Effective managers need to understand and use the concepts of behavior in managing. To understand those concepts, managers should focus on two major areas: Individual behavior and group behavior.

The reasoning behind all of this is simple: a manager’s success (and the organization’s success) depends on getting things done through their employees, so in order to do this the manager needs to explain their behaviour, predict their reactions so that he can influence how they behave.

Naturally, managers place interest in some important and specific behaviours like.

Productivity - to measure efficiency and effectiveness.

Absenteeism – failure to report to work.

Turnover – permanent withdrawal from the organization, be it voluntary or involuntary.

Workplace misbehaviour – intentional behaviour that has negative consequences.

Job satisfaction – general attitude towards the job in question.

This leads us to:

Job Involvement

In simple words, jobs involvement is the degree to which an employee identifies with his/her job. Employees with a high level of job involvement strongly identify themselves with their work, which leads to a positive attitude that will help them contribute to the organization’s progress.

Employee Attitude Survey – Job Related Attitudes

Attitude surveys can help with a company’s measure management effectiveness and improve operations. Typically they consist of a set of questions that ask employees how they feel about their job, work group, supervisors and the organization itself. Basically it’s a way to understand how employees perceive their working conditions.

By doing this, the managers can see how their policies and practices affect their employees. One policy might seems reasonable and fair to the manager, but the employees might see it as inequitable. So, in order to detect potential problems, a regular use of attitude surveys is advised.

It is also believed that business units that score high on attitude surveys also achieve better performance, but there’s no support to this theory yet.

Survey Sample

As an example, the following statements could be used in an attitude survey.

• My job makes the best use of my abilities.
• Promotions are handled fairly.
• I trust my boss.
• I feel free to give my opinion.
• Wage rates are fair and competitive.
• This company is a good place to work.

The employee would then rate each one from 1 to 5, where 1 means strongly disagree, and 5 strongly agree. Of course, like it was said before, this is just an example to give you an idea, there’s probably plenty of samples in the Internet.