CHAPTER 3 (APE)

Perceiving Ourselves and Others in Organizations

Self-concept refers to an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations.

Self-concept:

Complexity refers to the number of distinct and important roles or identities that people perceive about
themselves. People are generally motivated to increase their complexity (called self-expansion) as they
seek out new opportunities and social connections.

Consistency is the second characteristic of an individual’s self-concept.

Clarity, the third characteristic of self-concept, refers to the degree to which a person’s self-concept is
clear, confidently defined, and stable.

Self-enhancement, is observed in many ways. Individuals tend to rate themselves above average,
believe that they have a better than average probability of success, and attribute their successes to
personal motivation or ability while blaming the situation for their mistakes.

Individuals try to confirm and maintain their existing self-concept. This process, called self-verification,
stabilizes an individual’s self-view, which in turn provides an important anchor that guides his or her
thoughts and actions.

Almost everyone strives to have a positive self-concept, but some people have a more positive
evaluation of themselves than do others. This self-evaluation is mostly defined by three elements: self-
esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control.

Self-esteem—the extent to which people like, respect, and are satisfied with themselves—represents a
global self-evaluation.

Self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief about successfully completing a task. Those with high self-efficacy
have a “can-do” attitude.

Locus of control is defined as a person’s general beliefs about the amount of control he or she has over
personal life events.

The individual self, called personal identity or internal self-concept, fulfills the need for distinctiveness
because it involves defining ourselves by our personality, values, abilities, qualifications, achievements
and other personal attributes.

Social identity (also called external self-concept) is the central theme of social identity theory, which
says that people define themselves by the groups to which they belong or have an emotional
attachment.

Perception is the process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us.
Selective attention the process of attending to some information received by our senses and ignoring
other.

Another selective attention problem, called confirmation bias, is the nonconscious tendency for people
to screen out information that is contrary to their decisions, beliefs, values, and assumptions, whereas
confirming information is more readily accepted through the perceptual process.

The most common and far-reaching perceptual grouping process is categorical thinking—the mostly
nonconscious process of organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in
our long-term memory.

Mental models, are knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain, and predict the world
around us.

Stereotyping is the perceptual process in which we assign characteristics to an identifiable group and
then automatically transfer those features to anyone we believe is a member of that group.

This combination of social identity and self-enhancement leads to the process of categorization,
homogenization, and differentiation:

• Categorization. Social identity is a comparative process, and the comparison begins by categorizing
people into distinct groups.

• Homogenization. To simplify the comparison process, we tend to think that people within each group
are very similar to each other.

• Differentiation. Along with categorizing and homogenizing people, we tend to assign more favorable
characteristics to people in our groups than to people in other groups.

A second problem with stereotyping is stereotype threat, a phenomenon whereby members of a

stereotyped group are concerned that they might exhibit a negative feature of the stereotype.

A third problem with stereotyping is that it lays the foundation for discriminatory attitudes and
behavior. Most of this perceptual bias occurs as unintentional (systemic) discrimination, whereby
decision makers rely on stereotypes to establish notions of the “ideal” person in specific roles

Worse than systemic discrimination is intentional discrimination or prejudice, in which people hold
unfounded negative attitudes toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group.

Systemic discrimination is implicit, automatic, and unintentional, whereas intentional discrimination

deliberately puts the target person at an unfair disadvantage.

The good news is that while it is very difficult to prevent the activation of stereotypes, we can minimize
the application of stereotypic information.

Another widely discussed perceptual phenomenon in organizational settings is the attribution

process. Attribution involves forming beliefs about the causes of behavior or events.
Self-serving bias—the tendency to attribute our failures to external causes more than internal causes,
while successes are due more to internal than external factors.
Fundamental attribution error (also called correspondence bias), which is the tendency to
overemphasize internal causes of another person’s behavior and to discount or ignore external causes
of their behavior.

Self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when our expectations about another person cause that person to act in a
way that is consistent with those expectations.

positive organizational behavior, which suggests that focusing on the positive rather than negative
aspects of life will improve organizational success and individual well-being.

Four additional biases that have received attention in organizational settings are briefly described
below:

The halo effect occurs when our general impression of a person, usually based on one prominent
characteristic, distorts our perception of other characteristics of that person.

The false-consensus effect (also called similar-to-me effect) occurs when people overestimate the extent
to which others have similar beliefs or behaviors to our own.

The primacy effect is our tendency to rely on the first information we receive about people to quick
form an opinion of people of them.

The recency effect occurs when the most recent information dominates our perceptions.

Another way to reduce perceptual biases through increased self-awareness is by applying the Johari
Window. Developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingram (hence the name “Johari”), this model of self-
awareness and mutual understanding divides information about you into four “windows”—open, blind,
hidden, and unknown—based on whether your own values, beliefs, and experiences are known to you
and to others.

The open area includes information about you that is known both to you and to others.

The blind area refers to information that is known to others but not to you.

Information known to you but unknown to others is found in the hidden area.

Finally, the unknown area includes your values, beliefs, and experiences that are buried so deeply that
neither you nor others are aware of them.

This objective is partly accomplished by reducing the hidden area through disclosure—informing others
of your beliefs, feelings, and experiences that may influence the work relationship. The open area also
increases through feedback from others about your behavior.

The Johari Window relies on direct conversations about ourselves and others, whereas meaningful
interaction is a more indirect, yet potentially powerful, approach to improving self-awareness and
mutual understanding. Meaningful interaction is any activity in which people engage in valued
(meaningful, not trivial) activities.
Meaningful interaction is founded on the contact hypothesis, which states that, under certain
conditions, people who interact with each other will be less perceptually biased because they have a
more personal understanding of the other person and their group.

Empathy refers to understanding and being sensitive to the feelings, thoughts, and situations of others.

A global mindset refers to an individual’s ability to perceive, know about, and process information
across cultures. It includes

(a) an awareness of, openness to, and respect for other views and practices in the world;

(b) the capacity to empathize and act effectively across cultures;

(c) the ability to process complex information about novel environments; and

(d) the ability to comprehend and reconcile intercultural matters with multiple levels of thinking.