Perception and Individual Decision-Making & Motivation Concepts - Essay Example

Employee attitudes can be influenced by various issues and the worst among them is racial background. Racialism as a source of employee attitude leads to the development of negative attitudes among employees. Normally, the attitudes of employees of an organization affects the organization in various ways. First, it affects their own productivity, often without their awareness. Reisig and Lovrichh (1998) explains that positive attitudes result to improved productivity and such employees are characterized by self-motivation, hard work, drive to achieve, good moods and happy faces to all.

On the other hand, negative attitudes lead to reduced productivity both for individuals and teams, rudeness and even aggressiveness. Ray (2001) explains that employee attitudes can be very infectious. Within a short time, other employees can pick up negative attitudes from fellow workers and adopt them as their own. Team spirit is very important for the success of an organization and where group attitudes arise, they can either foster or frustrate this. A positive team attitude makes employees to want to works together for the good of the company whereas a negative attitude discourages team work.

Employees of one race, tribe or any other dividing factor will not be willing to work together with their counterparts. One type of organization that can really be affected by poor attitudes among its staff is prison. Poor attitudes among correctional staff in a state prison could affect other aspects of that prison like its security, management of inmates, designing of teams for employee shifts and coexistence among inmates. The development of poor attitudes can lead to disunity among employees of different racial groups and as such, employees arrange themselves along racial lines when changing shifts and forming teams (Ray, 2001).

This is so negative considering that at any one time, there might be no equal number of employees from different racial background. This means a group containing a mixture of races will work in hatred and disunity. Some could even end up subordinating others. Hatred along racial lines could also spreads from staffs to the inmates where they form gangs whose loyalties are defined by race or ethnicity (Kane, 2001). This has the potential of causing detrimental effects on the prison for example, it can lead to gang violence, riots and physical altercations.

Divisions along racial lines may also threaten the security of the prison and everybody else where prison staffs ignore unacceptable actions by done by inmates from their racial or ethnic backgrounds. This means that some individual inmates or group of inmates will have the freedom to oppress fellow inmates or smuggle things in and out of the prison. On the other hand, the other inmates will have little support whenever they voice their concerns. Poor attitudes among prison staff affects how inmates are treated in that some will conservative and hard-lined when dealing with inmates whereas other will be less strict and liberal.

The greatest level of disunity, disagreement and arguments is seen when such attitudes are displayed by employees from various ethnic, racial and gender backgrounds. Poor attitudes a