9.3 Attitudes and Behavior
People often talk about a person’s intelligence and relate it to an IQ. Leaders need another type of intelligence, emotional intelligence, EQ. Managers with a high EQ are able to manage their emotions, are self-motivated, show empathy for others, and good social skills. Being a manager is more than being a ‘boss’. To motivate people it is important to understand and relate to them.
Understanding employees includes understanding their attitudes and behavior. There are three basic attitudes people have in response to a situation.
- Affective – This is ones feelings and emotions towards a situation. A person with an affective response might say, “I don’t like…”
- Cognitive – Cognitive refers to knowledge. It is an attitude derived from knowledge of situation. A cognitive response to a situation might be, “This is the worst…”
- Intentional - This is what one intends to do, their expected behavior in the situation. An intentional response might be, “I will never…” or “I’m going to …”
How a person reacts to a situation depends upon their predispositions.
- Cognitive dissonance is when one has conflicting pieces of “knowledge”. They believe two things to be true (cognitive) but both can’t be true at the same time (dissonance). E.g. World will end but it doesn’t. One then works to reduce or resolve the dissonance.
- Positive affectivity is when a person has a tendency to be positive, a “glass half full” person.
- Negative affectivity is when a person has a tendency to be negative, a “glass half empty” person. (What does an engineer say when they see a glass half full/empty? Answer – “the glass is too big.”)
Finally, broadly speaking we can classify individuals as one of two types:
- Type A – These individuals are intense.
- Type B – These people tend to be more easy going and laid back.
A problem with most classifications is that things don’t always fall neatly into a bucket.
