Cognitive dissonance refers to a situation characterized by stress or internal discomfort that results from differing values, beliefs, practices, and ideas. Fundamentally, this serves as a condition whereby two or several conflicting thoughts lead people to experience discomfort psychologically. When it comes to humans, for instance, they have an inner force that allows them to sustain harmony between beliefs, attitudes, and practices (Morvan & O’Connor, 2017) . When people experience these internal conflicting situations, their natural inclination is to focus on eliminating or minimizing them to avoid experiencing emotional discomfort. For the cognitive dissonance theory, it provides three options that facilitate in minimizing stress. These comprise of altering beliefs or attitudes, attaining new information, as well as minimizing the cognitions importance (Wicklund & Brehm, 2013) . In this case, understanding cognitive dissonance makes it possible to understand how it applies to real life, such as through ways in which it serves as a hindrance to workers on the job.
Within the workplace situation, cognitive dissonance is prevalent while it serves as a major source of stress operating in diverse support functions within an organization, such as human resources and risk management. When performing these kinds of duties, the employees face situations in which they are required to be supporting, tolerating, as well as executing tasks, which conflict with their idea of wrong or right behavior, ethics, training, and personal drives significantly. The vital role of the different beliefs needs emphasizing because in most cases, certain primary forces influence persons to choose the occupations as their career path. For most employees pursuing professions, such as environmental advisors, nurses, trainers, human resource experts, or paramedics, serves as more than just a profession. They perceive it as a calling (Chaskalson, 2011) . In this vein, when faced with opposing practices and beliefs, as well as pressure of tolerating them, the professionals portray significant personal distress and dissatisfaction together with unending tension, which leads them to develop various health effects as well as severe impairments to how they perform in the workplace.
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Numerous situations and examples prevail that lead individuals performing support functions to portray cognitive dissonance. These might comprise of being required to observe poor and inappropriate practices in leadership or when the employees are required to perform duties, which fail to follow the norms, procedures, organizational, training, and personal values. For example, a HR manager might be required dismiss a worker because of misconduct while not having sufficient evidence or where the evidence does not support taking actions since it might lead the manager to experience tremendous cognitive dissonance (Wicklund & Brehm, 2013) . On one side, the manager’s sense of wrong or right, internal values, and knowledge concerning how the move would affect the long-term performance of the organization would be placed directly against the senior decision maker’s anticipations, which would influence the career negatively (Morvan & O’Connor, 2017) . In this case, it would be probable to witness increased levels of stress emerging due to the choices made.
Furthermore, in the event of a safety or project health advisor required by the managers to ensure that investigation toward an incident “goes easy” when it comes to certain forces would portray related symptoms (Chaskalson, 2011) . In various cases whereby individuals make conscious choices of executing certain tasks (stressors) against their values and beliefs, rather than the stress ending afterwards, it ends up becoming severe and with varying intensity. This situation usually leads to depression affiliated with the workplace (Wicklund & Brehm, 2013) . Irrespective of the extent in which individuals embark on altering internal beliefs or values to minimize cognitive dissonance, such an approach is quite challenging. Even when it comes to best-case scenarios, certain stresses levels remain for a significant amount of time. The reason for this is that change in beliefs is inadequate, while outside forces rather than voluntary realization from inside force them together with an individual’s viewpoint of the world (Morvan & O’Connor, 2017) . Thus, cognitive dissonance can serve as a significant hindrance when employees are trying to execute their tasks.
References
Chaskalson, M. (2011). The mindful workplace: developing resilient individuals and resonant organizations with MBSR. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.
Morvan, C., & O’Connor, A. (2017). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Boca Raton: CRC Press.
Wicklund, R. A., & Brehm, J. W. (2013). Perspectives on cognitive dissonance. London: Psychology Press.
