Many employees
across various organizations have negative attitudes towards work and these
negative attitude influences their behaviours and productivity at work
negatively as well. How can these negative attitudes be changed to positive
attitudes is the question before us now.
Before we answer
or find solutions to these questions, we need to understand some facts about
attitudes, behaviours, business organizations, and employee performance/productivity
level.
A business
organization can be an individual or a group of persons who come together/collaborate
intentionally to achieve certain commercial goal or set of goals. When people come
together and form a business organization, they do so with a lot of things in
mind; such as the goals and objective of the business, a vision and a mission
statement which clearly spells out how the organization should operate and how
things should appear all things been equal. Organization also develops it sets
of values which defines its culture and personality and finally develop a
strategy to achieve it set goals and objective.
In order to
achieve all these, the organization work with and through people otherwise
referred to as employee, and when these set of people who are obviously from
different background come together to work as a team with the right attitude,
the organization can easily achieve its business goals and objective. But when
they develop the wrong work place attitude, things are most likely to go wrong
and productivity is hampered.
Before we continue
let us define Attitude.
According to
business dictionary, Attitude can be defined as a predisposition or tendency to
respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or
situation. Attitude influences an individual choice of action and responses to
challenges, incentives and rewards.
Certain factors
come together to shape a person’s set of attitude, these factors are: family
background and upbringing, genetic factors, culture customs and belief e.t.c. Our
Attitudes are a source of action which in turn determines our behaviour.
Some negative
attitudes such as aggression, anger, cynical, bigotry, intolerance, dishonesty,
greed, resentment, pride, thoughtlessness, blame, critical, among others are
example of negative work place attitude displayed by employees can affect their
behaviour towards their jobs and reflects in their performance. For example a
greedy and dishonest employee will display such counter-productive behaviours as
stealing, lying, receiving bribe e.t.c. In the same way a person with a positive
attitude such as trust, commitment, honesty, empathic, loyal e.t.c, will behave
accordingly. (They will display behaviours such as job satisfaction and
organization citizenship behaviour OCB).
A person might not
always be aware of his or her attitude or the effect it is having or his
behaviour, in this case it becomes almost impossible for the person to make
amends except someone points it out to him.
Organizations
understand the seriousness and level of damage negative attitudes attitude can
have or productive and the image of the organization, this why they devise
various methods of intervention such as in-service training for staff to update
their skill.
While employers
can teach people better ways of getting their job done, they can’t teach
employees to have and imbibe positive attitude, it must willingly come from the
employee to change from negative to positive attitude.
William James once
said “the greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter
his life by altering his attitude”. There is need for people to change negative
attitude, to positive attitude. People with positive attitude are happy,
active, and productive. And they do all they can to improve the mood of those
around them. In much same way, people with negative attitude are not only
unproductive, but also have very low quality life, and they find a way to
spread their negativity to those around them.
For an employer to
reinforce specific positive behaviour from his employees, he needs to create a
positive work environment, put a place a fair reward system, and also a code of
conduct that promotes positive behaviours. And for an employee to keep his job,
remain in business in this tough times, live a better quality life, and make a
positive impacts in the life of his loved ones, I urge you in the word of Wayne
Dyer, “change the way you look at things, and the things you look at will also
change”.
If you find this
article interesting, please share with others and make a contribution.
What interventions
do you think employers should make to reinforce positive attitudes and
behaviour in the work place?
Cynthia Dare
Research Assistant
For Institute of Attitudinal Change Managers
Website: www.iacmng.org
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