Lesson 2

• Values, attitudes lead to job satisfaction.
• Values have both content and intensity attributes.
• Their work fills the need for social interaction.
• Supportive Colleagues - people get more out than merely money or tangible achievement
• The content attribute of values states that a mode of conduct or end-state of existence is important.
• The intensity attribute of values specifies how important it is.
• When we rank an individual’s values in terms of their intensity, we obtain that person’s value system.
• Values differ across cultures, and an understanding of these differences should be helpful in explaining and predicting behavior of employees from different countries.
• One of the most widely referenced approaches for analysing variations among cultures has been done by Geert Hofstede.
• Power distance is the degree to which people in a country accept that power in institutions and organizations is distributed unequally.
• Individualism is the degree to which people prefer to set as individuals rather than as members of a group.
• Collectivism describes a tight social framework in which people expect others of which they are part to look after them and protect them.
• Quantity of life refers to the extent to which societal values are characterized by assertiveness and materialism while quality of life emphasizes relationship and concern to others.
• Uncertainty avoidance is the degree to which people prefer the structured over the unstructured situations.
• Long term versus short term orientation refers to the extent to which people in cultures with long term orientations look to the future and value thrift and persistence, while people in cultures with short term orientations value the past and present, and emphasize respect for tradition and fulfilling social obligations.
• Knowledge of employee attitudes can be helpful to managers in attempting to predict employee behavior.
• Attitude encompasses all of a person’s emotional, perceptual, behavioral and rational processes in response to some aspect of the environment.
• Attitudes reflect how one feels about something.
• Attitude surveys are a popular method for obtaining information about employee attitudes.
• Attitudes significantly predict behaviors when moderating variables are taken into account.
• Attitudes are not the same as values, but the two are interrelated.
• Cognitive Dissonance Theory sought to explain the linkage between attitudes and behavior.
• An attitude survey seeks to understand and evaluate the consumers’ attitude towards a particular product/service/idea.
• An attitude survey helps the company obtain insights related to the different attitudinal aspects of consumers towards the product, service or category.
• Desire to reduce dissonance depends on the importance of elements creating dissonance, the degree of individual influence over elements, and the rewards involved in dissonance.
• The behavioral component of the person's attitude would be the ignoring of the information to continue to receive the high salary.
• Attitudes are evaluative statements- either favourable or unfavourable- concerning objects, people or events.
• An attitude survey is often administered keeping in mind target consumers, clearly spelling out the respondent profile.
• The affective part of the person's attitude would be feeling certain discomfort knowing that he works for a company that is harming people.
• Dissonance, simply put, means an inconsistency.
• The cognitive part of the person's attitude would be the evaluation that tobacco is harmful.
• People generally seek consistency among their attitudes and between their attitudes and their behavior.
• Satisfaction is also negatively related to turnover but the correlation is stronger than what we found for absenteeism.
• There is renewed support for the original satisfaction- performance relationship when satisfaction and productivity data are gathered for the organization.
• Attitude survey allows the company to identify latent markets, new target groups or the more profitable demographic segments.
• Self-Perception Theory suggests that attitudes are used after the fact to make sense out of an action that has already occurred.
• Manager’s interest in job satisfaction tends to center on its effect on employee performance.
• Satisfaction is negatively related to absenteeism but the correlation is moderate.
• Researchers have recognized this interest, so we find a large number of studies that have been designed to assess the impact of job satisfaction on employee productivity, absenteeism and turnover.
• Happy workers aren’t necessarily productive workers, but happy organizations are more productive.