Attitude (Organizational Behavior)

What is attitude? Well, attitude can best be understood as a state of mind or a temporary disposition

One might also think of it as a temporary nature of your personality

Where personality is enduring and consistent, an attitude is not very temporary in nature

Now, the important part about understanding attitude for organizational behavior and management is that attitude has an effect on behavior

As a matter of fact, the concept of cognitive dissonance says that we act in a way such that we do not have inconsistencies in how we process information

Attitudes can cause inconsistencies in how we process information and thus result in a change in how we act

Now with that being said, attitudes are subject to arousal generally from external stimuli

things in our environment that we come into contact with. So external stimuli cause an internal reaction

Now this is generally made up of three parts. You have the affect portion, which is it can affect emotions

The cognition portion, which is the tendency to think through things or mentally process things

and then there action tendencies our natural responses or pre responses to exposures to external elements Now we can characterize attitude via multiple factors

Some of the more common ones are valence. This includes the degree to which your attitude towards an object is either positive or negative

Multiplexity, how many objects or how many elements make up whatever is your attitude towards an external object

So how many influences are there or external stimuli that are contributing to the attitude

Relation to needs, how closely related is the object of your attitude to accomplishing your goal, your objectives, or your individual interests

And then lastly, centrality, that is how important is the object of your attitude to you

This again is a sliding scale. So with that being said, to understand attitude, look at these various dimensions and understand

that we form our responses. We form our dispositions toward these external stimuli through our experience and exposure

So it tends to be learned rather than innate. So this is attitude and how it's relevant for management and organizational behavior