According to Festinger, cognitive dissonance is an uncomfortable feeling that arises when an individual holds two opposing views simultaneously. (Festinger, 1957) This dissonance, as mentioned by professor Safayeni in Lecture 4, creates tension and makes us uncomfortable, and we have a motivational need to reduce this dissonance, by changing one of the cognitions,; adjusting the importance or adding additional justifications.
In my previous organization, we had a manager who was always working below his 8 hour shift. There were days he would work only 4 hours, leave work to go do her personal stuff, and he wioulld tell us (his assistants) to call him when the district manager is around. This actually put a lot of work on us, as we were the ones managing the daily activities of the organization in his absence.
Besides for him, leaving work early every day, he was a great manager. He was our best bet for all our answers if we had any questions. On some weekends, we spent a great deal of time with him, and we developed a personal relationship with him.
It later got to a point in time, where we felt inundated with work to be done, and our manger’s behaviour was not helping. This led to a decrease in sales, service, and overall productivity. When this caught the attention of the district manager, we struggled as Assistant managers to fire our manager because of the personal relationship we had with him.
Going back to Festinger’s Cognitive Dissonance, in order to reduce this tension (between firing the manager, and the negative consequence on the organization), we chose the survival of the organization as our priority, over the manager, in reducing the dissonance. We later got a new Mmanager, who helped improved sales, service, and overall productivity.