TopDec is the world’s only, high validity, online, self-coaching tool, which measures mind-set (attitudes), and provides instant, accurate and actionable, individual feedback. When applied to groups, TopDec can measure the culture and can create benchmarks with wide application in decision support.
TopDec is the preferred tool in any situation where people are assessed. It is multilingual, easy to process, unbiased to gender, age, religion, ethnicity and sexual preference.
TopDec is a very modern tool for any kind of evaluation of the human capital. As an individual person you want a different experience of your performance and suspect that the ways you react to situations and work with people play a significant role. You want a way to measure yourself and get feedback, which removes the personal judgement of others and gives you straight facts.
As a team leader or a manager you want your people to work better together or you want to balance-out the team to become more focused, creative or agile. You may also accept that your own attitudes play a significant role affecting those of your team members, so you are willing to explore that possibility too.
In addition to providing a powerful, individual and group feedback and self-coaching tool, we also facilitate focused collaborations, in a broad spectrum of applications:
- Cultural due diligence for mergers and acquisitions
- Reducing the time to “right-hire” in a range of industrial and professional service companies
- Talent selection and development
- Measurement of training program effectiveness over time, providing feedback on content and data for marketing
- Augmentation of consulting and other professional services
IT’S ALL ABOUT ATTITUDE!
TopDec® measures attitudes instead of personality as attitudes can be changed or modified whereas personality is more or less stable throughout our lives.
Attitudes are general evaluations of objects, ideas, and people one encounters throughout one’s life. Attitudes are important because they can guide thought, behaviour and feelings. Attitude change occurs anytime an attitude is modified. Thus, change occurs when a person goes from being positive to negative, from slightly positive to very positive or from having no attitude to having one. Because of the functional value of attitudes, the processes that change them have been a major focus throughout the history of social psychology.
TopDec® is measuring and analysing attitudes in real time and gives instantly an actionable feedback to enable change in attitudes for improving and better performance.
In attitude change there are two types of processes: (1) one that occur when one puts forth relatively little cognitive effort, low effort processes, and (2) those that occur with relatively high cognitive effort, high-effort processes. The amount of thought and effort used in any given situation is determined by many variables, all of which affect one’s motivation or ability to think.
Low-Effort Processes
When factors keep one’s motivation and/or ability to think low (such as when the issue is not personally relevant or there are many distractions present), attitude change can be produced by a variety of low-effort processes. These include some largely automatic processes as well as simple conclusions.
Associative Processes
One way to produce attitude change in the absence of effortful thoughts is to repeatedly associate a neutral object with another stimulus that already possesses a positive or negative meaning. This is also called Classical Conditioning.
Affective Priming
Another process that involves the association of two stimuli is called the affective priming. In this process a positive or negative stimulus (e.g. words such as love or murder) is encountered just prior to a novel attitude object. The reaction to the positive or negative stimulus will come to color the evaluation of the new object producing attitude change.
Inferential Processes
This attitude change involves cognitive balance. Stated simply, balance is achieved when people agree with those they like and disagree with those they dislike. If one experiences a state of unease attitudes are likely to shift to bring the system into balance.
Attribution
An attributional process, which occurs when people are not well tuned to their beliefs, is self-perception. People infer their own attitudes from their behaviors, just as they would from someone else. In a related phenomenon, called overjustification effect, people come to infer that they dislike a previously enjoyed activity when they are provided with sufficient rewards for engaging in it.
This attitude process is widely used in marketing.
Heuristics
When motivation and ability to think are low, people use simple rules to form evaluations. By basing their opinions on the roulette “the majority is usually right” and positive attitude is established. Instead of thinking carefully and critically a person might simple count arguments and reasons, “the more arguments, the better”.
High-Effort Processes
There are also attitude change processes that require a greater use of mental resources. When a person is motivated and able to invest high effort in making a judgment about an issue or object, attitude change can occur due to characteristics of his or her thoughts, his or her estimation of good or bad outcomes will be tied to the object, or the person’s realisation that he or she holds conflicting beliefs about a set of attitude objects.
Cognitive responses
When people’s attitudes change through the use of high cognitive effort, some of the most important aspects to consider are their actual thoughts toward the attitude object or any persuasive message received on the topic. Three aspects to consider: (1) is the thoughts about the attitude object or message favourable or unfavourable. By examining the ratio of positive or negative thoughts the likely amount of attitude change produced can be approximated. (2) How much thinking is done. For example the more positive thoughts one has about an attitude object the more favourable the attitudes will be. The final (3) the aspect of thought is related to confidence. If a person is highly confident in a thought, it will have a great impact on their final attitude. Those thoughts that are associated with low confidence, however, will play a minor role in any attitude change.
Expectancy-Value Processes
The attitudes are created through an individual’s assessment of how it is that a given attitude object will be associated with positive or negative consequences or values. The more likely it is that an attitude object is associated with a positive consequence or value the more positive the attitude will be.
Dissonance Processes
According to dissonance theory, people are motivated to hold consistent attitudes. Because of this motivation for consistency, people experience unpleasant physiological arousal when they willingly engage in a behavior that is counter their beliefs or are made aware that they possess two or more conflicting attitudes. This experience then motivates them to change their attitudes so that the unpleasant feeling can be eliminated. When people make a choice from among alternatives dissonance processes will often produce attitude change.
Attitude Strength
One of the most important characteristics of an attitude is its strength. Attitude strength is associated with an attitude’s persistence, resistance to change or ability to predict behaviour. As you might expect, attitudes produced by high-effort cognitive processes are stronger than those produced by low-effort processes. Of course the high-effort processes are supported by a more developed knowledge structure than the low-effort processes.
Reference: Petty R.E.,Wheeler, S.C., Tormala Z.L: (2003)
Persuasion and attitude change: T. Millon & M. Lerner. Personality and social psychology: Hoboken, NJ:Wiley
