Attitude: Concept, Formation and Components

Attitude is an individual's predisposed state of mind and evaluative statements about objects, people, ideas or events and is expressed through the favorable or unfavorable evaluation of a person, place, thing or event. Attitude is a mental and emotional entity that characterizes a person and is a psychological construct that is developed through experiences. 

Factors influencing Attitude

Psychological factors: They are ideas, values, beliefs, perceptions, etc.

Family: The family includes parents, brothers, sisters, and elders in the family.

Society: The society includes culture, the tradition, the language, etc.

Economic Factors: The economic factors include salary, status, work environment, etc.

Components of Attitude

Attitude is a multi-component model, where attitudes are evaluations of an object that have affective, behavioral, and cognitive components (the ABC model)

Affective component:  The affective component of attitude is the emotions or feel linked to an object, person or event.

Behavioral component: The behavioral component of attitude is the way we act or behave to a person, object or event.

Cognitive component: The cognitive component of attitude is the beliefs and knowledge about an object, person or event.

Attitude measurement

The attitude of an individual can be measured in two ways:

Explicit measure: Explicit measure is the attitudes at the conscious level, which is formed deliberately.

Implicit measure: Implicit measures are the attitudes at an unconscious level that is unknown to us and is formed unconsciously.

Both explicit and implicit attitudes have greater impact on developing an individual's behavior. However, Implicit attitudes, are more dominating when an individual is under stress or distraction.

Attitude change

Attitude can be changed through persuasion. The effectiveness of the persuasion is determined by the following factors:

Target characteristics: the behavioral characteristics of the person whose attitude is to be changed such as intelligence level, self – esteem, ego level, etc.

Source characteristics: the efficiency of the change maker such as expertise, trustworthiness and interpersonal attraction or attractiveness.

Message Characteristics: the nature of the message also plays an important role in facilitating the attitude change such message clarity and presentation style and method.

Cognitive routes:  the cognitive evaluation which is motivated by the message by presenting with the data to arrive at an attitude changing conclusion.
Work-related attitudes:

An individual will have lots of attitudes, but the organizational behavior emphases on work-related attitudes only; they are:

Job Satisfaction: Job satisfaction refers to the level of contentment of a person about the job. This feeling is mainly based on an individual’s perception of satisfaction. The high level of job satisfaction is associated with positive attitudes, while the level of job, dissatisfaction is associated with a negative attitude about the job.

Job Involvement: Job involvement is the degree with which the job is identified psychologically by an individual and the individual believes that his supposed performance level is important to self-worth.

Organizational Commitment: Organizational Commitment refers to an individual’s identification with the organization and feels proud of being part of the organization.