Greetings and welcome to the first section. First, let's talk about the kinds of impact a leader might have on the followers. In particular, let's talk about attitudes. in psychology, an attitude is an opinion or belief about something in the world. Usually, it involves an evaluation of the desirability or the worthiness of the thing. For example, your belief about what the best sports team is, is an attitude, or whether Star Wars is the best movie series ever or completely overrated. Some of the most important attitudes in the workplace are job satisfaction, organizational commitment and workplace engagement. Attitudes have three components, the cognitive, the effective and the behavioral. The cognitive component is an intellectual understanding of the situation. The affective component consists of your feelings about that situation. The behavioral component is what you plan to do about that situation. For example, the cognitive component is a rational comparison of your job to other similar jobs. Are you paid more, or less than other jobs like your own? The affective component is how you feel about it, is the situation okay? Does it need to change? The behavioral component is how you will act on those feelings, you can learn more about that in the readings. However, it is worth noting now that the attitudes are most strongly related to your intentions than your behaviors. There are many situational constraints on how attitudes are expressed in the world. For example, you might hate your job, but you don't feel like you can leave because you have to pay rent. Taken all together, we can understand an attitude like job satisfaction. Job satisfaction is not just whether or not you like your job, there are many factors involved. Another important at work attitude is organizational commitment. Perhaps, you already know why leaders should want to inspire commitment in the team and members. After all, research has shown that organizational commitment predicts job performance. Interestingly, this relationship is stronger in younger workers than older ones. Now, there are three major kinds of organizational commitment, that as a leader, you might try to develop. They are affective commitment. These are the positive feelings you might have towards work. This is generally a desirable state and involves a sense of personal loyalty. Normative commitment and these are feelings of obligation to work. For example, you might work for a family business where you feel obligated to support the family by working there. And finally, continuance commitment. These are the perceived costs of leaving the organization. One example would be someone who stays, because if they left, they could not afford their rent. Now, one major predictor of commitment is the psychological contract between the worker and the organization. In other words, if workers perceive that the organization does not keep their promises, they will become disengaged and less committed. So now that we know what attitudes are, we can ask what causes them. There are many potential causes which are elaborated more in the readings. However, here are some examples. Personality, fit between the person and the organization, and job characteristics. The psychological contract we just discussed, perceived fairness and justice, the relationships at work and stress with work-life balance. Now, if as a leader you want to promote job satisfaction or commitment, then you'll need to understand these concepts and how they work to build those attitudes. You'll learn more about them in later sections. To focus on one of these briefly, though, one major cause of job satisfaction is perceived fairness. People who feel their jobs are in just or treat them unfairly tend to have extremely low job satisfaction, and we'll see the consequences of that later. Before we move to the next section, I'd like to make one final note. We have seen now a couple of the ways leaders can have a positive or negative impact on their followers. Soon, we will talk about the ways these can improve or worsen team performance. These things might seem obvious to you. If so, then this should be your main takeaway message. Research has shown that managers tend to have a very poor sense of the job attitudes of their workers. There are many different reasons for this. Sometimes managers just assume that people are more satisfied than they actually are. At other times, workers don't feel they can be honest about their feelings with their managers. So if you want to be an effective leader, you should commit to regular surveys to identify areas of improvement. This will also give workers a feeling of voice. This will make them feel empowered and subsequently more satisfied. In the readings, you will learn about whether job satisfaction improves job performance. You will also learn about a whole other kind of workplace behavior that is sometimes more important than normal jobs performance. Finally, you will learn what can cause workplace behavior to go horribly wrong.
