ATTITUDE
By P. Maity, Deputy General Manager, MECON LIMITED

Introduction
The performance of any organization is the sum total of performance of every employee starting from a security staff to reception desk to Chief of the organization.Individual performance depends upon the attitude to work assigned to the person.If any body can enjoy the pleasure of doing and doer derives the benefits of the doing, the performance will be definitely excellent.Thus attitude to work becomes a criteria, how serious a person to perform the assigned work.

Work ethics
The employees are classified into 3 major groups :
# Performers -who perform in any position.
# Workables -ho work when adequately compensated with rewards.
# Passengers – who do not want to work and consider work is evil.
Management tools are always busy to increase proportion of performers in the matrix and manage the workables and passengers.

Human characteristics

Koutilya’s Arthashastra describes human natures as under :

Man, the shaper of his destiny.
Man, the variables (in work situations
Man, the exploiter ( in social contexts)
Man, the corruptible ( in weaker moments)

Accordingly the Arthashastra provided competency points for assigning critical responsibility.The competency points are :

Technical capability.
Intelligence.
Strength of character.
Preservance and austerity eloquence.
Boldness and prescence of mind.
Ability to contain crisis.
Uprightness and firmness of devotion in dealing with others.

In the nature of human, the good and the bad features are embodied and the good and the bad features vary from person to person.Many of the features acquired from heredity and many of them are environmental.This complex constituent of the organization need to be nurtured to obtain the organizational benefits.As a result POSCO in South Korea has considered in their organizational motto : Natural resources limited, human ingenuity unlimited : use it.
It is, therefore, right to say that use the best in everybody without exploiting him.Sharpen the good features and eliminate the bad ones.

Organizational success

The success area of organization are:

Productivity
Quality
Relation

For consistent growth, prosperity, survival and sustain threats, every organization has to look into all the three areas continuously and effectively.Work in any one of the areas will not definitely yield results – all the three areas need to be looked into simultaneously.However, special attention need to be paid to quality and relation areas in which human plays vital role particularly to softer sides in these areas.Thus only campaign “Productivity Week” will not serve the purpose.There should be ‘relation week’ and ‘quality week’.In present day context, the work ‘week’ also need to be dropped and every day should be “Productivity, relation and quality day”.

Soft quality
The ‘Quality’ is entering into every sphere and every activity.Quality is the totality of features of the activity or product to satisfy the stated and implied needs to whom the activity / products is delivered.We may consider 5 types of quality in general

Personal quality.
Departmental quality.
Product quality.
Service quality.
Company quality.

In each of the above quality there is a hard aspect which can be called as technical quality and the other one is soft quality relating the human aspects.This softer side need more attention and need fuller understanding to close the gap between ideal and actual quality.

The soft quality is characterized by:

Openness
Honesty
Trust
Mutual respect
Commitment
Genuine interest in helping each other.

Majority of the leaders, when asked to describe the top characteristics of human, used the following ten words:

Honesty
Competence
Forward looking
Inspiring
Intelligence
Fair minded
Broad minded.
Courage.
Straight forwardness.
Imagination

Thus quality aspects are not unknown to us, but very few of us respect these because “by the act of talking big, we have failed to act big” and this “led us to learn slowly” and “led us to undermine execution, led us to undervalue quality, led us to underfocus on values, led us to denigrate rather than celebrate champions and finally led us away from cooperation”.There are leaders and doers who often proclaim “I know everything, every detail of any subject’ and express opinions without a data base.The invisible soft factors make the total difference.

Soft relation
Relation is directed totally towards the people of the organization.Relation does not mean only mutual relation among the people inside the organization, but also with outside of the organization including competitors.

The main characteristics of relations are :

Company culture
Inspiration
Communication and commitments.
Growth and development of people to give their best.
Good work environment.
Balance of personal commitment with commitment to company.
Responsibility, authority and accountability.
Loyalty and initiative.

The Establishment Manual, the Organizational Chart, the pay and perks are the hard areas of relation, the softer sides are :

Development of individual (knowledge well)
Unlearning and relearning capability
Conflicts
Entrepreneurshipness
Self esteem
Self fulfillment
Fellow feeling
Selflessness
Value additiveness
Ability to embrace.
Divinity
Simplicity
Acceptance and tolerance.
Priorities (personal and organizational)

Thus the softer side of the relation decides on self and company perceptions, team building capability, real knowledge level, orientation and finally is the driving force for prosperity by converting value subtraction to value addition.Normally the softer side brings the changes, allows to respect the good in everybody and helps to reduce the bad in everybody and helps to reduce the bad in everybody by constructive criticism and knowledge sharing.

