The job market in Taiwan is currently very competitive and it is difficult to find a job without professional certification. Because this is so, gaining professional certification has emerged as a trend in Taiwan (Cheng & Hsu, 2011; Cheng, Lin, & Su, 2011). Examinations for this purpose have received a great deal of attention as a result of the government’s promotion of the system of certification. In response to this trend, schools have been actively encouraging undergraduates to obtain professional certification – particularly in technological and vocational subjects – while they are still at school. Previous researchers have focused on graduate credentials in fields such as intensive care nursing (Santiano & Daffurn, 2003), professional writing (Epain, 2005), radiation oncology (Kun et al., 2005), teaching (Chou, 2010), and surgery (Panagopoulos, Schein, & Wise, 1999). Few researchers have examined attitudes and behaviors in relation to certification in business and management.

Cognitive dissonance theory (CDT; Cooper & Fazio, 1984; Festinger, 1957) presupposes the existence of needs in the context of discrepancies between attitudes and behavior (Aronson, 1969; Johnson, Kelly, & LeBlanc, 1995). Previous researchers have suggested that external justification is the key factor influencing experiences of cognitive dissonance and that such justification motivates attitude change (Aronson, 1969; Chiou & Wan, 2007; Frank, 1990; Goethals, Cooper, & Naficy, 1979; Wan & Chiou, 2010). In this study we used CDT to investigate the formation of attitude change. We designed an empirical approach involving the manipulation of the factor of a sense of responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions.

The main aim in this study was to examine whether or not a sense of responsibility for consequences of one’s actions can explain students’ attitudinal changes toward business-related certification examinations.

Literature Review

Responsibility for Consequences and Attitudinal Change

Individuals’ attitudes are affected by the extent to which they feel personally responsible for the acts or tasks they perform. When individuals feel personally responsible for the negative consequences of an action they have chosen to perform, dissonance emerges irrespective of whether the consequences could reasonably have been foreseen (Goethals et al., 1979). In contrast, irrespective of how damaging the consequences are, individuals will not experience dissonance for negative consequences if they are not a result of a choice.

Pallak, Sogin, and Van Zante (1974) found that when individuals felt personally responsible for a boring task they valued that task more highly and their dissonance was reduced. Under such conditions, individuals felt responsible for the consequences related to their behavior and their attitudes changed insofar as they experienced a sense of personal responsibility for the consequences of their behavior (Sogin & Pallak, 1976).

If students intending to take certification examinations felt responsible for tasks involving extra mental and physical effort as well as extra difficulty, then dissonance would be expected to occur insofar as they felt personally responsible for the consequences related to these tasks. Under such circumstances, students would need to reduce dissonance, which would lead to attitude change. Additionally, if individuals engage in an act or task that results in negative consequences for which they feel personally responsible, then attitude change would follow because the act or task that results in the negative consequence would be inconsistent with previously held attitudes (Scher & Cooper, 1989). Based on the findings in the aforementioned studies we reasoned that when students taking certification examinations feel personally responsible for tasks related to the examination, their attitudes toward the examination will become more positive, irrespective of their previous attitudes. Therefore, we proposed the following hypothesis:
Hypothesis 1: A student’s sense of responsibility will be positively related to changes in his or her attitudes toward the certification examination.

Method

We examined how responsibility for consequences affects attitude change. We predicted that students with initially neutral or negative attitudes toward the certification examination who felt greater personal responsibility for their learning achievements and a greater sense of dissonance would be more likely to change their attitudes toward these examinations in a positive direction. In contrast, we predicted that teachers with initially neutral or negative attitudes toward the certification examination who felt less personally responsible for students’ learning would experience less dissonance, and their attitudes toward certification examinations would remain unchanged or would change only marginally.

Participants and Experimental Design

The students’ attitudes towards certification examinations were measured by asking our participants to evaluate 11 items rated on a 7-point semantic differential scale anchored by bipolar adjectives such as worthless (1)/valuable (7), unpleasant (1)/pleasant (7) (Osgood, Suci, & Tannenbaum, 1957), and a single 100-point score was used to reflect the participants’ intention to take certification examinations. In the initial sample there were 200 business students who were selected using purposive sampling. Participants’ average scores on the 7-point attitude semantic differential scale were in the lowest quartile, and scores on intention to take the certificate examination were lower than 50 out of 100. Among them, 87 students aged between 20 and 24 years (62 females and 25 males) were selected as the formal sample. They were then randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions of personal responsibility: low, moderate, or high. Personal responsibility was manipulated across participants, and the dependent measure was attitude toward the certification examination.

