Thompson Work Organisations A Critical Introduction (3rd ed)

15 Masks for Tasks: Perception, Attitudes and Personality

In this chapter we give an account of the processes through which we comprehend the world and the other people with whom we interact, and those processes by which others make judgements about us. In our exploration of perception, attitudes and personality we find that the reciprocal assumptions made by others and ourselves produce a social world where we actively transform ourselves according to our context.

Perception: learning what to see

Perception can be defined in terms of ‘the dynamic psychological process responsible for attending to, organizing and interpreting sensory data’ (Buchanan and Huczynski, 2000: 212). This is usually explained within a perspective that emphasises information processing and seeks to explain how our perceptions of ourselves, others and our environment shape our attitudes and behaviour. The utility of understanding perceptual processes lies in the fact that people’s perceptions of themselves and others can be manipulated to change attitudes and behaviour in the situations and contexts within which work takes place. The practices which were associated with the ‘Japanisation’ of British industry in the 1980s, such as single-status canteens and clothing, provide an example of this, in that they are intended to alter perceptions of the divisions between management and labour, in order to create attitudes (see below) more compatible with organisational goals.

Perception, then, is the umbrella heading for the processes through which we organise and interpret the range of visual, aural, tactile and chemical stimuli that impinge on us. As these processes enable us to comprehend and order the world around us, they must also underlie the manner in which we go about constructing identities.

Perceptual processing

The organisation, processing and interpretation of incoming stimuli are the basic subject matter of cognitive (knowing through sensation or perception) psychology. Much material in this area deals with the neurophysiology of perceptual systems. But as our focus is on organisational psychology we do not intend to deal with the detailed cognitive processing of information, as the ordering and organisation of these systems are not wholly determined by their structure. In social, interpersonal and selfperception, the determinants we are concerned with are the past and present influences and constraints on us, and our actively directed interests. Perception, then, is not just the process of seeing, but involves our other senses and is intimately connected with the notion of intention. In other words, what we see and hear is transformed according

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to how our system of values, attitudes and beliefs informs our actions. The formative content of identity could, in this light be viewed as produced by the filters through which our perceptions pass in order to select out what is of value to us.

Basically, to perceive something we have to be attending to it. This does not mean that we only take in those stimuli that we notice. Rather, we take in everything our particular range of senses allows us to. What it does mean is that we only actively process and act upon those parts of the incoming data that concern us. This concept of perceptual selectivity or selective attention can be illustrated by a crowded and noisy office, where we cut out much of the background noise in order to concentrate on the people we are listening to. Yet we can still pick out and shift our attention to references to ourselves, or to other things that interest us coming from other parts of the room, temporarily or permanently cutting out the immediate conversation we had been intent on a moment before. Hence we appear to have some mechanism that can shift our attention and select the stimuli to which we attend, according to which appear of the greatest current relevance. Thus having to concentrate for long periods on a single type of stimulus, for example components being inspected on a production line, requires effort in face of the distractions coming from other stimuli in our environment.

Perceptions are often classified as primary or secondary on the basis of whether they come from actual or vicarious experience, though it may be more proper to view these classifications as related to forms of attention. Keltner (1973) claims that we attend primarily to strong or unique stimuli and secondarily to learned selection patterns, but we may also depend upon ‘derived primary attention’ where secondary perceptions become habitual and unconscious. Hence the notion of perceptual selectivity underlines the intentionality of attention. We may not be consciously aware of directing our attention, because we are predisposed to notice some things rather than others. Our perceptual systems are structured to pay attention to things that change and things that stand out from their surroundings, and we might also perceive information as being more valid when it comes from what we consider to be an ‘authoritative’ source. Thus criticism of our work from a respected peer or a superior responsible for evaluating it will be taken more seriously than that from sources less close to our own interests. These filtering processes are summarised in Figure 15.1.

Environmental		Sensations			Attention			Perception
stimuli
Sources		Sensory filters			Attention filters			Perceptual organisation
Light		Range of sensitivity			Stimulus			Categorisation
Air pressure		and threshold			characteristics (e.g.			Figure-ground
Heat		values of senses			size, intensity,			Proximity
Chemicals		(e.g. not being			frequency, contrast,			Similarity
Gravity		able to see UV			motion, rate of			Closure
		or IR light)			change, novelty)			(see later)
T h e p e r c e p t u a l p r o c e s s								F I G U R E 1 5 . 1

Source: based on D. J. Cherrington (1989) Organizational Behaviour: The Management of Individual and Organizational Performance, Boston: Allyn and Bacon, pp. 82–6.

