. However if we were in the working class, this decision of the government would immediately catch our attention and would become an item of discussion! Thus, we can conclude that the relevance of the subject is another important factor that could help us define a relation between attitude and behavior.

    We shall discuss the other components in the next blog.

  • How are attitudes formed?

    In the last blog, we looked at cognitive dissonance and understood the source of such a dissonance. In today’s blog, we look at how we form attitudes.

    When we reflect on the way we have learnt, we begin to see two distinct manners – one, where we have had direct experiences and second where we learn by observing others and then trying out ourselves.

    Our first few experience with mathematics, the experience which our teachers created for us when we learnt science, or the questions they asked in the exams in history really made our attitude towards these subjects. There were direct experiences in childhood that we carry even today. Such experiences derived from personal experience are stronger, held confidently, and are found to be more resistant than the ones we pick up from indirect experience (those that were just told and believed in by us)

    The second type of learning occurs when we look at our own surroundings – we observer our parents, friends, seniors etc We create “models” in our mind of these people and attempt to create our attitudes by merely observing others. This process of observing and creating our attitude generally would have 4 processes in it:

    1. We would focus and observe our model
    2. What is observed is retained in our mind
    3. We as learners practice what we observed as a behavior
    4. We are constantly motivated to learn from such a model.
    Having shown that we have 2 broad ways in which we learn an attitude, it would be extremely important to understand that society we live in and the cultural context of our operation have a major influence on the way we form our attitudes.

  • Cognitive Dissonance

    In the last blog, we attempted understanding Attitude using the ABC model. In today’s blog we take a situation and understand the underlying issue and how it is handles in real life.


    Assume you are a salesperson who strictly believes that selling damaged goods to customers is an unethical behavior. For the day, you have been posted to the TV section of the show room; you know that a specific model (the last in its model currently available) of TV is damaged. A customer approaches you and asks for the same model and to be delivered immediately. How would you react?


    There are many responses you could take to a situation like this, some of these are: you might refuse to sell the TV, or you could rationalize saying that the defects in the TV are those that wouldn’t harm the customer who doesn’t know about it and move ahead to sell it or any such approach. Invariably in any stance the behavior that you have adopted creates some form of “dissonance” or “discomfort” that is the result of a conflict between the “attitude” and “behavior”.


    Cognitive Dissonance is a state of tension that is produced when an individual experiences conflict between attitude and behavior. It originates from our attempt to be consistent in everything that we believe in and do. We prefer a consistency between our attitude and behavior.


    As manager, one would need to understand cognitive dissonance since the employees who work with them and find themselves in situations in which their attitudes conflict their behavior. If there is a sudden shift in the behavior of an employee, might possibly be due to the attempt to reduce dissonance. In extreme cases it could also lead to one quitting the job.

  • Kannada Naadina kathe – Punyakotiya Kate

    People of Karnataka are generally accommodating and peace-loving, was wondering why this might have been the case and eventually seem to have made a connection. Do look at the following video.
    For those who haven’t got the jist of the video, here is a short summary:
    “A cow on its way returning home is stopped by a tiger. It negotiates its exit with the promise that it would return to be eaten by the tiger  – once it feeds its calf. It indeed does as promised. The tiger feels guilty of having though of killing such a truthful being and spares the cow.”
    This song was one which lingered pretty early in my ears – made part of the curriculum under the syllabus recommended by the Karnataka State. I think this was part of the syllabus in 3rd Standard or so… and had been so for over 25 years I guess!
    The message of belief in truth, being non-violent, doing your duty with atmost faith etc are all embedded in it.

  • Education – We inherently know what to learn!

    I found this floating in the Facebook world and this sparked off a thought! – Could we make education really personal. I guess there are multiple dimensions of this, and it would be worth exploring these in a series.
    Albert Einstein possibly put this statement out of his own experience! Especially his early childhood when he was considered a good for nothing kid! But today we consider him as one of the many geniuses who walked on the planet.
    As humans, we all possess an inherent urge to “learn something”. This “something” could range from the standard courses taught in college to just what we find around – could be art or just a simple skill too.
    Most likely, we donot know the source of this inspiration that comes to us – exciting us about the “thing” we intend to learn… The question then is – “If we inherently know what excites us to learn a specific thing, why shouldn’t we think of personalizing the learning process?” 
    Recognizing that individuals are all different, like different things, learn different things at different paces should be the bedrock on which we should develop our learning systems. Education though broad-based, should be flexible to give the necessary space for students. 
    An interesting perspective it to allow the diversity itself to be a guiding factor in the process of educating oneself. Constraining and creating a rigid mindset could be detrimental to the education’s cause of broadening one’s horizon.

  • Looking at an enterepeneur as a farmer! – An interpreation of entreprenurship

    Entrepreneurship is really a hot topic of discussion. There are various forums that discuss about it. I tried super-simplifying this by equating it to farming! But in reality there are many analogies that we could think of when this comparison of start-ups as plants…
    Beginning with this blog, I attempt to try drawing parallels between plants/farming/ etc and the world of entrepreneurship.

  • Looking at an entrepreneur as a farmer!

    Many aspire to be entrepreneurs and start firms that eventually become part of their “identity”, i.e. an entrepreneur acts as if there is no distinction between the firm and the individual running the firm. You might have possibly guess where I am heading to in this blog…So just hang on…
    While an entrepreneur is the one who grows and manages the firm/enterprise, it is very important for an entrepreneur to be able to distinguish oneself from the firm. 
    As an analogy, we could look at the entrepreneur as a farmer who passionately tills the soil, sows the seed, takes sufficient care to see the crop grow and finally harvests the crop. An interesting question to ask here – what would happen if the farmer begins to think that the crop he grown and (s)he is one? Yes, you may not be willing to harvest what you have grown!
    A sense of attachment to the firm, with the ability to detachment is a key to being able to act in the best interest and with the right spirit. It is the attachment, which is the passion aspect of an entrepreneur, helps put in all the energy and enthusiasm one holds towards the hopeful dream into action; but the detachment enables one takes an arms length view of the venture at hand and decide with potentially the best interest what is to be done.
    The key, thus is really to look at the process of venture creation and growth with a “farmers” mindset than being the crop itself!!! What say?
    There are interesting extensions of this attempt of being able to equate the firm one sets up to plants; I would love to explore this aspect over the next few blogs. Stay tuned is your are interested in thinking about this.