Procedure

Participants’ initial attitudes toward the certification examination, as assessed in the pretest, were used to compute the degree to which their attitudes changed after the experimental manipulation. Participants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 experimental conditions and received an abstract of a professional report entitled An Investigation of Business Students’ Certification Examination. In order to increase their involvement in the task, participants were told that this report provided valuable insights into positive outcomes for business students taking the certification examination and that they would benefit from reading the report attentively. Each version of the report consisted of one page, and all versions included equivalent paragraphs in order to control for any confounding effects related to the amount of information. In the posttest, respondents were asked to rate their attitude toward the certification examination. In addition, respondents were asked to use a 9-point scale, ranging from 1 = not at all to 9 = very strongly, to rate how responsible they felt for poor job performance related to failure to obtain a business certification.

Manipulation of Personal Responsibility

The independent variable, personal responsibility, was manipulated as follows. Under the high-responsibility condition, the abstract emphasized feeling fully responsible for poor job performance related to failure to obtain business certification. Under the moderate-responsibility condition, the abstract framed the outcome of poor job performance in the context of two-sided arguments and emphasized that both personal and external factors (e.g., school, society, and government) contributed to students’ attitudes toward certification examination. Thus, poor job performance was only partially attributable to the certification examination. Under the low-responsibility condition, the abstract stressed minimal personal responsibility for poor job performance related to failure to obtain certification.

Dependent Measures

The Semantic Differential Scale for Certification Examination was developed for this study to measure attitudes toward the certification examination. As described above participants rated 11 items on a 7-point scale; the Cronbach’s alpha for the entire instrument was .91. This measure of attitudes demonstrated satisfactory internal consistency in terms of item-total correlations (ranging from .59 to .79). Participants were asked to rate their attitudes toward the certification examination in both the pretest and the posttest. The mean scores on the 11 items were computed and the higher the score the more positive was the attitude toward the certification examination. Participants’ scores in the posttest were compared with their scores in the pretest. Positive scores for attitude change indicated a shift toward a more positive attitude. Participants were also asked to rate their level of personal responsibility on a 9-point scale, ranging from 1 = not at all to 9 = very strongly.

Results

Manipulation Check

A statistical summary of participants’ responses to the certification examination is shown in Table 1. First, we found no significant differences in initial attitude toward the certificate examination across experimental conditions, F(2, 84) = 1.06, p > .05. This finding indicates that the procedure used to randomly assign participants to experimental conditions produced three equivalent groups. Second, participants’ perceived personal responsibility was congruent with the condition to which they were assigned. A one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) revealed a main effect of perceived personal responsibility, F(2, 84) = 41.85, p < .001. Follow-up contrasts showed that participants in the high-responsibility group (M = 8.26) felt more responsibility than did participants in the moderate-responsibility group (M = 7.33), t(84) = 4.05, p < .001, who felt more responsibility than did those in the low-responsibility group (M = 6.17), t(84) = 5.16, p < .001. Thus, the manipulation of independent variables was effective. Finally, scores for initial attitudes (M = 3.85, SD = .45) were significantly below the midpoint of the scale (i.e., 4.00), t(86) = -2.97, p < .005. We used statistical regression analysis to determine whether statistically significant changes in participants’ attitudes toward the certification examination were reflected in differences between pretest and posttest scores. Posttest attitudes (M = 5.01) were significantly more positive toward the examination than were pretest attitudes (M = 3.85), t(86) = 15.28, p < .001, and posttest attitudes were significantly above the scale’s midpoint (i.e., 4.00), t(86) = 13.74, p < .001. Because statistical regression cannot produce this cross-over-the-mean effect, the observed attitudinal changes could not be attributed to this phenomenon.

The Effect of Personal Responsibility on Attitude Change

Participants’ scores for attitude toward the certification examination across the three experimental conditions (see Table 1) were subjected to a 3 (personal responsibility) × 2 (attitude) mixed ANOVA, treating attitude as a repeated factor and responsibility as a between-subjects factor. The analysis revealed a main effect of attitude, demonstrating that participants exhibited a statistically significant change toward a more positive attitude, F(1, 84) = 410.83, p < .001, n = .82. More importantly, this effect was mediated by an interaction with personal responsibility, F(2, 84) = 33.53, p < .001, n = .43. This interaction was subjected to a one-way ANOVA, treating personal responsibility as a between-subjects factor. Planned contrasts revealed that participants’ attitude changes in the high-responsibility group (M = 1.76) were more strongly associated with participants’ sense of responsibility than were those of participants in the moderate-responsibility group (M = 1.13), t(84) = 4.51, p < .001. Similarly, the attitude changes of participants in the moderate-responsibility group were more strongly associated with their sense of responsibility than were those of participants in the low-responsibility group (M = .60), t(84) = 3.74, p < .001. In summary, our findings were consistent with our predictions and indicate that personal responsibility may serve as a motivational basis for changes in attitudes toward the certification examination.