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The outcomes of these processes are seen in the notion of the perceptual set, which refers to our individual and unique readiness to perceive what we expect to perceive. Our perceptual set reflects our perceptions of ourselves and our social position and is, in effect, the outcome of our socialisation processes (see the next section). For instance, we often appear to be set to perceive people of lower status to ourselves as less competent, inferior and more generally inadequate. This type of set extends to social groups and to wider social divisions – men for example generally perceive women as less competent than themselves, reflecting the social value placed on gender rather than any reliable sex differences. Likewise men tend to attribute competence shown by women to luck rather than skill (Deaux and Emswiller, 1974), showing that their subjective adaptation of their perceptions will tend to reinforce the security of their male identity.

The consequence is that we put actual effort into interpreting the world around us, rather than simply taking it all in as a camera might. But a haphazard interpretation of the myriad stimuli coming to us would be worse than none at all. We need a system of interpretation; our perceptions need to be organised. Wertheimer and the ‘Gestalt’ School identified the classic principles of perceptual organisation up to the 1920s (see McKenna, 1994 or Mullins, 1999 for applications and examples). These principles show that we tend to place organisation on stimuli, by focusing on significant or moving rather than background factors, by associating stimuli that are close together, similar, moving in the same direction or that appear to be a continuation of other stimuli. According to the principle of closure we fill in gaps in perceptual input to give meaning to apparently disorganised information. This underlines the notion that we actively transform our perceptions in order to make sense of our environment.

The importance of the gestalt principles for providing insights into how we go about constructing our personal and social world is not generally given great emphasis in the organisational psychology literature: apart, that is, from the extent to which they can be utilised in the construction of the kind of test instruments used in recruitment and selection procedures. That our perceptions are ordered to extract and construct meaning out of our environment both helps to engender our individuality and makes us vulnerable to those who seek to limit or channel the kind of information we receive. By placing perceptual stimuli, people and events, into categories, we effectively take shortcuts in our comprehension of the world. We enable ourselves to deal with the numerous stimuli that impinge on our senses by reducing the necessity to analyse each new stimulus as a unique object. This does however mean that we treat the things and people with which we interact through their relation to the subjectively determined, but apparently objective, categories into which we place them. Thus, to some extent, we reify everything and everyone we come across. We produce them as mental representations of our own creation, yet we treat them as if these images were in fact real. The images and slogans associated with corporate cultures and missions are precise examples of attempts to channel our perceptual organisation into acceptance of a dominant reality through supplying a ready-made basis on which to apply closure to contexts and concepts on which we might not have accurate information.

Perceptual categorisation

It is through this process of categorisation (see Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 106–9) that the major perceptual processes dealt with in organisational behaviour texts can be

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understood. Categorisation involves an accentuation effect (1995: 106), which acts to increase both perceived similarities within categories and differences between categories. Categorising people on the basis of limited cues, such as gender, skin colour, bodily characteristics, social, regional and national identity, and then treating an individual as having the generalised traits associated with that category, is the pervasive phenomenon known as the stereotype, identified by Lippman (1922). This enables us to make quick assessments of others and of situations. You can, for example, have a stereotype of what a particular kind of person or meeting will be like and react accordingly, or you may need quickly to assess the intent of someone who enters your office or wants to come into your house. Although it has psychological uses to the individual, stereotyping can also have negative social consequences: for example, men in secretarial work might be seen as only seeking temporary employment, unambitious or gay (Callan Hunt, 1992). Stereotyping, then, is one of the mechanisms through which racism and sexism are socially enacted and given ideological justification. Thus a branch manager in a case study of the insurance industry comments on his perceptions of why women are unsuitable for sales work at ‘Insco’: ‘Yes, it can be a soul destroying job, and women are either not hard bitten enough to ride off insults or those that can are pretty unpleasant people’ (Knights and Collinson, 1987: 155). It would appear that in the face of an established stereotype, you just can’t win!