Soft area of an organization
The soft quality and soft relation areas constitute the soft areas of an organization, whereas personnel policy, employment contracts, recognition system and information system constitute the hard areas.Thus the soft areas play a vital role for harmonious growth featuring the following:

Loyalty, responsibility and initiative to derive mutual benefits for prosperity of all participants, to alleviate conflicts, analyzing value, value addition, learning, goal sharing, caring and supporting, commitments and accountability, integrity, honesty, openness and effectiveness.
Multiforming for multifunctioning and conversion to a learning company to extract more from everybody and to retain human resources effectively.
Sharing than checking and controlling.
Customer-supplier relation in house to become Mg Ltd./Us Ltd. Fulfilling expectation of everybody.
We/they culture to We/We culture.
Feeling for everybody and the organization.
Direction of everybody’s energy to company energy.
Balancing personal commitments with company commitments.
Togetherness.
Environment for fulfillment of organizational expectations and self expectation.
Environment for process development and process improvement.
Elimination of knowledge gap and incremental increase of knowledge well of each as well as department as a whole.
Conversion of a nonlearning company to a learning company by reducing dead wood and obsolence.
Incentives and rewards to achievers.

Thus as address to soft areas augments performance in all three success areas of the organization for sustaining the threats and sharpening the strength.Many companies are trying to describe the company mission designating each letter of company name to one spirit.This obviously adds some sentiment and brings collaction at large.

Internal customers
Once we consider our fellow employees as customer and aim to satisfy them, the supplier-customer relationship inside makes everything very simple.The problem is that the internal customer-suppliers are fixed and known.All employees are bound to accept them whether good or bad since they do not have any alternative.Further there is no commercial transaction.This limitation, i.e. we cannot be choosy in selection of either supplier or customer, lands us into conflicts, attitudinal imbalance and we fail to satisfy the internal customers.Further the organization chart may accelerate the dissatisfaction or reduce the dissatisfaction depending upon the perception and self need of the hierarchy.When CEOs start listening to “yes man” and sycophants and isolate themselves from workers that day dooms-day begins to dawn on a corporation.Every organization, therefore, devote much of their time to devising a neutral personal system to build trust and commitment.
This calls for a high degree of responsibility on the part of the supplier to understand the need and expectation of the customer.Attitudinal change, openness, accountability and commitment would only fetch customer satisfaction together with bench marking and analysis of weakness.The following guideline may be considered for satisfaction of internal customer:

Smooth flow of work without intervention from hierarchy.
Mutual satisfaction and understanding of the problems and constraints.
Open communication and feedback.
Measure of compliance of commitments.

Without correct attitude the above guideline cannot be ensured.

Inhomogeneity – heterogeneity
The human resource in the organization is a heterogeneous mixture of people from various sectors as well as human race.The difference of economic conditions and the environments develops different types of maturity.Again to an Indian, work is never socially neutral or free of social relationships.It is often performed as a part of a social relationship.The Indian caste system and grouping on local or area culture are commonly seen in work place.The magnitude of adult, child and parental behaviours in each differs giving a total inhomogeneity.This inhomogeneous and heterogeneous mixture of human resource is to sail to company goal and in return of fulfill the personal goal of each constituent.
Accordingly personality dimensions viz. dependence vs independence, relaxed vs disturbed, assertive vs humble and conscientious vs unscrupulous etc. need measurement to ascertain the magnitude of heterogeneity and to devise the personnel system of attitudinal balance.

Human resource :CAN – WILL MODEL
The human resources in any organization, being a heterogeneous mixture of people from different parts of the country, is segmented in groups formed by local area culture and/or vested and common interests and by caste system.Each person of any such segment may belong to particular department depending upon his expertise.These departments are again headed by a leader belonging to another segment.Further the same HR participates to perform a task under a different leader who may belong to another segment.
Depending upon the mixture of the participants, some of the participants may be of the same segment as that of the leader.The chief executive thus has to manage leaders from his own segment and from different segments.Thus the entire personnel relationship becomes totally complex and the work performance becomes very difficult until and unless participants understand fully what is demanded and expected from them.Each participant must show a team spirit and complete his portion of task cohesively with others in time exhibiting humanness and professionalism and being physically and mentally fit.This shows that each should be sufficiently competent having knowledge, skills and attitude.The can (ability) – will (desire) model describes situations and depicts the state of affairs:

CAN

		No	Yes
	No	Transferred Dismissed	Motivated Supported Faced with demand
Will
	Yes	Educated Tested Supported	Gets responsibility Freedom of action New challenges

