Individual employees are information processors who employ information standards when evaluating their interactions with work environments.  Cognitive dissonance occurs when a person receives information that is unexpected or varies from internal standards.  This discerned discrepancy in turn serves as a motive because it energizes and maintains behavior.  Reduction of dissonance stops behavior and leads to the learning of actions that have resulted in dissonance reduction.  Hence, dissonance reduction influences the direction and choice of behavior.

                        Behavior research over the past fifteen years suggests that individuals react to a number of standards in their activities (including work behavioral).  These standards can be summarized as follows:

            1.         Comfort standards are physiological in nature and are based on the experience of pain or discomfort.  Reaction to a blow on the head or a bee sting, for example, result in an automatic reaction to avoid the pain.  All levels of discrepancy from standard are aversive to the individual, and reaction to them is inborn and automatic.

            2.         Homeostatic standards are also automatic and physiological in nature.  The need to satisfy hunger, for example, is a motive arising from a discrepancy from a homeostatic standard.  Such standards serve to maintain balance in the various physiological processes of the body.

            3.         Information standards are fundamentally different from the two standards just described because they are cognitive.  The individual makes a comparison between perceived information from the environment and consciously recognized expectations he or she has.  Repeated experience with people and objects on the job lead to a set of internal expectations about what to expect when interacting with them.  Unexpected events with respect to people, objects, or places on the job cause dissonance and serve as a motive for behavior. 

                                                            .  . .

            4.         Action standards are also informational in nature and are really a subtype of the standard just defined.  Action standards are really values (mores and ethical) that employees have on the job.  In other words, action standards involve expectations about the way things should be.  Action standards often take the form of goals, intentions, plans or moral values.  For example, employees often compare their pay with others to determine if there is a fair or equitable distribution of rewards for actual work accomplished.  The basis for equity judgement is an action standard.

                        Informational and action standards are fundamentally different from comfort and homeostatic standards and deserve additional attention in our discussion of motive for at least several reasons.  First, they are more important in understanding individual behavior in organizations, because they provide the basis for the vast majority of employee motives.  Second, they involve the perception of information rather than physical energy.  Third, they do not assume that all levels of stimulation (discrepancy) are aversive to individuals.  Fourth, they are not tied to basic physiological processes.  Rather, they are learned over time through interaction with the environment.

                                                            .  . .

            Increasingly, the field of organizational behavior views employee performance as a function of both individual adjustments to the organization and organizational adjustments to the individual.

                                                            Szilagyi and Wallace [1980, 60-63].

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