Another process given force by our categorisation of stimuli is the so-called ‘halo effect’ identified by Solomon Asch in 1938, which is essentially another process of producing a stereotype. When we come across new persons or situations we can only assess them in terms relevant to our own experience and the limited cues we have about them. This initial assessment, whether positive or negative, tends to be carried over into the attitudes we build up to that person or thing because of the powerful categorisation effects of first impressions. Thus if we rate a new workmate in a positive fashion on the basis of our first impression, we would tend to continue to rate them positively in the future. Of course, the fact that we rate them positively will probably in itself improve our relations with them. This may produce a selffulfilling prophecy (Merton, 1949) from our first impression and probably improve our opinion of our ability to judge others. The halo effect can work against stereotyping, in that meeting a member of a group about whom we hold stereotyped views, who makes a good first impression on us, may weaken a negative stereotype. On the other hand, we may simply view the person as an exception, and perceptual selectivity may bring us to focus on the aspects of their appearance or behaviour that fulfil the prophecies of our stereotypes. These processes might, for example, have powerful effects on new recruits in organisations, since stereotypical attitudes can be socially communicated. This is backed by evidence such as that of Salancik and Pfeffer (1978), whose social information processing model of job design implies that our reactions to our work are significantly influenced by cues picked up from our co-workers. In an organisation where the prevailing experience of power relations is unitarist and hierarchical, we might expect new managers or workers to hold stereotypes about each other that will heavily reflect categorising processes, in that their experiences will tend to be interpreted through the dominant attitudes of their peers.

We also have a tendency to categorise others in the same light in which we categorise ourselves. Suspicious or aggressive persons, according to this principle of projection – or more properly, assumed similarity – will view others as being more

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suspicious or aggressive in nature than will people who tend to be more trusting or placid. We can apply this notion to the kinds of attitudes and values in the ‘new realism’ identified in industrial relations since the 1980s. To someone who sees themselves as ‘looking after number one’, those who stand for the values of class solidarity and union loyalty might be seen as stupid, unrealistic or hiding a lust for personal power behind a facade of caring for others. Identity in this sense becomes the standard of social comparison by which we judge the world and those in it.

To project categorisations onto others, we must be categorising ourselves. We can produce stereotypes about ourselves, perhaps regarding our probable or favoured responses to certain people or things. We can also apply the halo effect to ourselves. If we perform well at a particular activity the first time we try it, we will tend to rate ourselves better in the future, and vice versa. The major source of the categorisations we use are the various groups to which we belong, as the membership of these groups provides us with the basis of the identities which we take up in various situations. Thus the norms and standards of conduct of a group to which we belong will inform both the kinds of stereotypes we use and the identity which recognises our right to make such judgements. If a group can be said to have an identity, then that identity is communicated to its members in their self-perceptions and becomes part of, possibly a major part of, their own identities. Given that the major groups that many of us belong to are related to work and work organisations, our identities will be constructed in terms of our perceptions of ourselves within work organisations. Even the identities of the unemployed might be defined to a great extent by their lack of attachment to work groups.

The major theoretical position on identity from social psychology itself, Tajfel and Turner’s social identity theory (see Tajfel, 1982; Fiske and Taylor, 1991; Haslam, 2000), is essentially a theory of intergroup behaviour as it relates to personal and social identity. (See Chapters 17 and 20 on leadership and groups.) We should be careful not to place too much emphasis on group influences, however, as social identity theory in particular has been criticised for not accounting for the individual adequately. This has led to the development by Turner and also Oakes et al. (in Augoustinos and Walker, 1995: 127, 213) of self-categorisation theory which accounts for the levels of necessarily stereotypical abstract categorisation we apply to ourselves within particular contexts as follows:

•superordinate – for example, self as part of humanity

•intermediate – for example, self as part of a group

•subordinate – for example, self in personal terms.

(see Augoustinos and Walker, 1995; Hogg and Abrams, 1990)

Attribution theory

Organisation and categorisation of our perceptions enable us to comprehend and interpret our world in a contextual fashion, and on this basis we are able to make judgements dependent on how we interpret the intentions of others. This is a crucial task for any individual, as it is linked to the fashion in which we identify the links between cause and effect in events. Attribution theory, initiated by Heider (1958) and developed by Kelley (1971), shows how we tend to be biased in our judgements of others’ intentions. It is founded on the notion that we calculate whether the

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reasons for actions are due to internal (or dispositional) factors or to external (or environmental) factors, based on our assessment of the distinctiveness, consistency and amount of consensus of any particular action. It appears that we have an inclination, termed the fundamental attribution error, to judge people’s intentions in terms of dispositional factors (see Arnold et al., 1991: 288). We tend to attribute the causes of their actions to their personality or nature. In the Insco case, women office workers are seen to require high levels of supervision and control. This is not attributed to their ‘experience of subordination and blocked mobility but to their gender’. The ‘discontented and moody’ behaviour they are seen to exhibit is thus attributed to their gender-based disposition, and is further used to disqualify them from jobs in sales (Knights and Collinson, 1987: 151).

