Workplace Attitudes: Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Dimensions

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Workplace Attitudes: Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Dimensions

Leadership and Organizational Behavior · Chapter 6: Workplace Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational BehaviorSection 6.1 · lesson 33 of 12211 min · free with a free account

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In this lesson

What an attitude is made of, where it comes from, and when it predicts anything.

  • Define an attitude and its three components
  • Trace the four pathways of attitude formation
  • State when attitudes reliably predict behavior
  • Apply cognitive dissonance to organizational life

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Workplace Attitudes, Job Satisfaction, and Organizational Behavior

Workplace Attitudes: Cognitive, Affective, Behavioral

Chapter Six is about what employees think and feel about their work. And, more importantly, about when those attitudes actually predict behavior. This first subchapter builds the conceptual architecture. What an attitude is, and the three components it contains. How attitudes form, through four different pathways. When they predict behavior, which is a genuinely hard question. And what happens when attitudes and actions conflict. That last topic is cognitive dissonance, and it explains a great deal. It explains why people can be uncomfortable in a job for years. And gradually stop noticing that they are.

Definition

Three Features of an Attitude

An attitude is a learned, relatively stable evaluative disposition. A tendency to respond to some target in a consistently favorable or unfavorable way. Three features of that definition deserve emphasis. First, attitudes are learned. Acquired through experience, socialization, observation and reflection. They are not innate, which means they can in principle be changed. Second, they are relatively stable. Once formed, attitudes persist and resist change, though they are not immutable. Third, they are evaluative. Every attitude contains a judgment. Good or bad, favorable or unfavorable. That is why attitudes matter so much to organizational behavior. They shape what employees notice, how they interpret events, and how they act.

Objects

What Employees Hold Attitudes Toward

In organizations, attitudes attach to a wide range of objects. Specific job tasks. Supervisors, and colleagues. Compensation systems, and organizational policies. The organization itself, as an entity. And the broader occupation or career the person is building. These attitudes are among the most intensively studied variables in the field. Because of their demonstrated links to a long list of outcomes. Performance, turnover, absenteeism, citizenship behavior and well-being. Note that an attitude can also be ambivalent. And ambivalence is a distinct state, not a midpoint on a scale. Feeling strongly both ways is not the same as feeling nothing much.

The ABC Model

Three Interconnected Components

The dominant framework for attitude structure is the tripartite model. It is usually called the A B C model. The affective component is the emotional dimension. How the attitude object makes you feel. Feeling proud and energized when discussing your work with others. Or experiencing dread on a Sunday evening before the week begins. The behavioral component is the action tendency, or intention. Volunteering for extra assignments. Updating your resume and scanning postings. Or quietly avoiding interactions with a difficult colleague. The cognitive component is belief and evaluation. Believing your organization treats employees fairly. Thinking that your supervisor is competent and supportive. Each of the three can influence behavior independently.

Divergence

When the Three Components Disagree

Usually the three components agree with one another. Positive beliefs co-occur with positive feelings and approach-oriented intentions. But they can diverge, and when they do the divergence is diagnostic. Take a concrete case. An employee may accept that a new performance system is technically well-designed. That is a positive cognition. And still feel anxious and resentful about it, which is negative affect. And passively resist its implementation, which is negative behavior. All three at once, in the same person, about the same object. Which yields the practical point of this whole model. Knowing which component drives the problem determines the right intervention. Addressing beliefs with more information will not help an affective problem. And more information is exactly the default organizational reflex.

Formation I

Experience and Observation

Attitudes form through several pathways, and the pathway matters. It determines how malleable the attitude will be later. Direct experience produces the strongest attitudes. They are more accessible, and more predictive of behavior. Direct experience gives you vivid, emotionally tagged memories. Memories that are easily retrieved, and carry high subjective confidence. Consider a manager's supportive response to somebody's mistake. An employee who experienced that forms robust trust. Someone who only heard about it secondhand does not. The second pathway is social learning, by observing respected or similar others. New employees are especially susceptible to this. They watch how experienced colleagues talk about the organization. Which is how culture actually propagates, rather than through values statements.

Formation II

Socialization and Disposition

The third pathway is socialization, formal and informal. Organizations that invest in structured onboarding see the difference. Onboarding designed to create positive early experiences. To build accurate role expectations. And to foster connections with colleagues and mentors. Those organizations predictably generate more positive attitudes. And the timing is disproportionately important. Attitudes formed in the first weeks and months set a baseline. A baseline against which every later experience gets interpreted. The fourth pathway is dispositional, and partly genetic. Some people tend toward positive or negative affect across situations. Studies of identical twins raised apart find heritability in job satisfaction. That does not make situational intervention futile, but it does affect interpretation.

Not All Equal

Accessibility and Strength

Not all attitudes are equally influential on behavior. Two dimensions determine how powerfully an attitude guides action. The first is accessibility. How quickly and easily the attitude comes to mind on encountering the object. Attitudes activated frequently and recently are highly accessible. And they exert more consistent influence than less accessible ones. The second dimension is attitude strength. Strength comes from the certainty with which an attitude is held. From its centrality to the person's self-concept. And from having support in both affective and cognitive components. Strong attitudes resist change and predict behavior better. They are also more likely to influence information processing. That last property is the quiet one. A strong attitude changes what evidence registers.

