Imagine you work for Clue, Inc., a small company as Director of Sales. You have

Question

Imagine you work for Clue, Inc., a small company as Director of Sales. You have worked there for five years, and the company has been successful. The owner, Mrs. White, decides to retire, and sells the company to an investor, Col. Mustard. You have a good sense of who your customers are and what is important to them, but Col. Mustard isn’t interested in your ideas. He directs you to pursue a different strategy. After 6 months, sales are down and customer satisfaction is, too. Col. Mustard blames you for the decrease in sales.

What is your attitude in response to this situation? Address all three components of attitude (cognitive, affective, and behavioral). Would it make a difference whether you have high job involvement or low job involvement? Incorporate aspects of work environment, competence, meaningfulness of the job, and perceived autonomy. Using the Exit-Voice-Loyalty-Neglect model, how might you personally choose to express dissatisfaction in this situation?

Explanation / Answer

Piaget, the famous Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher, and his ideas as presented in The Psychology of the Child are worth reading if you have any interest in child psychology, developmental or educational theory. The book is fairly technical and presents formalized results in a case study-like language.

His findings in this book, and many of his other works, conclude (I am grossly simplifying here) that children don’t think like adults and it takes a long process to get to developmental adulthood. The book documents Piaget's developmental stages of the child. The stages include: sensorimotor, the development of perception, the semiotic or symbolic function, the concrete operations of thought and interpersonal relations and the preadolescent and the propositional operations. He argues that the transition between these stages is fluid through a process of assimilation and accommodation.

The process of accommodation involves a change to one's existing “schemas”, or ideas, as a result of new information or new experiences. An example of this is given in a book when a baby pulls a string and action occurs the action is like magic and the baby will continue to pull the string even if action stops in the hope for a action (sensorimotor stage) , but when the baby connects the string as having a casual relation to the action the schema has changed and the baby will not pull the string if action no longer occurs thus transitioning to a new stage of development.

While reading this book, I was amazed at how internalized much of Piaget’s thinking is today in educational and developmental theory. It was interesting to look at the studies and the primary documents from which we derive this common thinking.

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