Another form of perceptual error identified by attribution theory is that of selfserving bias, which is the propensity to attribute our successes to internal factors and our failures to external ones (vice versa for those we disapprove of). Heider also identified the discounting principle which indicates that in social perception we may pay more attention to strong situational cues and ignore a person’s disposition: for example we may distrust the overtures of an insurance seller who asks about our heath, regardless of what we think of him or her as a person.

According to Martinko (1995: 11) in a survey of OB texts, attribution theory is generally only considered in detail in chapters on perception, and attributional studies are sometimes cited in chapters on leadership and selection. In UK texts, where attribution is covered, the apparent emphasis is on achievement and performance appraisal, though there is also a tendency to relate it to a person’s locus of control (for example see Johnson and Gill, 1993: 72–3). Martinko is keen to emphasise the role attribution theories have played in the development of work on areas such as learned helplessness, achievement and expectancies in the study of intrapersonal motivation. At the same time Martinko emphasises the problems involved in the study of attribution in organisations, particularly regarding its measurement and application. (See Martinko, 1995, for extended discussions of these issues.)

Attribution theory does imply, however, that the more information we have about other people, the greater our capability of making accurate environmental attributions about their actions. We are better able to see things as not necessarily intentional or inherent in their nature but due to their social and personal circumstances. The choice to initiate a strike may be attributed by employers or managers whose knowledge of their employees consists mainly of stereotypes, to bloody-mind- edness or their militant nature. In Lane and Robert’s (1971) account of the long strike at Pilkingtons in St Helens, the tradition of paternalism meant that management could only interpret the action in terms of intruders such as scousers, revolutionaries or both. One would hope that attribution theory implies that managers who know something of life at the lower end of an organisational hierarchy might be more likely to attribute workers’ decisions to factors relating to the workplace or its environment, making a more realistic assessment of the situation in the process. Of course attribution processes are just as prevalent in managerial activities themselves, as noted by Leavitt and Bahrami (1988: 65): ‘managers are both blessed and cursed by that tendency to ascribe causality, because the causality – either way

– is often ascribed to them rather than to other aspects of the situation’.

As an example, judgements on the performance, ability and effort of others, that is, of their behaviour and characteristics, are nowadays routinely subsumed into

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judgements of a person’s commitment. Thus the concern is not just with what we do or who we are, but whether we ‘mean’ what we are doing and what we present ourselves as. In traditional OB terms, this would be reduced to judgements of whether individual satisfaction, motivation and so on tend to be derived mainly from intrinsic, social or extrinsic sources. It is possible, however, that the outcomes from judgmental processes are both more dependent on, and more faithfully reflective of, attributional process than they are of any activity or characteristic of the person under judgement. For example Dejoy (1994: 3) in a study of safety work, notes that ‘actions to manage safety derive more from attributions than from actual causes’. Likewise Gronhaug and Falkenberg note that:

Attribution and attributional research serves as a point of departure to capture how managers and organizations make sense of their internal and external environments, enabling them to act purposefully. (Gronhaug and Falkenberg,1994: 22)

To some extent we are, in making attributions, making assessments of the personality or identity of others. But our ability to make consistently valid attributions is questionable. We constantly have to make judgements on the basis of too little or inaccurate information. On this basis we are assumed to carry around our own implicit personality theories (Asch, 1938) about how people look and behave. These act as barriers to the kind of new information we will take in about them. Also, according to Langer (1981), we often behave in a less rational manner than assumed by attribution theory, using habituated scripts which we act out in appropriate situations (see Chapter 19). In sociological terms this notion of scripting is linked to the ‘habitus-project’ distinction made by Bordieu in his ‘theory of action’ (1977, 1994). Habitus equates to our dispositions, our ‘embodied history’ which we bring with us from our past personae and which act as a set of cognitive and motivating structures, without however impinging on consciousness or will. This ‘internalised second nature, forgotten as history’ distinguishes the notion from purely behavioural mechanisms and from the value free judgements of more rational-cognitive explanations.

