Social Psychology of Organisations - Essay Example

Running Head: Social Psychology of Organisations Attitudes And Perceptions By Attitudes and perceptions change frequently. It is often asserted by many psychologists that attitudes are dependant upon the organisational structures and settings. These may vary from culture to culture while many psychological processes are considered to be consistent across cultures; the operation of these processes is a function of culture. Organisational attitudes where on one hand propose that motivational goals exert a fundamental influence on the dominance of particular attitude components, on the other hand this function-structure model of attitudes proposes that salient motivations influence the weighting of information within each attitude component. Certain goals might be salient because they are chronically or temporarily accessible for some individuals. For example, the attitude object of an individual may be associated in his memory with a particular motive, causing the motive to be chronically accessible when the object is present. Alternatively, temporary features of the immediate situation may be associated in memory with a particular motive. For instance, the presence of credit card logos or money might activate utilitarian motivations to pursue wealth, and this motive might be particularly strong in a person who is surrounded by others wearing expensive clothing. These are all the influences of various attitudes on individuals. Wiggins (1965) argued that personalities are forged by social roles and social interactions. Work roles and work role interactions occur later in our lives than do social roles and social role interactions, but many enter the world of work via part-time and temporary work in their early teens. (Brett & Drasgow, 2002, p. 8) According to Brett & Drasgow "Attitudes are composed of affective, belief, and behaviour components. In some way, these elements coexisted as part of the attitude construct. Current thinking reconfigures this relationship. It appears more useful to say that attitudes are summary evaluations that are formed by affective experiences with the attitude object, beliefs about the object, and behaviours directed toward the object. Each of these former elements of attitude can be seen as a different piece of information that helps form the attitude. Attitude operations are consistent with this structure. Basic attitude measures ask respondents to place the attitude object along a scale of evaluation. That evaluation is the attitude". (Brett & Drasgow, 2002, p. 84) Seminal theories of attitude function in context with organisational structure provide some clues about potentially influential motivations. Smith et al. (1956) suggested that attitudes could serve object-appraisal, social-adjustment, and externalisation functions. The object-appraisal function encompasses the ability of attitudes to summarise the positive and negative characteristics of objects in our environment. In other words, attitudes enable people to approach things that are beneficial for them and avoid things that are harmful to them. Similarly in an organisational setting, attitudes refer to the social-adjustment function, and are served by approaches that help us identify with well-regarded individuals and dissociate from disliked individuals. For example, people often like and purchase styles of clothing that are worn by celebrities. The externalisation function is served by attitudes that defend the self against internal conflict. For instance, a poor squash player might grow to dislike the game because it threatens his or her self-esteem. The need for affect also predicts involvement in a real-life, emotion-inducing situation, even when the situation elicits negative emotions. For example, in one study, British participants were asked to complete an open-ended questionnaire assessing their cognitive, affective, and behavioural reactions to the death of Princess Diana, approximately three months following her death (Maio & Esses, 2001). Because the need for affect is analogous to an attitude toward emotion, this "attitude" should be malleable. Of course, a common technique for changing attitudes utilizes persuasive messages. Thus, to manipulate the need for affect, people could be given messages that support or refute the value of emotional experiences. Participants who receive a pro-emotion message should subsequently exhibit a stronger inclination to pursue emotions than participants who receive an anti-emotion message. The Effect of Organisational attitudes and perceptions clearly, affect the work-family culture of an organisation, which influence employee perceptions about the acceptable balance of work-family integration. Thompson, Beauvais, and Lyness defined work-family culture as "the shared assumptions, beliefs, and values regarding the extent to which an organisation supports and values the integration of employees' work and family lives. " In organisations that have little to no managerial support for work-family issues or where individuals feel as though there are possible negative career consequences for balancing work-family life (Anderson, Coffey, & Byerly, 2002), employees are more likely to experience work creep. For example, a manager may schedule a breakfast meeting to address an important issue regarding an ongoing project. However, over the course of the project, the occasional breakfast meeting gradually becomes accepted as a standard meeting that the manager expects all employees to attend. Thus, the breakfast meeting has converted time that was previously family time into work time. If the employee perceives that attendance at this meeting is an expectation or norm, the employee will need to be there in order to be considered part of the team. Thus, the employee will lose family time by this meeting creeping from the work domain into family time. Perlow (1998) argues that the scheduling of activities by managers is one way that they attempt to control the employees' work-nonwork boundary by dictating expectations about expected work hours. The gradual violation of the work domain into time previously set aside for nonwork activities is especially likely in individualistic organisational cultures where there is perceived to be intense competition between individuals for managerial goodwill, promotions, and monetary rewards because employees in these types of organisations will perceive that meeting managerial expectations regarding work hours is critical to the advancement of their