Prediction

When Attitudes Predict Behavior

Now the foundational question. Do attitudes predict behavior at all? Early reviews were pessimistic. They found surprisingly weak correlations between attitudes and observed behavior. Later research identified when the link does hold, and there are four conditions. First, attitude specificity. Attitudes toward a specific behavior predict that behavior far better than general ones. Matching specificity between the attitude measure and the behavior improves prediction dramatically. Second, accessibility. Automatic attitudes guide behavior more consistently. Third, the strength of behavioral intention. Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior says attitudes work through intentions. And those intentions are moderated by subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Fourth, situational constraints. Rules and surveillance can block attitude-consistent behavior entirely.

Dissonance

Festinger, 1957

Leon Festinger introduced cognitive dissonance theory in nineteen fifty-seven. It describes the discomfort of holding inconsistent cognitions. Beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge of your own behavior that do not fit together. The critical property is that dissonance is motivating. People are driven to reduce the discomfort somehow. By changing one of the inconsistent elements. By adding new cognitions that reconcile them. Or by reducing the importance of one of the conflicting elements. In organizations, this arises constantly. An employee who values environmental sustainability, at a company with poor practices. Dissonance between personal values and organizational affiliation. Or an employee asked to implement a policy they consider ethically questionable. Dissonance between behavioral compliance and moral conviction.

Resolution

Four Ways Out

There are four strategies employees typically use to resolve dissonance. The first is attitude change. Revising the attitude so it aligns with the behavior. Perhaps this policy is not as problematic as I first thought. The second is behavior change. Speaking up, requesting a role change, or resigning. The third is rationalization. Adding cognitions that reconcile the inconsistency. I need this job to support my family, so this compromise is necessary. The fourth is trivialization. Minimizing the importance of the conflict. This particular issue is not really that important overall. Now notice something uncomfortable about that list. Three of the four leave the organizational conditions completely unchanged.

Change

What Makes Attitude Change Work

Organizations regularly try to change employee attitudes deliberately. Through culture initiatives, training, communication and structural redesign. Three factors determine whether the attempt works. First, the source of the message. Credible, trustworthy sources persuade more than self-interested ones. Leaders seen as authentic, who model what they advocate, are far more effective. Far more effective than leaders whose communication reads as performative. Second, the route of persuasion. The central route engages with argument quality and evidence. It produces more durable change than the peripheral route. The peripheral route relies on presentation quality and superficial cues. Third, behavioral engagement accelerates change. Participating in activities that embody an attitude pulls the attitude along.

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Leadership and Organizational Behavior carries a NCCRS credit recommendation. These universities work with NCCRS; some are UPI Study's signed partners. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.

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FAQ

Questions students ask us

About Workplace Attitudes: Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Dimensions

What is the ABC model of attitudes?
The ABC model, also called the tripartite model, says an attitude has affective, behavioral, and cognitive components. The affective part is how the object makes you feel, such as dread on a Sunday evening. The behavioral part is an action tendency, such as updating your resume. The cognitive part is a belief, such as thinking your supervisor is competent. The parts usually agree but can diverge, and knowing which one drives a problem points to the right fix.
What is cognitive dissonance in the workplace?
Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort of holding inconsistent beliefs, attitudes, or knowledge of one's own behavior, a theory Leon Festinger introduced in 1957. At work it arises when, for example, an employee who values sustainability works for a company with poor environmental practices. People reduce dissonance by changing their attitude, changing their behavior, rationalizing, or trivializing the conflict. Only behavior change, such as speaking up or resigning, alters the underlying conditions.
When do attitudes predict behavior?
Attitudes predict behavior best under four conditions. The attitude and the behavior should match in specificity, since an attitude toward a specific action predicts that action better than a general one. The attitude should be accessible, coming to mind quickly. Intentions should be strong; Ajzen's Theory of Planned Behavior holds that attitudes act through intentions shaped by subjective norms and perceived behavioral control. Finally, situational constraints such as rules and surveillance must not block the behavior.
How are workplace attitudes formed?
Workplace attitudes form through four main pathways. Direct experience creates the strongest and most predictive attitudes, because it leaves vivid, emotionally tagged memories. Social learning comes from watching respected or similar colleagues, which is how new hires absorb culture. Socialization through structured onboarding sets an early baseline that later events are judged against. Disposition also plays a part, as twin studies find some heritability in job satisfaction, though situations still matter.

About the Leadership and Organizational Behavior course

How many college credits is Leadership and Organizational Behavior?
Leadership and Organizational Behavior (Business 206) carries a NCCRS credit recommendation for 3 semester credits. ACE and NCCRS have over 2,100 cooperating colleges that will consider accepting credits; the final decision is with the universities.
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$250, paid once, with lifetime access: all 122 video lessons, a practice quiz after each, the graded work and final exam, and an official transcript when you finish. Students who want several courses choose UPI Study PRO instead.
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