These factors, coupled with our tendency to make dispositional attributions, make both our perceptions of others and ourselves highly subjective and prone to fallibility. We can add one last layer to the barriers to accurate perception, one that is receiving increased attention in these days of global markets and information exchange, namely ethnocentrism. This is the tendency to view the world through the values norms and roles of our own culture or even subculture, and to devalue or show hostility to those of other cultures (see Jackson, 1994). Because our perceptual worldview is learned, we can come to an understanding of other cultures by exposure and, in the case of modern export management and ‘international management’, by specific training. Our sensitivity to those in other cultures depends on monitoring our reactions to information filtered through our own ethnocentrism. Thus, in our construction of identities out of our perceptual world we need to make constant reference to sources of knowledge and comparison that we have built up over time. In social terms, among the major sources of such knowledge are the attitudes which we and others espouse and through which we make the categorisations on which we depend for comparisons.

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The attitude problem

All that we see, learn, are and do is not just part of ourselves, but part of the social world around us. Others can judge us on what we do, what we appear to be, and can attribute the reasons for our actions; but to predict how we are likely to react to situations, there are a limited number of possible avenues to be explored. In social and interpersonal terms, we depend a great deal on the verbal statements of others to estimate their likely responses to situations and events. Likewise we communicate our own position in regard to issues, objects, events and our social transactions and negotiations. Such statements of belief, evaluation and feeling are of necessity a major component of socio-psychological study, and this study of attitudes has correspondingly been one of the main sources of data and practice in the development of OB.

When we consider the structured environment of the workplace, performance can be measured, though an employee could be a hard worker and a ‘troublemaker’; personality can be assessed, though this may often produce counter-intuitive results not trusted by the client (see next section); and behaviour itself can be regulated in attempts to ensure future compliance. However, such information as can be generated through such techniques does not necessarily provide the requisite depth of information for the planning and systematic control desired by modern organisations. Rothwell and Kazanas (1986: 15) argue that even ‘sophisticated quantitative techniques’ are ‘generally not superior to the kind of structured expert opinion that can be gleaned from survey results’. They see attitude surveys as fundamental to the process of human resource strategic planning in procuring ‘a means of tapping employee creativity and knowledge about the organisation and of building genuine commitment to future success’.

Defining attitudes

In the 1870s Charles Darwin referred to attitude as the facial expression of emotion (Petty and Cacioppo, 1981: 20), though these days attitudes are most commonly regarded as consisting of three main components: the conative (behaviourallyoriented), cognitive (belief-oriented) and the affective (emotion-oriented). This is based on Rosenberg and Hovland’s (see Ajzen, 1988) model, which more correctly identifies these ‘components’ as abstractions, based on verbal and non-verbal responses, from which the construct of attitude is inferred. The implication here is that the evaluations implicit in the components can differ while at the same time leading to a unified expression of ‘attitude’. For example, an employee may dislike the kind of work undertaken in a new department he or she is being asked to move into (negative affect), but believe that the workers in that department are a cohesive and effective team to work with (positive cognition), and thus agree to make the move (positive conation) (based on Ajzen, 1988: 20). It is important to note that in the example given, the enquirer could infer a wholly ‘positive’ attitude from the conative component alone, unless the negative affect was actively expressed by the employee. More commonly it is the cognitive component which is subjected to measure; for example Taber (1991: 598) claims that in one major area of attitudinal measurement, ‘current job satisfaction assessments may be assessing what workers think about their job satisfaction, rather than how they feel about their jobs’.

Though discriminations between such components have been made in depth in

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the socio-psychological literature (see Ajzen, 1988: 21–3) these distinctions are rarely carried through into the design or analysis of studies in the wider literature making use of attitudinal measures. In essence, attitudes are often taken as indicative of an undifferentiated consistency of response, which is in turn predictive of behaviour or intention. An implicit assumption of much research involving attitudes is that they are informed by and reflect value systems. The distinction between attitudes and values is generally that attitudes are directed toward specific objects and that values are evaluative standards. In effect this makes them an output of the filtering and ordering processes by which we perceive and learn. As such, attitudes have been considered as embodying psychological functions for individuals:

•Adjustment: utility of object in need satisfaction; maximising external rewards and minimising punishment.

•Ego defence: protecting against internal conflicts and external dangers.

•Value expression: maintaining self identity; enhancing favourable self-image; selfexpression and self determination.

•Knowledge: need for understanding, for meaningful cognitive organisation, for consistency and clarity.

