Module 4

Self Concept, Perceptions and

Attributions
Objectives:

 After completing the chapter, you’ll be able to:

1. Describe self-concept as a factor to understand job performance and well-being.
2. Discuss perception, its process and errors.
3. Explain the different attribution models.
Intro

 Self-concept, perceptions and attributions are important

factors that impact an employee’s view of his work
environment. Understanding these individual
characteristics will surely aid managers and non-
managers in performing their respective roles and jobs
more efficiently and effectively.
Self-Concept

 People do not have common self-concept. They always think of themselves in

numerous manners in different circumstances. Self-concept refers to how a person
thinks about, evaluates or perceives himself. It is an important and useful way to
understand and improve performance and welfare.
 There are three conceptual dimensions of self-concept which
influences a person’s adaptability and well-being. They are:
1. Complexity – a person’s self-concept has higher complexity when it
consists of many categories.
2. Consistency – a person has high consistency when similar personality
traits and values are required across all aspects of self-concept.
3. Clarity – this means the level of a person’s self- conceptions are clearly
and confidently described, internally consistent and stable across time.
Self-Enhancement

 Most often people, desires to rate themselves as above average, selectively recall
positive feedback while forgetting negative ones, attribute their success to personal
inspiration or ability while pointing to others for mistakes ad believe tat they have a great
possibility of being successful.
 Self-Verification
 People are also inspired to verify ad maintain their self-concepts. Self-verification
assumes that people work to preserve their self-views by seeking to confirm them. It
stabilizes a person’s self -concept which helps guide his thought and actions.
Self-verification has numerous implications in organizational behavior, which are:
1. It affects the perceptual process because employees are likely to remember information
that is consistent with their self-concepts.
2. The more confident employees are in their self-concept, the less they accept feedbacks
whether positive or negative, that is at odds with their self-concept
3. Employees are motivated to interact with others who affirm their self-concepts and this
affect how well they get along with their boss and with co-employees in teams.
Self-evaluation

A positive self-concept is what almost everyone endeavors to have. However, some

people have more positive evaluation of themselves than do others. Self-evaluation is an
individual’s honest and objective assessment of himself. The self-evaluation is usually
defined by three concepts which are self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus of control.
 

1. Self-esteem – is the extent to which a person has generally positive feelings about
himself. People with high self-esteem view themselves in a positive light, a re
confident, and respect themselves.
2. Self -efficacy - is a personal belief on competencies and abilities.
3. Locus of control – deals with the degree to which people feel answerable for their own
behaviors. People with high internal locus of control or internals believe that they can
influence their own destiny and wat happens to them is caused by their own doing.
1.  
Self-monitoring

 Self-monitoring refers to the level to which a person is able of checking his

actions and appearance in social situations. In other words, people who are social
monitors understand what the situation demands and act accordingly.
Perceptual Process
 The perceptual process consists of six steps: the presence of objects, observation,
selection, organization, interpretation and response. The perceptual process is the sequence
of psychological steps that a person uses to organize and interpret information from the
outside world. The steps are:
a. Objects are present in the world
b. A person observes
c. The person uses perception to select objects.
d. The person organizes the perception of objects.
e. The person interprets the perceptions.
f. The person responds.
Perceptual Selection
 Human beings are simultaneously exposed to different stimuli in his environment.
Owing to the fact, that the various stimuli cannot be taken are of or processed at the same
time, people become selective in their approach. Internal factors include:
1. Personality – personality traits influence how a person selects perceptions
2. Motivation – people will choose perceptions based on what they need in the moment.
They will support selections that they think will aid them with their present needs, and
be more likely to disregard what is immaterial to their needs.
3. Experience – the patterns of incidences or associations one has learned in the past
affect current perceptions.
   
