Psychology of management

2. Social-and-psychological phenomena of a personality’s behavior in a group 
As we have already noted before, an impact (pressure) considerably influences group-
members’ behavior. Nevertheless, this impact turns out to be different for various people in 
connection with the peculiarities of their personalities. In conditions of group communication 
and interaction people show specific traits which are called social-and-psychological phenomena 
of group behavior. To such phenomena are related various manifestations of a personality’s 
activity in a group. 

---

86 
Personality attitudes
are manifestations of unconscious drive to activity. The attitude 
theory was developed by N.D. Uznadze’s psychological school, where for the first time there 
were experimentally discovered the phenomena of cognitive and practical attitudes. 
For instance, if a subject is offered two objects different in size to be compared, and then 
offered two other objects of equal size, the person will perceive them as different in size. The 
subject has the illusion of the identical object’s inequality which is explained by the fact that 
perception of two actually equal objects takes place under the conditions of a subject’s 
preparedness for objects to be unequal, i.e. under the attitude as a need to perform an action of 
comparison in a certain way. Thus, an 
attitude
is an unconscious personal state of readiness for a 
certain activity by means of which one or another need can be realized. 
As a result of recurrent “attitudinal situations” in a subject there is gradually formed a 
“fixed attitudes set” which imperceptibly for the person themselves determine his/her position in 
life in perceiving of surrounding reality. 
In social practice psychologists distinguish the forms of behavior in which the fixed 
attitudes of a personality at perceiving people and eventsare manifested. An attitude is a 
psychological mechanism of those communication stereotypes. For instance, the attitude to the 
necessity of obeying the executive’s orders causes preparedness to carry out any orders without 
critical evaluating him/her as a personality. Looking closely at people’s personality traits we are 
trying to understand what they are like, whether we can trust them, etc. And here often are 
applied set attitudes, social stereotypes, worldly ideas that have been formed by every person, as 
well as the level od psychological culture in the ability of perceiving and critical estimating other 
people. The following example can serve to demonstrate a social attitudinal stereotype: many 
people believe that a professor is always myopic and misfit for everyday life; a student is always 
cheerful, witty, mobile, and is never prepared for an exam; all Englishmen are skinny, arrogant 
and composed, and the only thing the French ever think of is love. The attitude to sportsmen is 
expressed in the saying “He who has strength needs no wits”. 
Meeting a new person we immediately relate him/her to a certain category and build up 
our behavior in accordance with a set stereotype. Psychologists distinguish three types of attitude 
at perceiving another person: 
- positive attitude causes us to overestimate the positive qualities and ignore the weak 
traits of a person, i.e. we give the person a big advance which is manifested in unconscious 
trustfulness; 

---

87 
- negative attitude makes us perceive only negative qualities of another person, 
expressing mistrust and suspicion; 
- adequate attitude is connected with understanding of the fact that every person has both 
advantages and disadvantages, the main thing being their balance and evaluation by another 
person. 
The presence of attitudes is viewed as unconscious predisposition to perceive and 
evaluate other people’s qualities. These attitudes lie in the basis of typical distortions of another 
person’s perception. Here are examples of some of distortions. 
“