(from Katz, 1960, in Kahle, 1984: 18)

There is not a great deal of confirmatory evidence for this model and this may in some part be due to its being merely descriptive rather than prescriptive or diagnostic. It says little about the measurement of attitudes, or the relation of attitudes to behaviour that has generated much of the research in the area. According to Eiser (1986: 13), ‘an attitude is a subjective experience involving an evaluation of something or somebody’. This active experience of perceiving, interpreting and evaluating experiences with a public reference to others should be contrasted with the more general usage of attitude as an object to be measured, correlated and tabulated. As subjective experiences, attitudes must have some consistent linkage to social behaviour or, as Eiser notes, ‘it would be difficult to know what such verbal expression meant’ (1986: 13). The problem really arises when it is assumed that attitudes can predictably cause behaviour.

Attitudes and behaviour

The failure of socio-psychological research to find strong correlative links between attitudes and behaviour led to a decline in attitude-based studies in the 1970s. However, work on the specificity of behaviour as related to attitude, notably by Ajzen and Fishbein, brought the subject back into focus. Ajzen and Fishbein argued (1980) that attitudinal measures have to correspond with the particular components of a behaviour in order for prediction to be possible. These component elements of behaviour are the specific action itself, the target of the action, the context in which the action is performed, and the time the action is (to be) performed. The assumption is that the more of these components that can be measured accurately, the more likely that the attitudes will predict behaviour. The problem once more is that many attitude surveys only measure the cognitive target component, that is, the attitude to the thing itself – rather than the attitude to the use or doing of the thing or to the when, where and how in which the behaviour would be expected to take place. In other words, they

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ask, ‘what do you think of this?’, without asking ‘what about doing it under these specific conditions?’

Ajzen and Fishbein in their ‘theory of reasoned action’ link the prediction of behaviour to what we know of the person’s intention, which is a function both of the attitude toward the behaviour and of their subjective norm regarding the behaviour. Thus we have to take into account not only their positive and negative feelings, but also the social pressures surrounding the particular behaviour. Attitude here has two subcomponents: beliefs about the consequences of the behaviour, and affective evaluations of (in other words, feelings about) the consequences (Perloff, 1993: 95). Likewise, subjective norms have two subcomponents: normative beliefs about whether significant groups or individuals approve or disapprove of the behaviour, and the person’s motivation to comply with such normative beliefs (1993: 97). In addition to such qualifications it should be noted that the Ajzen and Fishbein model has been criticised for being too rational/cognitive in nature and that the effect of more ‘mindless’ behavioural associations, such as the accessibility of an attitude and the effects of past behaviour, selective perception/direct experience and habit (Triandis, 1980; Bentler and Speckart, 1981; Fazio, 1985) are also important determinations of the attitude–behaviour correlation.

Attitude change

Because of the presumed effects of attitudes on behaviour, there is a concomitant concern with the possibility of changing attitudes (and hence behaviour). The possibilities of changing attitudes are often linked to the persuasive characteristics of persons as sources (attractiveness, trustworthiness and expertise); as targets (high or low self-esteem); and of messages themselves (levels of threat). The routes to attitude change are generally explained in terms of Kelman’s (1961) three sources of attitude change, compliance, identification and internalisation (discussed further in Chapter 19), and through the reduction of psychological tensions as conceived in balance theory (Heider, 1946) and cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957). (See McKenna 2000, chapter 8 for an extended discussion.) Perhaps the most important aspect of attitude change in organisations is the gaining of public commitment (Deutsch and Gerard, 1955; Tedeschi, Schlenker and Bonoma, 1971), where ‘whenever one takes a stand that is visible to others, there arises a drive to maintain that stand in order to look like a consistent person’ (Cialdini, 2001: 72 – perhaps the most readable source on influence processes).

Public commitments are seen to produce more enduring effects in changing attitudes and behaviour than private commitments (see Eiser, 1986). Corbett (1994: 56) gives an example of this need for consistency in what he terms ‘Internal Marketing’: in competitions where tie-break questions are used to give a reason or slogan for buying a product, ‘tens of thousands of people testify in writing to the product’s appeal and they experience a powerful psychological pull to believe what they have written’. The discussions below on attitude surveys and personality tests, and those in Chapter 19 on goal-setting and development profiling, all concern attempts by organisations to gain public commitment to corporate objectives. The overall effect of such systems is to reinforce individual responsibility for fitting in to organisational objectives. This can be linked to the currently popular practice of ‘project-based working’, where individuals are steered towards or allowed to follow their own