 External factors include:
a. Size
b. Intensity
c. Contrast
d. Motion
e. Repetition
f. Novelty and familiarity
Perceptual Organizations
 When exposed to a large number of stimuli simultaneously, people may often block the various stimuli, at the
same time.
 After certain perceptions are selected, they can be organized differently. The following reasons are those that
determine perceptual organization:
a. Figure-ground – once perceived, objects stand out against their background. This can mean, for instance, that
perceptions of something as new can stand out against the background of everything of the same type that is old.
b. Perceptual grouping – grouping is when perceptions are brought together into a pattern.
c. Closure – this is the tendency to try to create wholes out of perceived parts.
d. Proximity – perceptions that are physically close to each other are easier to organize into a pattern or whole.
e. Similarity – similarity between perceptions promotes a tendency to group them together.
f. Perceptual constancy – this means that if an object is perceived always to be or act a certain way, the person will
tend to infer that it actually is always that way.
g. Perceptual context – people will tend to organize perceptions in relation to other pertinent perceptions, and create
a contexts out of those connections
Visual Perception
 Is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment by processing information that is
contained in visible light.
Visual perceptual processing is subdivided into categories including visual discrimination,
visual figure ground, visual closure, visual memory, visual sequential memory, visual form
constancy, visual spatial relationships, and visual motor integration.
1. Visual discrimination is the ability of the child to be aware of the aware of the distinctive
features of forms including shape, orientation, size and color.
2. Visual figure ground is the ability to distinguish an object from irrelevant background
information.
3. Visual closure is the ability to recognize a complete feature from fragmented information.
4. Visual memory is the ability to retain information over an adequate period of time.
 5. Visual sequential memory is the ability to perceive and remember a sequence of objects,
letters. Words, and other symbols in the same order as originally seen.
6. Visual form constancy is the ability to recognize objects as they change size, shape, or
orientation.
7. Visual spatial skills refer to the ability to understand directional concepts that organize
external visual space. These skills allow an individual to develop spatial concepts, such
as right and left, front and back. And up and down as they relate to their body and
objects in space.
 Social Perception
 Is the study of how people from impressions of and make inference about other people.
People learn about other’s feelings and emotions by picking up on information gathered from
their physical appearance, and verbal and non-verbal communication.
 These includes three domains of competence on being competent in social perception which
are:
1. Knowing that other people have thoughts, beliefs, emotions, intentions, desires and the like.
2. Being able to “read” other people’s inner states based on their words, behavior, facial expression
and the like.
3. Adjusting one’s actions based on those “readings’. That is, a socially competent person can make
note of other people’s facial expressions, tone of voice, posture, gestures, words, and the like, and
on the basis of these cluses, make reasonably accurate judgements about that person’s
 Perceptual Errors
 In the workplace, the process of making evaluations, judgments or ratings of the
performance of employees is subject to a umber of systematic perception errors. They are the
following:
a. Central tendency – appraising everyone at the middle of the rating scale.
b. Contrast error – basing an appraisal on comparison with other employees rather than on
established performance criteria.
c. Different from me – giving a poor appraisal because the person has qualities or characteristics
not possessed by the appraiser.
d. Halo effect – appraising an employee undeservedly on one quality performance, for example)
because he/she is perceived highly be=y the appraiser on another quality.(attractiveness)
e. Horn effect – the opposite of the halo effect. Giving someone a poor appraisal on one quality
(attractiveness) influences poor rating on other qualities (performance).
 
F Initial impression – basing an appraisal on first impressions rather than on how the person
has behaved throughout the period to which appraisal relates.
G. Latest Behavior – basing an appraisal on the person’s recent behavior.
H. Lenient or generous rating – perhaps the most common error, being consistently generous
in appraisal mostly to avoid conflict.
I. Performance dimension error – giving someone a similar appraisal on two distinct but similar
qualities, because they happen to follow each other on the appraisal form.
j. Same as me – giving those in higher level positions consistently better appraisals than those
in lower level jobs.
K Status effect – giving those in higher level positions consistently better appraisals than those
in lower level jobs.
L. Strict rating – being consistently harsh in appraising performance.
Attributions

 Attribution is the process through which individuals link behavior to its causes to
the intentions, dispositions and events that explain why people act the way they do. It
is simply the process of attaching or attributing causes or reasons to the actions and
events people see. It is divided into two different sections, the internal and external
attributes.
Kelly’s Attribution Theory

 According to the attribution process involves reasoning backward from the

observation of an event or behavior to a judgment about its cause. Different from a
prediction, the attribution, process attempts to offer an explanation for an event that has
already happened.
1. Distinctiveness – this is the degree in which a person behave the same way across
different situations.
2. Consistency – this is the degree in which a person behave the same way in different
occasions in the same situation.
3. Consensus – this is the degree in which other people behave the same way.
According to Kelley people fall back on past experience and look for either:
1. Multiple necessary causes – for instance, people see an athlete win a marathon, and
they reason that she must be very fit, highly motivated, have trained hard etc., and that
she must have all of these to win.
2. Multiple sufficient causes – to illustration, people see an athlete fail a drug test and they
reason that she may be trying to cheat, or have taken a banned substance by accident or
been tricked into taking it by her coach.
Bernard Weiner’s Model of Attribution
 He proposed a theory that looked at how people interpret success and failure.
According to Weiner, humans feel the need to explain both success and failure, although
this need is more prevalent in situations in which the outcome was not unexpected. People
attribute their successes and failures to four things:
a. Ability
b. Effort
c. Task difficulty
d. Luck
In addition, he categorized attribution characteristics into three causal dimensions which
are locus, stability, and controllability.
a. Locus – this refers to whether the cause of the event is perceived as internal to the
individual or external. If a learner believes that she failed an exam because she lacks
ability, she is choosing an internal cause because ability is internal to the learner.
b. Stability - this refers to whether the cause is stable or unstable across time and
situations.
c. Controllability – refers to whether the cause of the event is perceived as being under
the control of the individual.
Attribution Biases
 Is when individuals make an assumption about others without having all the data they
need to be accurate. There are two different types of bias errors.
a. Self-serving bias - where individuals attribute positive dealings to their own character
and negative dealings to external factors.
b. Fundamental Attribution Error – when a person assign blames or cause of something to
the person themselves and does not take into account external issues.
End of Topic!