careers. This leads to the following proposition: Proposition 2: The more emphasis the workplace culture places on competition between individuals for promotions, raises, and bonuses, the more work creep there will be in the lives of the organisation's members. Employees' decisions about appropriate work hours for themselves are likely to be affected by what they perceive to be the expectations of appropriate work hours. Perlow (1999) argues that in the engineering culture she studied, working long hours was viewed as a measure of one's commitment to the organisation. Failure to put in the hours that others do, thus, is likely to be viewed as an example of one's lack of commitment. Proposition 3: The perceived failure of an individual to put in at least the social norm of work hours will be associated with a perceived lack of commitment to the organisation. It is likely that expectations of appropriate work hours have risen in many industries as organisations seek to cut development cycles or find ways to deliver products or services to clients faster. The following quote from a part-time MBA student we interviewed captures this: "Our boss seems to measure productivity by the amount of time one spends at his desk, and not by what he produces. Our boss keeps telling us we should work longer hours. I doubt he would be happy until we worked at least 12 hours a day". Another perception from a different approach can be presented in the following manner: "My boss possesses practical approach. He is realistic in measuring productivity of the task given and not the time one spends daily". Employees who have a desire to balance their work with nonwork activities face a dilemma given the strong environmental and organisational pressures that seem to be propelling forward the expansion of work hours. This is especially true when one considers that individuals may be only bounded rational in how they make their time allocation decisions. It is often observed that the pressure of deadlines and the perceived negative consequences of failing to meet managers' expectations suggest that work activities are likely to be advantaged over nonwork activities in the competition for time. The use of ineffective coping strategies by individuals with low core self- evaluations might be especially important in engagement in work and family roles. Because individuals have to manage the interface between both their work and home lives and interact with numerous others in these situations (bosses, co workers, spouses, and children), managing the boundary between work and family may provide a particularly intense and complicated situation where the selection of coping strategies is important. For example, coping with the stressor of an unexpected increase in workload may be challenging, but attempting to manage this increased workload while meeting family obligations is even more challenging. Judge, Erez, and Bono (1998) note that core self-evaluations give people the ability to cope better with change, and the authors cite several studies indicating that those with a positive self-concept cope more effectively with organisational transformations. (Kossek & Lambert, 2005, p. 92) Ormel and Wohlfarth (1991) found that life situation changes were much more strongly related to distress for individuals high on neuroticism than for individuals low on neuroticism. This suggests an increased sensitivity to life changes on the part of individuals high on neuroticism that may be due, at least in part, to difficulties in coping with these changes (Ormel & Wohlfarth, 1991). Johnson and Sarason (1978) found that the relationship between life changes and depression is significant only for individuals with an external locus of control. The implication is that as changes occur in one's work or family roles (e.g., a promotion, the birth of a child, an elderly parent moving in), those with more positive self-evaluations would be able to cope better with such changes. The ability to enhance one's life via change may be connected to self-evaluations, which entirely depends upon an individual's perception of working conditions and working hours. Time pressure has important consequences both for managing work-related tasks and for managing the boundary between work and nonwork. Consider, for example, what happens when the time given to someone to accomplish a particular job is shortened, whether that job is writing a legal brief or introducing a new product to market. In such a circumstance, it is necessarily true that more tasks have to be completed in a given time period than previously. If the number of tasks to accomplish in a given time period is increasing, then it must also be true that the amount of time to accomplish some of the subtasks must decrease or tasks must be dropped. (Kossek & Lambert, 2005, p. 47) The attempt to compress tasks to fit into smaller blocks of time creates both the sense of needing to work faster as well as a sense of being pressed for time. We refer to the effort to squeeze more tasks into a finite period of time as time compression, which we define as the accumulated effect of having to accomplish tasks in less time than one had to accomplish the tasks previously. If, at the same time that this demand for increased speed of task accomplishment is occurring, there is also a trend toward increased complexity of managerial and professional jobs, then one can easily understand how and why there would be upward pressure on the number of hours devoted to work versus nonwork activities. If there are limited opportunities for upward mobility in a hierarchy and more people who desire promotions than there are promotions to be had, then a worker needs to be perceived as an excellent performer in order to win a promotion. In cases in which performance is difficult to measure, this may translate into a perceived need to be seen as willing and able to work long hours, especially when one's manager and peers are doing the same. To the extent that an individual desires to move up the hierarchy and his or her peers work long hours, then it becomes as much a social imperative as a work-related imperative that an individual work long hours in order to preserve his or her status in the hierarchy. Some workers probably would argue that they have to work long hours just to keep their jobs. Generalising theories of work behaviors to behaviors in general, and including attitudes and affect as core constructs in the theories, adds to the mix of empirical findings, generalizations from these findings, and