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Employee attitude can point out future behaviour trend
Attitude of a person is reflected in his behaviour. Research has repeatedly proved that knowledge about a person’s attitude helps anticipate his future behaviour. This knowledge has great significance at the workplace. Managers, therefore adopt various means to extract information about the attitude of their employees.
Managers consider attitude as a decisive factor in various situations. Before offering a potential candidate a job, they consider his attitude towards work and the organisation. Before assigning a leadership role to an employee they find out what he thinks about growth and success. Similarly while forming teams, they examine the potential team members’ attitude towards each other and to teamwork.Changes are inevitable in organisations. And each employee responds to the change guided by his attitude. For example, when there is a merger, employees who are highly competent generally have an attitude to accept challenges. This kind of employee accepts the change with optimism and even helps others to cope with the change. Some employees will remain calm till they encounter a problem. Such employees do not create unnecessary problems by responding hastily. On the other hand, there are some employees who perceive everything negatively. Such employees must be tackled with a well-planned strategy. Else they will lose their morale, experience insecurity and even influence others to believe their distorted perceptions. Work teams consist of employees who hail from different backgrounds, cultures, beliefs and attitudes. This applies specifically to companies with a culturally diverse workforce. To maintain a balance of skills, such diversity can be unavoidable. In such cases, managers must inculcate the right attitude in subordinates.Managers must try their best to gather as much information as possible on the attitude of their employees on various aspects. This gives them a fair knowledge about how they will react to a situation. Thereby they can devise a suitable action plan to tackle any future challenges.Collecting information on employee attitude is not a one-time task. Attitudes of people keep changing according to their experiences. This explains the reason for the sudden change in behaviour of some employees. For example a dedicated employee loses a promotion to his colleague. He feels defeated and jealous. This is reflected in his under performance. Even worse he can start conspiring against the colleague and the manager. Thus, managers must keep an eye on such issues to avoid negative repercussions.
While observing the responses of an employee to various subjects and situations is one way to get insight into his attitude, attitude surveys are another. Attitude surveys are conducted in two ways. One is to ask the employee himself and his colleagues to tell about his attitude. Another is to pose questions on the subject towards which the attitude of the person is being assessed. The set of questions must be carefully and sometimes a little craftily framed to get the right information. Using more than one means of assessing the attitude and recording the conclusions frequently gives good results.
Though the attitude of a person towards a subject is well known, many times it is not feasible to access his behaviour accurately. The reasons behind this are several. For instance an employee who detests a colleague suddenly starts befriending him to get a deal signed. This is because his attitude towards the deal is stronger than his attitude towards the person. Or an employee who was pro-employee union earlier attends an anti-employee union meeting when he is promoted to a high level. Here he is forced to do it by virtue of the duties in his new role. Therefore behaviour is not guided completely by attitude.There is another interesting aspect about attitudes. When a person keeps behaving in a specific manner for sometime against his basic attitude, his attitude can actually change to match his behaviour.
Attitude and behaviour, both, play important roles in the growth of individuals and affect each other. Hence maintaining the right attitude and behaviour in employees is necessary for the organisation to succeed.
NITYA SAI SOUMYA
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