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Individual Behavior- Values and Attitudes

Individual Behavior
Individual Behavior is influenced by factors such as biographical characteristics, ability and learning. Biographical characters include factors such as employee’s age, gender, length of service with an organization.
The relationship between age and job performance is of increasing importance in the study of organization behavior. The reason for this is a widespread belief that job performance declines with increasing age. But at the same time, there are some positive qualities that older workers bring to their jobs, especially experience, strong work ethics and commitment to quality. But older workers are also perceived as lacking flexibility and as resistant to new technology.
The older worker gets, the less likely he is to quit his job. As workers get older, they have fewer alternative job opportunities. In addition, older workers are less likely to resize than are younger workers because their long tenure tends to provide them with higher wage rates, longer paid vacations and more attractive pension benefits.
The natural conclusion is that the demands of most jobs, even those with heavy manual labor requirement are not extreme enough for any decline in physical skills attributable to age to have an impact on productivity, or if there is some decay due to age, it is offset by aging due to experience.

INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES

Gender:- Important differences between men and women that will effect their job performance. There are no consistent male-female differences in problem-solving ability, analytical skills, competitive drive, and socio ability. Psychological studies have fund that women are more willing to conform to authority and that men are more aggressive and more likely then women to have expectations of success, but those differences are minor. One issue that seems to differ between gender, especially when the employee has preschool-age children, is preference for work schedules. Working mothers are more likely to prefer pail time work, flexible work schedules and telecommunicating in order to accommodate their family responsibilities.

Marital Status:- Research consistently indicates that married employees have fewer absences, undergo less turnover and are mere satisfied with their jobs then are their unmarried workers. Marriage imposes increased responsibilities that may make a steady job more valuable and important.

Tenure:- If we define seniority as time on a particular job, we can say that the most recent evidence demonstrates positive relationship a between seniority and job productivity. So tenure, expressed as work experience, appears to be negatively related to absenteeism. Tenure is also a potent variable in explaining turnover. The longer a person is in a job, the less likely he or she is to quit. Consistent with research that suggests that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior evidence indicates that tenure on an employee’s previous job is a powerful predictor of that employee’s future turnover. The evidence indicates that tenure and satisfaction are positively related.

VALUES

Values represent basic conviction that a specific mode of conduct or end- state of existence is personally or society preferable to an opposite mode of conduct. They contain a Judgmental element in that they carry an individual’s ideas as to what is right, good or desirable. Values have both context and intensity attributes. The context attribute says that a mode of conduct is important. The intensity attributes specifics how important it is.
Values are important to the study of organizational behavior they lay the foundation for the understanding of attributes and motivation and because the influence our perception. Managers have to become capable of working with people from different cultures. Because value and attributes differ across cultures, are understanding of these differences should be helpful in explaining and predicating behavior of employees from different cultures. Nine dimensions on which cultures differ:-

Assertiveness:- The extent to which a society encourages people to be tough, assertive,
confrontational and competitive verses modest and tender.

Future Oriented:- The extent to which a society encourages and rewards future oriented behaviors such as planning, investing in future and laying gratification.

Gender Differentiation:- The extend to which society maximizes gender role and differences.

Power Distance:- Degree to which members of society expect power to the unequally shared.

Performance Oriented:- This refers to the degree to which a society encourages and rewards group’s members for performances improvement an excellent.

Individualism/collectivism:- This is the degree to which individuals are encouraged by societal institutions to be integrated groups within organizations and society.

ATTITUDES

Attitudes are evaluative statements or Judgment concerning objects, people or events. They reflect how one feel about something. These are three components of an attitude: cognition, affect and behavior.

• Cognitive component of an attitude is opining or belief segment of an attitude. E.g. discrimination is wrong. Such an opinion is the cognitive component of an attitude.
• Affective component of an attitude is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude e.g. I don’t like Mr. X because he discriminates against minorities.
• Behavioral component of an attitude is an intention to behave in a certain way towards someone or something.
These three component cognitive, affect and behavior- are helpful in understanding the potential relationship between attitudes and behavior. In contrast to values, attitudes are less stable. E.G. Advertising message attempt to alter your with feeling related to product/services. That attitude may lead to desirable response/behavior i.e. the purchase of product or service.

TYPES OF ATTITUDES

A person can have thousand of attitudes. The work related attitudes can positive or negative evaluation that employees hold about their work environment. Most of the research in organizational behavior is concerned with three attitudes: job satisfaction, job involvement and organizational commitment.
Job Satisfaction:- The term job satisfaction refers to an individuals general attitudes towards his or her job. A person with high level of job satisfaction holds positive attitudes about the job, while a person who is dissatisfied with his/ her job holds negative attitudes about the job.

Job Involvement:- Job involvement measures the degree to which a person identified psychologically with his/her job and considers his/her perceived performance level important to self work. Employees with high level of job involvement strongly identify with and really care about the kind of work they do.

Organization Commitment:- It is a degree to which an employee identifies with a particular organization and its goals, and wishes to maintain membership in the organization. The research demonstrates negative relationship between organizational negative relationship between organizational commitment and both absenteeism and turnover.

ATTITUDE-BEHAVIOR RELATIONSHIP

Attitudes effect behavior and vice-verse. Important attitudes are ones that reflect fundamental values, self interest or identification with individuals or groups that a person values. Attitudes that individuals consider important tend to show a strong relationship to behavior. The more specific the attitude and the more specific the behavior, the stronger the link between the two.
Discrepancies between attitudes and behavior are more likely to occur when social pressures to behave in a certain ways hold exceptional power. The attitude-behavior relationship is likely to be much stronger if an attitude refers to something with which the individual has direct personal experience.

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