Thus when both Can-Will are ‘yes’, the challenge can be accepted, responsibility can be given and freedom of action is enjoyed.A knowledgeable and skilled person cannot do the work until and unless he is desirous to do it or he has the right attitude to take the challenge. Accordingly the task will be performed when the attitude of the constituent member and the team as a whole directed to the goal.
CINE
The action of any person is guided by some controllable internal and non-controllable external factors (CINE).A person as soon as receives a task or problem, he immediately equated with non-controllable external factors and controllable internal factors.When he finds that controllable internal factors will suplus the no-controllable external factors, he becomes desirous to perform.In th reserve case he tries to avoid the action and becomes slippery with excuses or find faults with others.The controllable internal factors will be more when a person has the required data base, skill and knowledge (including tacit knowledge).He will be then able to manage his non-controllable external effectively to win the game. In the complex situation of the modern days the share of non-controllable externals will grow in faster pace when one finally has to act on only non-controllable external.
Thanks to Information Technology which is narrowing the world on the other hand.Thus the knowledge well is also extending in a faster pace.A positive attitude of every participant will be highly required to manage in this environment.
Knowledge well
A child is born with a knowledge well of the size of a ‘point’ ( he learns to cry on pain).As he grows he increases the size of his knowledge well and learns to fight with adverse forces.Size of knowledge well of an employee thus depends upon his databse.We may consider knowledge well as under:
* Personal knowledge well
* Group knowledge well
* Department knowledge well
* Team knowledge well
* Company knowledge well
If a person in a department stays firmly with a fixed knowledge well, he will be finally a dead wood and obsolete.If a department contains such persons, the fate of the department will also be the same.Similarly if a company does not change by diversification when its sales have become almost fixed, the company will incur revenue losses and finally close its operation. This knowledge well of each person must expand to touch the well of each other and then finally break it to make one well to have a sound departmental well in which every person will reap and share the benefit and have pleasure to stay in the well acquiring competence and preserving self esteem.Every human being is afraid of stealing knowledge and thereby loosing importance.He keeps himself surrounded by a hick wall.Such personnel can be managed by entering into his knowledge well.His attitude can also be developed as he would also be developed as he would also then try to expand his knowledge well to remain important.All negative forces also can be managed by knowledge well (data base).Such attitudinal changes definitely benefitnot only the individual concerned but also the group and department and in turn the company.
Description of a person
The words which often come to mind to describe a person are:
* Fair minded
* Law abiding
* Caring for people
* Sensitive to people
* Complacent
* Lazy
* Indisciplined
* Lacking of faith in systems
* Proud of technological strength
* Proud of the quality of output.
* Lacking commercial acumen
* Ready to own mistakes
* Incompetent
* Lacking sensitivity to customer and supplier.
We may add a few more to the above list either in the positive or negative side and these are required only for a small number of people in the organization.In the changed scenario a new paradigm of HR requires the following quality to act as a change agent:
* Tough minded (sometimes rough too)
* Disciplined
* Assertive
* Sharp business acumen
* Demanding rising level of performance
* Aggressive
* Open
* Honest
Every human being is very slippery and prefers to work without a target date.Even if a target is given, he will immediately shift it to his convenience or give a target date suited to his own convenience tying with some other events.While working, he normally becomes very complacent since he does no take into account of the management of noncontrollable externals. Whenever he fails, he brings ten problems which relates to others and he is not responsible for those.But if he had the right attitude to do the job, he would have first cared to fix the external portions contributing to completion and assimilated these with the internal ones for completing the work in time.It is the noncontrollable externals which play a vital role in work.The doer avoids working with a target since he is afraid of the noncontrollable externals which even he cannot clearly perceive.Hence there is necessity of microplans input data management, controlling and monitoring, reviewing and sharing.
Noncontrollable externals
Our perception of noncontrollable externals are hose which come from outside.The personal data together with the department data can be easily brought into the system while performing.Any ther input data, decision, threats from other personnel of the department, group dynamics, hierarchy, team members of other departments, vendor, customer, opinion leader, resources, etc. become the external factors which inhibit the progress of work.
Many of these external factors can be controlled through personal relationship, negotiating skills and supports from hierarchy .Many of these cannot be controlled due to different attitudes.Orientation of each of the work participants, competence, positive attitude and professional approach when rule the environment, the non-controllable externals will be reduced.A neutral management instrument further curtails the magnitude of the noncontrollable externals.In the hard days of severe competition, the magnitude of noncontrollable externals will increase further and even time will come when efforts will be spent only to control the noncontrollable externals.The right size of knowledge, loyalty initiativeness and responsibility of everybody with a Win-Win formula will make the task easier for doers.
Win-Win formula
The Win-Win formula assumes the following:
* Ability to embrace ideas, thoughts and people as a whole to remain competitive in the
changing world which lives on learning, unlearning and relearning capability.
* Emphasis on higher meanings and values in everything in day to day life process including
those in work places for higher purposes.
* Simplicity and choices to adopt processes in the organization to satisfy the collective
whole and unite the energy of everybody to organizations strength.
* Acceptance of divinity of man (good in everybody) to allow him to make continuous struggle
to reach to the perfection through change processes by making the work place conducive to
extract the divine from each individual for self-realization.
* Process orientation for quality results.If the process is of highest quality and all doers
have faith on the process, the process will definitely yield quality product.Process
development and improvement will definitely ensure highest quality of work.
These Win-Win factors cultivate homogeneity in the heterogeneous-inhomogeneous materialistic world which an organization is composed of.The question only can we do it? When Indian philosophy viewed such principles and we had inherited the ideas, we must be able to absorb the ideas and synthesize these with other great philosophy of the world to make a recipe for absorption of all to fight the competition.Leaders ought to come forward and act as a change agent to this effect.
Values
Words and phrases which are normally used to describe human values, are :

