MGT502 Quiz 2

Lesson 10

Overview

Individuals behave in a given manner based not on the way their external environment actually is but, rather, on what they see or believe it to be. An organization may spend millions of dollars to create a pleasant work environment for its employees. However, in spite of these expenditures, if an employee believes that his or her job is lousy, that employee will behave accordingly. It is the employee’s perception of a situation that becomes the basis for his or her behavior. The employee who perceives his/her supervisor as a hurdle reducer who helps him/her do a better job and the employee who sees the same supervisor as “big brother, closely monitoring every motion, to ensure that I keep working” will differ in their behavioral responses to their supervisor. The difference has nothing to do with the reality of the supervisor’s actions; the difference in employee behavior is due to different perceptions.

The evidence suggests that what individuals perceive from their work situation will influence their productivity more than will the situation itself. Whether or not a job is actually interesting or challenging is irrelevant. Whether or not a manager successfully plans and organizes the work of his or her employees and actually helps them to structure their work more efficiently and effectively is far less important than how employees perceive the manager’s efforts. Similarly, issues like fair pay for work performed, the validity of performance appraisals, and the adequacy of working conditions are not judged by employees in a way that assures common perceptions, nor can we be assured that individuals will interpret conditions about their jobs in a favorable light. Therefore, to be able to influence productivity, it is necessary to assess how workers perceive their jobs.

Absenteeism, turnover, and job satisfaction are also reactions to the individual’s perceptions. Dissatisfaction with working conditions or the belief that there is a lack of promotion opportunities in the organization are judgments based on attempts to make some meaning out of one’s job. The employee’s conclusion that a job is good or bad is an interpretation. Managers must spend time understanding how each individual interprets reality and, where there is a significant difference between what is seen and what exists, try to eliminate the distortions. Failure to deal with the differences when individuals perceive the job in negative terms will result in increased absenteeism and turnover and lower job satisfaction.

influenced by how people interpret and make sense of the world around them and each other. Perception is the process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret sensory input. Attribution is an explanation of the cause of behavior. Perception and attribution explain how and why people behave in organizations and how and why they react to the behavior of others.

Perception is the process by which people interpret the input from their senses to give meaning and order to the world around them. The three components of perception are the perceiver, the target, and the situation. Accurate perceptions are necessary to make good decisions and to motivate workers to perform at a high level, to be fair and equitable, and to be ethical.

The perceiver’s knowledge base is organized into schemas, abstract knowledge structures stored in memory that allow people to organize and interpret information about a given target of perception. Schemas tend to be resistant to change and can be functional or dysfunctional. A stereotype is a dysfunctional schema because stereotypes often lead perceivers to assume erroneously that targets have a whole range of characteristics simply because they possess one distinguishing characteristic (e.g., race, age, or gender). In addition to the perceiver’s schemas, the motivational state and mood also influence

Characteristics of the target also influence perception. Ambiguous targets are subject to a lot of interpretation by the perceiver; the more ambiguous the target, the more likely perceivers are to differ in their perceptions of it. The target’s social status also affects how the target is perceived. Through impression management, targets can actively try to manage the perceptions that others have of them.

particularly important aspect of the situation is the target’s salience—that is, the extent to which the target stands out in a group of people or things.

Biases and problems in person perception include primacy effects, contrast effects, halo effects, similar-to-me effects, harshness, leniency, average tendencies, and knowledge-ofpredictor bias. Inaccurate perceptions resulting from these biases can lead to faulty decision making.

Attributions are important determinants of behavior in organizations because organization members react to other people’s behavior based on what they think caused the behavior. Common external attributions for behavior include task difficulty and luck or chance. Like perceptions, attributions can be inaccurate because of biases, including the fundamental attribution error, the actor-observer effect, and self-serving attribution.

Three ways in which organizations can promote accurate perceptions and attributions and effectively manage diverse employees include: securing top management’s commitment to diversity, diversity training, and education. Organizations also need to take steps to eliminate and prevent both quid pro quo and hostile work environment.

What is Perception?

“A process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment”

Why is it Important?

Because people’s behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. The world that is perceived is the world that is behaviorally important.

Factors Influencing Perception

Perceiver Target Situation

When an individual looks at a target and attempts to interpret what he or she sees, that interpretation is heavily influenced by personal characteristics of the individual perceiver.

The more relevant personal characteristics affecting perception of the perceiver are attitudes, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations.

Characteristics of the target can also affect what is being perceived. This would include attractiveness, gregariousness, and our tendency to group similar things together. For example, members of a group with clearly distinguishable features or color are often perceived as alike in other, unrelated characteristics as well. The context in which we see objects or events also influences our attention. This could include time, heat, light, or other situational factors.

The Nature of Perception

Perception is the process by which individuals select, organize, and interpret the input from their senses to give meaning and order to the world around them. The process of perception involves the perceiver—the person making the interpretation, the target of perception—what the perceiver interprets, and the situation in which perception takes place. The target can be an event, a situation, an idea, a noise, a group of people, or another person. Person perception, or the process of perceiving another person, plays a large role in organizational behavior.

The Link between Perception and Individual Decision Making

Individuals in organizations make decisions; they make choices from among two or more alternatives. Top managers determine their organization’s goals, what products or services to offer, how best to finance operations, or where to locate a new manufacturing plant. Middleand lower-level managers determine production schedules, select new employees, and decide how pay raises are to be allocated. Non-managerial employees also make decisions including whether or not to come to work on any given day, how much effort to put forward once at work, and whether or not to comply with a request made by the boss. A number of organizations in recent years have been empowering their non-managerial employees with job-related decision-making authority that historically was reserved for managers. There is a discrepancy between some current state of affairs and some desired state, requiring consideration of alternative courses of action. The awareness that a problem exists and that a decision needs to be made is a perceptual issue. Every decision requires interpretation and evaluation of information. The perceptions of the decision maker will address these two issues. Data are typically received from multiple sources. Which data are relevant to the decision and which are not? Alternatives will be developed, and the strengths and weaknesses of each will need to be evaluated.

Social Perception

“The processes, through which individuals attempt to combine, integrate and interpret information about others”. Social status, a target’s real or perceived position in society or an organization, also affects perception. High-status targets are perceived as more credible, knowledgeable, and responsible than low-status targets. Organizations use a high-status target to make public announcements and presentations because the audience perceives that person as credible.