Attitude Survey Paper In today’s economy, measuring attitudes is important. According to Hogan (2007), an attitude is usually defined with respect to its object. Objects include concepts, practice, group, institutions or an individual (p. 573). Attitudes consist of three components: cognitive, emotional and behavioral. I designed an attitude survey using the SERVQUAL approach to assess the attitudes of my coworkers at Ralcorp Frozen Bakery Products (RFBP). The purpose of the survey is to gain an understanding of the attitudes and perceptions that RFBP employees have toward the company. The purpose of the paper is to discuss the design, administration, scoring, and interpretation of the survey as well as any issues I experienced while creating the survey.
Design
According to Fink and Kosecoff (1998), surveys are a collection of data used to obtain information from individuals. The design of the survey was based on the SERVQUAL approach. The survey was designed for two purposes: employees to express his or her concerns toward Ralcorp and measure his or her expectations of the company while employed. The audience for this survey was employees who have been with the company for less than a year and for employees who have been with the company more than five years, to see if any improvements have been made. The survey will be administered two weeks after he or she comes off probation through a written format. This survey consisted of 11 items and took each employee no more than two minutes to complete. While designing this survey I kept in mind that long surveys loses the attention of the person taking the survey. Causing them to circle any answer without reading the questions, this makes the survey inaccurate.
Today Likert’s method is the most widely used method for measuring attitudes (Hogan, 2007). The Likert scale was used to measure employee’s attitudes toward the items in question. The responses were scored on the five point Likert scale ranging from -2 to +2 consisting of strongly agree, agree, uncertain or neutral, strongly disagree, and disagree with scores of -2, -1, 0, +1, +2. After scoring responses, a score card will be used to gather data collect to form a chart of the items the company needs to work on. It will also give the company a view of the direction the company is headed in. The responses of the Likert scale are based on a summative approach (Hogan, 2007). The questions that I asked address the employee’s feelings toward the company and determine ways to improve one’s issues or concerns.
Administration, Scoring, and Interpretation
For each employee responses to remain anonymously the supervisor will not administer the survey. A person from human resources will administer the survey because he or she will keep the survey from experiencing bias based on the employee’s views of the positives and negatives of the company. Lack of trust and respect from both the company and employees, can lead to biased results (Knapp & Mujtaba, 2011). If an employee answers negatively the score will be low, meaning the employee attitude is not happy with the way the company is handling situations. In order for the company to get an accurate score, the survey must be given to majority of the employees. The scores will be tallied and put into a table.
After the scores have been calculated, the results will be placed on a large grading scale to model scores. This allows the company to get a better understanding of what the company needs to improve. For example, if majority of the employees strongly disagree on one item, the raw scores of the survey can take into account the inclination The negative scores shows a negative attitude about RFBP and positive scores shows a positive one. The data collected will be put into nominal data by combining the ‘agree’ and ‘disagree’ responses.
Issues Experienced While Creating Survey
According to Zikmund (2003), the SERVQUAL approach to attitude survey is clearly designed to determine the quality of service and satisfaction of the product in the retail industry. The servqual measurements consist of five dimensions: tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. The main objective is to understand the employee expectations, perception, and bridge the gap between the company. I tried to design items that will measure both the expectations of the employees as well as his or her perception of the item in question. This will validate that lower scores of employees means he or she is unsatisfied and vice versa. The items handle both the employee’s personal perception and expectations. I included the three components of attitude measurements: cognitive, effective, and behavioral when I was thinking about items to ask. Conclusion
In summary, the attitude survey that I created follows the Likert scale method to measure the satisfaction of Ralcorp Frozen Bakery Product employees with an importance of both the personal views and expectation of the items on the survey. The survey also attempts to measure the cognitive, effective, and behavioral components of the construct being tested. The purpose of the survey was to discover how the employees thought about the company.