Gratitude
Selflessness
Humanity
Honesty
Loyalty
Patience
Dignity
Forgiveness
Gentleness
Sincerity
Trustworthiness
Fair mindedness

The antonyms of the above words and phrases relate disvalue.Today value erosion is often talked in every place.All of us work on mistrust and check, recheck and cross-check for correctness spending valuable times.The youngsters of recent years are fully aware of value erosion from admission in school to appointment in organization.The satisfaction level of a person does not commensurate with his earning.We have become participants of “rat race” to look beyond even if we do not qualify for same.This is not only in work place but also in the society.The corruption at high places in organized and unorganized sectors increases greed and maneuverity.A rejected person of one organization (due to his disvalues), often gets better employment in some other organization.We view the political, financial and social scams as “system failure”.The increased population of enemies of society in higher places and innovative ideas of corruption techniques, their continued success in various activities and demands clearly indicates that we have been driven away from divinity and are ready to take any course for our own benefit.Jealousy, sycophancy, backbiting, misproportion, insanity and such other value failures are the results of incompetence.
By nature human being is religious.All of us visit religious places and provide prayers for self desire fulfillment.Probably none of us pray for the growth and prosperity of the organization which provides us with funds to meet our desire.Can we not use religion which is the manifestation of the divinity already in man for human value?Can we not develop attitude to consider a win-win philosophy to combat the moral failures?Let us stop relating all failures to system failure.Attitudinal changes through current leadership as change agents will definitely arrest value failures.Let us try to accept failures as failures and find reasons for same to arrest failures.

Management of attitude development
Knowing the danger of pitfalls from attitudinal imbalance, all organizations are currently trying to adopt management principles to derive best from every employee.The classical “X” and”Y” theories of Douglas McGregor are being replaced by recently devised “Z” theory based on Japanes management principles.
Theory X considers that human beings are to be directed, controlled, threatened, driven and coerced since basically they dislike work, avoid doing it, wish to avoid responsibility and at the same time want security.Accordingly for achieving organizational goal, management authority has to be excessively used with frequent reviews and monitoring.
On the contrary theory Y considers that human being is inherently desirous to do work as a natural process to make commitment to objectives when achievements are associated with rewards, to seek and accept responsibility.Hence external controls and punishment threats cannot be the only weapon for results and the inherent intelligence in human being is only partially used.Thus Theory Y directs our mind to human development and real use of the human being by integration to bring into everybody’s own goal to organization’s goal.
Every organization hires not only the hands of the employee but also the brain.Use of brain fully makes the difference. The brain makes the human resource unlimited and all organizations, therefore, are adopting management principles and personal policy to fully utilize the immense power of human being by developing the right attitude.
The Theory Z takes into account use of this human brain effectively.The center idea of Theory Z lies on trust and subtlety. Every person can work autonomously since “trust” prevails.Integration of goals of every employee becomes the goal of the organization.Thus every employee learns continuously and lives in a learning company.The human in employee is best utilized to protect his self-esteem.Since “you cannot give people lasting help by doing for them what they were supposed to do themselves “, they must be allowed to give their best by themselves.
Thus management philosophy needs to be correctly se, particularly in organization where persons are employed for longer periods or almost on the permanent basis for efficient performance both in house and out house.This can be only ascertained by attitudinal developments as :
Individual performance = Ability X Motivation
Where,ability = Knowledge X Skill
And Motivation = Attitude X Environment
Development of “ability” alone without development of motivation will yield no result in the long run.

Conclusion
In the environment of competition and world of thickly knitted customer-supplier network attitude development and management of attitude development play a vital role in organizational growth and success.The environment in the company thus shall be conducive for self development of the employees so that they can give their best o achieve company goal. Every employee must develop process and improve process, multiform for extremisation to remain in the company and prosper with the company.Every leader must orient to the front line people, change to succumb threats, believe in process orientation for quality improvement, catalyse, share inspire and direct all energy to value addition and to stop value erosion.We can then assure right QUALITY of life to the mass and gain in turn the RESPECT which is long overdue.