Modeling of employees attitudes using NLP

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Modeling of employees attitudes using NLP

Journal Title: International Journal of Contemporary Management - Year 2012, Vol 11, Issue 3

Abstract

The modeling of employees’ attitudes, meaning the intentional influencing of them in or¬der to foster or change them so that they support achieving the mission, strategy and organisa¬tion goals, shall be of significant importance for all organisations. The multitude of employees’ attitudes and the diversity of the objects they refer to (the organisation itself and its environment), plus the diversity of factors influencing attitude modelling or human na¬ture’s complexity itself – everything makes this issue an extraordinarily complicated multidi¬mensional problem. Having all this in regard, the authors, in this article, focus only on sev¬eral issues out of the numerous possible as follows: 1) explanation of the term “attitude”, 2) definition of attitude modelling methods, 3) presentation of selected employees’ attitudes, 4) presentation of selected neuro-linguistic programming techniques used in order to model certain employee’s attitudes, 5) assessing efficacy of neuro-linguistic techniques applied to the modelling of certain employees’ attitudes. In the literature, especially in the domain of social sciences, this attitude went through di¬verse conceptualisations. The common point of the majority of attitude models described in the literature is the assumption that: attitudes characterise human nature, attitudes always refer to a certain object, attitudes are relatively constant in the organisation of feelings, be¬liefs and knowledge. Attitudes are relatively constant structures but it doesn’t mean that they are not subject to change. Research in the field of attitudes modelling do not answer unani¬mously the question of which component is most prone to its influence. The attitudes model¬ling issue is associated with the necessity of analysing the factors initiating the process of change, certainly in the simplest configuration – whether the motor of change is a human being itself with his attitude or are the entities external to him. Influencing the attitudes by external entities may have different forms, also in an organisational context. The problem of employees’ attitudes and behaviours modelling is within the scope of numerous sciences: psychology, social psychology, sociology and the relatively young sub-discipline – organisa¬tional behaviours. One can say that knowledge of attitudes as well as human behaviours gain special significance in an organisational context. The challenge which the managers face is not only choosing certain attitudes to be modified but first of all appropriate (which usually means effective in an organisational context) methods of modelling of these attitudes. This paper analyses the purposefulness of applying NLP techniques in modelling of cer¬tain employees’ attitudes and behaviours. Neuro-linguistic programming, because of weak empirical evidence of its effectiveness, is controversial but arouses interest of practicians – the representatives of numerous professions and those who are managing employees. As long as NLP techniques are applied by employees to model their own attitudes it shouldn’t gain any critics (if an individual believes in the efficacy of these techniques he doesn’t need a scientific proof to get expected results), but when it comes to the use of these techniques by managers, it shouldn’t be an issue but rather raise the question of what makes them use these close to psycho-manipulation techniques in relation to their sub-ordinates?

Authors and Affiliations

Grażyna Gruszczyńska-Malec, Monika Rutkowska

Keywords

EP ID EP58141
DOI -
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