ONE of the Fortune magazine's lists of "100 Best Companies to Work For'" is VSP, America's largest provider of exceptional eye care coverage. VSP's internal human resource group regularly conducts survey of employee attitudes. The company wants to hear what their employees have to say and values their opinions. Moreover, the fact that the company actively uses this information to improve the workplace has paid dividends. Overall employee satisfaction responses of good, very good, and excellent have risen from 93 percent to 98 percent. And during this period annual turnover has declined from 23 percent to 12 percent.

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When we talk about an employee being satisfied or dissatisfied with his/her job, we are actually referring to a specific trait of a person "attitude" - which shapes an employee's perception of job satisfaction.

Attitudes are evaluative statements - either favorable or unfavorable - concerning objects, people, or events. They reflect how one feels about something. When I say "I like my job," I am expressing my attitude about work.

Attitudes are complex. If you ask people about their attitude toward a certain issue, you may get a simple response, but the reasons underlying the response are probably complex.

To fully understand some intricacies of attitudes, we will discuss the three components of attitudes namely: cognitive, affect, and behavior.

The belief that "discrimination is wrong" is an evaluative statement. Such an opinion is the cognitive component of an attitude. It sets the stage for the more critical part of an attitude - its affective component, which is the emotional or feeling segment of an attitude and is reflected in the statement "I don't like Juan because he discriminates against minorities." Finally, affect can lead to behavioral outcomes. The behavior component of an attitude refers to an intention to behave in a certain way toward someone or something. So, to continue our example, I might choose to avoid Juan because of my feelings.

These three components of attitudes are very helpful in understanding how employee behaves in the work place. An example of how to illustrate the relationship of the three components of an attitude is when an employee didn't get a promotion he thought he deserved; a coworker got it instead. The employee's attitude toward his supervisor is illustrated as follows: cognition (the employee thought that he deserved the promotion), affect (the employee strongly dislikes his supervisor), and behavior (the employee is looking for another job).

Now we will discuss job satisfaction as a component of attitude. Job satisfaction can be defined as a positive feeling about one's job resulting from an evaluation of its characteristics. A person with a high level of job satisfaction holds positive feelings about the job, while a person who is dissatisfied holds negative feelings about the job.

This definition is clearly a broad one. Remember that a person's job is more than just the obvious activities of shuffling papers, writing programming code, serving customers or driving a truck. Jobs require interaction with coworkers and bosses, following company policies, meeting performance standards, and the like. This means that employee's evaluation of how satisfied or dissatisfied he or she is with the job is a complex summation of a number of distinct job elements.

It is sad to note that many managers today disregard the importance of understanding work place attitude; perhaps they might be thinking that it is so easy to replace a dissatisfied employee. However, there is always an intangible replacement cost associated when managers constantly replace employee.

Managers should be interested in their employee's attitudes because attitudes give warnings of potential problems. Satisfied and committed employees, for example, have lower rates of turnover, absenteeism, and withdrawal behavior. They also perform better on the job.

I may suggest that companies will create an attitude change program based on the famous dictum "It's your attitude, not your aptitude, that determines your altitude".

After all positive attitude is the single biggest thing that can change a business.

(You may send your comments or suggestions to the writer at e-mail: archietim@yahoo.com and cell No. 09266468591)