attitude/behavior theories. The consistently significant attitude/behavior relations found between job satisfactions and several job behaviors pose an unacknowledged theoretical problem for attitude researchers. Organisational attitudes predict many organisational behaviors; social attitudes towards objects do not, in general, predict individuals' behaviors toward those objects. This discrepancy may reflect a fundamental difference between social and work attitudes and between social and work behaviors. It should be addressed. (Brett & Drasgow, 2002, p. 18) Job satisfaction measures, like attitude measures in other domains, ask respondents to place the attitude object along some scale of evaluation. Sometimes the evaluative scale is presented to the person to locate his or her response on it. Other times, people are presented with descriptive items already scaled for evaluative meaning by subject matter experts. Scales sometimes may be phrased in ways that make them seem like they are tapping affective states, but make no mistake, evaluation is what is being tapped. To see a performance rating as an attitude immediately makes salient the fact that evaluations and affect share the same space. When the rater is rating a person with whom he or she has had opportunities interact over time, it is unlikely that the rater does not possess some feelings about the person that may or may not have anything to do with performance. Furthermore, temporary events independent of job performance often occur around the time of appraisals that create affect. The ratee may disappoint the rater by not inviting him or her to some off task activity; he or she may have acted in a way that embarrassed the rater in some way not associated with job performance, and so on. Considering an appraisal measurement, as an attitude will not solve the problem that affect creeps into ratings but may prevent the users of such measures from the dilution that the measure is affect free. This perspective will also encourage us to look to the attitude literature for effects that might be expected in evaluations. Research on attitude formation finds that frequently asking persons to provide attitude ratings of an attitude object leads to forming general attitudes that converge on a stable attitude toward that object that is less likely to be influenced by external events over time. In the performance appraisal area, recommendations for frequent observations of a person's performance are often suggested under the assumption that these observations pick up "actual" performance incidents and thus are more valid indicators of performance behaviours. Yet, the attitude literature suggests just the opposite. The frequent ratings should converge on the internally held attitude of the evaluator rather than capture behavioural events more accurately. Combining the needs of appraisal processes with knowledge of attitude research leads to approaching the observation issue not as one of behaviour sampling alone but as a tension or dilemma balancing opportunity to observe changing behaviours with the tendency of the observer to form general impressions. So there were many different kinds of adjustments and changes made in work and family patterns as part of these professionals' process of adaptation to parenthood. And two clearly powerful constraints operating on this adaptation process were the organisation context and the spouse or partner's career and employment situation. Employers offering less flexibility in terms of work load, work hours, work places, and the like restricted the range of accommodations available to the parent wanting to work less, both directly and indirectly, through the rigidity in the spouse or partner's work situation. The spouse or partner's actual occupation and interest in being involved significantly in the family work also has an impact on the kinds of adjustments possible. For example, if a father is a professional cellist in a symphony orchestra, a certain amount of travel per year is totally non-negotiable, as is being able to pick up a sick child from school if there is a rehearsal or performance in progress. However, if the cellist has periods of weeks off totally and refuses to share drop-off and pick-up of children, the shortfall is in his attitude not the constraints of the occupation. The transformation process for professionals from pre parenthood to post parenthood identity involves an iterative and idiosyncratic process of socialisation into the new role of parent. Meanwhile these professionals are also learning by trial and error what kinds of changes or adjustments in work and family patterns allow for the way of life they want. To a great extent the socialisation experiences are proposed to have a big effect on the adaptation process, although within the constraints of the workplace policies and culture and the career and work place constraints of the spouse or partner. But there is a final important dynamic operating in the transformation of identity, and that is the individual's emotional reactions to the transition of becoming a parent in addition to a professional. These emotional responses then drive the spiralling effects of socialisation on accommodation and change, and then the effects of those changes in work patterns on subsequent socialisation and so the cycle continue to go on and on. References & Bibliography Anderson, S. E., Coffey, B. S., & Byerly, R. T. (2002). Formal organisational initiatives and informal workplace practices: Links to work-family conflict and job-related outcomes. Journal of Management, 28, 787-810 Brett M. Jeanne & Drasgow Fritz, (2002) The Psychology of Work: Theoretically Based Empirical Research: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Doyle E. Christine, (2002) Work and Organisational Psychology: An Introduction with Attitude: Psychology Press: London Maio, G. R., & Esses, V. M. (2001). The need for affect: Individual differences in the motivation to approach or avoid emotions. Journal of Personality, 69, 583-615 Morris Robin & Ward Geoff, (2004) The Cognitive Psychology of Planning: Psychology Press: Hove, England. Kossek Ernst Ellen & Lambert J. Susan, (2005) Work and Life Integration: Organisational, Cultural, and Individual Perspectives: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Mahwah, NJ. Ormel, J., & Wohlfarth, T. (1991). How neuroticism, long-term difficulties, and life situation change influence psychological distress: A longitudinal model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 60, 744-755. Read More