Discussion and Conclusion

We examined whether or not changes in students’ attitudes toward the certification examination could be motivated by cognitive dissonance. We found that the attitudes of participants who received the abstract emphasizing personal responsibility for the consequences associated with taking the certification examination changed more than did those of participants who received an abstract that did not have this emphasis. These results are consistent with those of researchers in other behavioral domains (Chiou & Wan, 2007; Scher & Cooper, 1989; Sogin & Pallak, 1976). Moreover, the greater the sense of responsibility among our participants the more likely they were to change their attitude toward the certification examinations. Attitude change was found to be more strongly associated with sense of responsibility for the participants in the high-responsibility group than for those in the moderate-responsibility group and, similarly, in the moderate-responsibility group attitude change was more strongly associated with sense of responsibility than it was among the participants in the low-responsibility group. When students believe that they are responsible for the consequences associated with certification examinations, dissonance emerges because negative attitudes toward taking certification examinations and awareness of the aversive consequences associated with not taking these examinations are incongruous. According to CDT, in this context students would be expected to attempt to change prior attitudes in order to reduce or eliminate dissonance. At a time of rising unemployment, professional certification will increase employment opportunities because it is regarded as proof of the individual’s abilities. In this study, CDT was successfully applied; the findings provide understanding of students’ attitudes toward the certification examinations. It can be concluded that increasing students’ responsibility for the consequences of their actions can change their attitudes and is, therefore, an effective way of motivating them to obtain professional certificates.

This research has several limitations. First, some authors have emphasized the role of self-concept in eliciting and reducing dissonance (Stone & Cooper, 2003; Tesser & Cornell, 1991). Stone and Cooper further indicated that self-esteem is a mediator in evaluations of behavior. Thus, the participants’ self-confidence with respect to the certification examination may play an important role in cognitive dissonance. Future researchers should use the models used by these authors to explore how self-esteem moderates dissonance. Secondly, external justification may play a key role in influencing both dissonance and subsequent attitude changes. In this study we examined the effects of responsibility for consequences on change in students’ attitudes toward the certification examination. However, prior researchers have demonstrated that threats, rewards, choices, foreseeability, and irrevocable commitment also play crucial roles in determining the extent of external justification for engaging attitude-discrepant behavior and subsequently changing attitudes (Aronson & Carlsmith, 1963; Goethals et al., 1979; Leippe & Eisentadt, 1994; Linder, Cooper, & Jones, 1967). Third, the presence of dissonance was assumed on the basis of the experimental paradigm that was designed to test CDT (Elliot & Devine, 1994). A direct measurement of dissonance may provide more detailed evidence that proves that attitude change was actually motivated by dissonance reduction. The cognitive dissonance test (Cassel, Chow, DeMoulin, & Reiger, 2001), developed to determine the presence of cognitive dissonance, may be useful as a direct measure of dissonance. Finally, in this study we addressed only the conditions that produce attitude change in experimental settings. Future researchers should explore the multiple pathways toward dissonance reduction and the relationships of these in situations outside the laboratory by observing spontaneous dissonance reduction.

Overall, our results in this study help to clarify the role of internal motivations in business school students’ intentions to take certification examinations. Using CDT, we demonstrated that increasing students’ responsibility for consequences can change their attitudes toward the certification examination. The results of this study reveal that students who felt personal responsibility are motivated to change prior attitudes about the certification examination in a positive direction. In conclusion, policymakers and teachers can benefit from understanding the concept of cognitive dissonance when considering how to modify students’ behavior as it relates to certification examinations.

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This research was funded by a grant from the National Science Council of the Republic of China (NSC 98-2511-S-165-002-MY2).

Ping-Kun Hsu, Department of International Business Management, Tainan University of Technology, 529 Jhongjheng Road, YongKang Dist., Tainan City 71002, Taiwan, ROC. Email: [email protected]