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The attitude is the evaluative statements or judgments concerning objects, people, or events. More precisely attitudes can be defined as a persistent tendency to feel and behave in a particular way toward some object which may include events or individuals as well.
Attitude can be characterized in three ways:
I. They tend to persist unless something is done to change them.
II. Attitudes can fall anywhere along a continuum from very favorable
to very unfavorable.
III. Attitudes are directed toward some object about which a person has feelings
(sometimes called “affect”) and beliefs.
COMPONENTS OF ATTITUDES
The three basic components of attitude are cognitive, cognitive and
affective part.
• Cognitive Component of Attitude refers to opinion or belief part of attitude. When you for your opinion or judgment on the basis of available information and decide whether you have a favorable or
unfavorable opinion on that, it the cognitive part of attitude we are
talking about.
• Co native Component of Attitude refers to the emotional aspect of attitude. This is perhaps the most often referred part of attitude and decides mostly the desirable or undesirable aspect attitude.
• Affective Component of Attitude refers to the behavioral part of attitude. If we have a positive attitude for a particular object, it is likely to be translated into a
• Particular type of behavior, such as buying or procuring that object.
FORMATION OF ATTITUDE
How attitudes are formed? How do you develop your attitude? Essentially attitudes are the outward manifestation of your inner values and beliefs. These develop over time. As you grow you watch the significant people around you behaving in a particular way; you are being told to cherish certain things over others and you learn from your teachers and peers and come to value certain things over other, thus forming your value system. These in turn give rise to development of your attitudes.
Attitudes help predict work behavior. The following example might help to illustrate it. After introducing a particular policy, it is found from an attitude survey, that the workers are not too happy about it. During the subsequent week it is found that the attendance of the employees drops sharply from the previous standard. Here management may conclude that a negative attitude toward new work rules led to increased absenteeism.
Attitudes help people to adapt to their work environment. An understanding of attitudes is also important because attitudes help the employees to get adjusted to their work. If the management can successfully develop a positive attitude among the employees, they will be better adjusted to their work.
FUNCTIONS OF ATTITUDE
According to Katz, attitudes serve four important functions from the viewpoint of organizational behavior. These are as follows.
The Adjustment Function
Attitudes often help people to adjust to their work environment. Well-treated employees tend to develop a positive attitude towards their job, management and the organization in general while berated and ill-treated organizational members develop a negative attitude. In other words, attitudes help employees adjust to their environment and form a basis for future behavior.
Ego-Defensive Function
Attitudes help people to retain their dignity and self- image. When a young faculty member who is full of fresh ideas and enthusiasm, joins the organization, the older members might feel somewhat threatened by him. But they tend to disapprove his creative ideas as ‘crazy’ and ‘impractical’ and dismiss him altogether.
The Value-Expressive Function
Attitudes provide individuals with a basis for expressing their values. For example, a manager who values hard and sincere work will be more vocal against an employee who is having a very casual approach towards work.
The Knowledge Function
Attitudes provide standards and frames of reference that allow people to understand and perceive the world around him. If one has a strong negative attitude towards the management, whatever the management does, even employee welfare programmers’ can be perceived as something ‘bad’ and as actually against them.
CHANGING ATTITUDES
Employees’ attitudes can be changed and sometimes it is in the best interests of managements to try to do so. For example, if employees believe that their employer does not look after their welfare, the management should try to change their attitude and help develop a more positive attitude in them. However, the process of changing the attitude is not always easy. There are some barriers which have to be overcome if one strives to change somebody’s attitude.
There are two major categories of barriers that come in the way of changing attitudes:
Prior commitment when people feel a commitment towards a particular course of action that has already been agreed upon and thus it becomes difficult for them to change or accept the new ways of functioning.
Insufficient information also acts as a major barrier to change attitudes. Sometimes people simply see any reason to change their attitude due to unavailability of adequate information.
Some of the possible ways of changing attitudes are described below
Providing New Information
Sometimes a dramatic change in attitude is possible only by providing relevant and adequate information to the person concerned. Scanty and incomplete information can be a major reason for brewing negative feeling and attitudes.
Use of Fear
Attitudes can be changed through the use of fear. People might resort to change their work habit for the fear of fear of unpleasant consequences. However, the degree of the arousal of fear will have to be taken into consideration as well.
Resolving Discrepancies
Whenever people face a dilemma or conflicting situation they feel confused in choosing a particular course of action. Like in the case where one is to choose from between two alternative courses of action, it is often become difficult for him to decide which is right for him. Even when he chooses one over the other, he might still feel confused. If someone helps him in pointing out the positive points in favor of the chosen course of action, he person might resolve his dilemma.
Influence of friends and peers
A very effective way of changing one’s attitude is through his friends and colleagues. Their opinion and recommendation for something often proves to be more important. If for example, they are all praise for a particular policy introduced in the work place, chances are high that an individual will slowly accept that even when he had initial reservations for that.
Co-opting
If you want to change the attitude of somebody who belongs to a different group, it is often becomes very effective if you can include him in your own group. Like in the case of the union leader who are all the time vehemently against any management decision, can be the person who takes active initiative in implementing a new policy when he had participated in that decision making process himself.
OBJECTIVES
• To identify the factors motivating the customers towards purchase of TVS motorcycle among available alternatives in the market.
• To ascertain the level of satisfaction of the customers.
• To find the customers’ expectations towards TVS Scooty.
• To offer valuable suggestions for improving the performance of TVS Scooty.
• The developing the economic level of the company.
LIMITATIONS
• Research work was carried out in Salem Town only the finding may not be applicable to the other parts of the country because of social and cultural differences.
• The sample was collected using convenience sampling techniques. As such result may not give an exact representation of the population.
• Shortage of time is one of the major constraints for completing the project.
• The views of the people are biased therefore it does not reflect true picture
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
It is well known fact that the most important step in marketing research process is to define the problem. Choose for investigation because a problem well defined is half solved. That was the reason that at most care was taken while defining various parameters of the problem. After giving through brain storming session, objective were selected and the set on the base of these objectives. A questionnaire was designed major emphasis of which was gathering new ideas or insight so as to determine and find out solution to the problem.
Data source
Research included gathering both primary data and secondary data. Primary data is the first hand data which are selected a fresh and thus happen to be original in character. Primary data was crucial to known various customers and past consumer views about Scooty.
Secondary data are those which have been collected by someone else and which already have been passed through statistical process. Secondary data has been taken from internet, newspaper, and company’s websites.
Research approach or design
The research approach was used survey method which is widely used method for data collection and best suited for descriptive type of research survey includes research instrument like questionnaire which can be structured and unstructured. Target population is well defined like personal interview.
Sampling unit
It gives the target population that will be sampled. This research was carried in Salem Town from which the researcher has taken 100 respondents as sample size.
Research instrument
Research instrument used for collecting a data is questionnaire cum interview schedule.
Period of study
The research work “A STUDY ON USERS’ ATTITUDE TOWARDS TVS SCOOTY IN SALEM TOWN” was carried on from January 2016 to march 2016 in Salem only.
Data completion and analysis
After the data has been collected, it was tabulated and findings of the project were presented followed by analysis and interpretation to research certain conclusions.