How Attitudes Can Affect Your Life
By: Ben Davis
What's the deal with attitudes?
Throughout your life you will hear so many people tell you to "watch your attitude" or you need to "check your attitude", but what is an attitude? According to "Human Relations: Principles and Practices", attitudes are defined as "thoughts you have accepted as true and lead you to think, feel, or act positively or negatively toward a person, idea or event" (p. 97). So, your attitudes are more than just a feeling but they become an inspiration and motivation for any further actions we might take.
How do they affect work?
How many times have you been at work and wanted to strangle that customer who swears they are right? The one that always says they ordered ranch instead of blue cheese but you know you heard them say blue cheese? Well, this person who is constantly nagging begins to change your emotions from happy-go-lucky to extremely annoyed. As a worker it is necessary to swallow your pride and accept the fact that they are right. You do this to make sure that you don't lose business, get bad reviews, and the customer has the best experience possible. Looking even further into this world of business, you may have more difficulty in a higher paying job as well. As described before, your attitudes are motivation for how well you do your work and the inspiration that leads you to do it. In "Employee Engagement and Commitment", written by Robert J, Vance (2002) it is stated that, "The greater an employee’s engagement, the more likely he or she is to “go the extra mile” and deliver excellent on-the-job performance" (p.2). So, if you are going into work with a positive attitude and your employers are making you feel engaged in the work space, then you are most likely going to perform extremely well during the day, This not only makes the business look good because they have confident employees, but it also makes their sales and money line go way up due to the positive hard working people of the company.
How Do they Affect Our Social Lives?
Being as how we are all different in this world, there will be thousands of people that we are not familiar with as we get older. Many of our attitudes towards others are formed when we are younger and by people we spend a lot of time around like, family, friends or teachers. This is called socialization, known as the process through which people are integrated into a society by exposure to the actions and opinions of others. there are other ways they are formed which could be through peer groups or reference groups.