Attitudes

What about those employees who have a "bad attitude"? Most of us consider that attitudes are appealing set, and that our attitudes control our performance. That makes instinctive sense. How- ever, research into cognitive dissonance has shown that attitudes are a lot more unsettled than we used to think?

And that in a lot of cases our performance controls our attitudes. This means that you can change someone's attitude by changing their behavior.

Let's look at a simple example, such as when you give money to charitable trust. The act of giving money leads to a change in attitude. Research shows that after people donate money to a charitable trust, their attitude toward that charity is again and again more positive than it was before the contribution. If you think about this, it does make sense: I have a definite image of myself-which may contain disliking a convinced charity. If I give money to that charity, I now have what the researchers call "dissonance"-I've just done something that goes beside my attitudes and psychologically, I feel uncomfortable. To resolve this disagreement I can do numerous things: I can counteract the donation by saying I was forced to give; I can stop charitable to the charity; or I change my attitude by saying, "Well, the charity isn't that bad after all."

Knowledge of cognitive disagreement leads the manager to meeting point not on varying the attitude but on changing the behavior-which will then lead to a change in attitude. How do you change performance? We'll talk more about that in the section on incentive, after we explore personality decision making.