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Attitude Change, Behavior Change: The Role of the Training Department
Wohlking, Wallace
13/2  (Winter 1970): 45-50

This article focuses on the impact of conventional management development programs on attitudes and on-the-job behavior. Since the late 1940s there have been persistent efforts to change managerial behavior through training. At that time interest centered on attempting to modify or change the behavior of first-line supervisors. Today, training and management development aims to change behavior of all levels of management from the foreman to the president. Although management development practitioners attempted to use psychological methods in their management development programs, but now the time has come for management development and training professionals to reconsider the emphasis in training which for the past twenty years has focused on face-to-face relations with its implicit reliance on the concept of the attitude-behavioral change sequence. It is time to review the heavy proportion of training resources allocated to programs designed to bring about some form of behavioral change through such courses as communication skills, on-the-job coaching and sensitivity training. It may be premature to abandon the use of "process" approaches to achieving behavioral change, but it is now apparent that new training concepts must be developed.

 

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