PERCEPTION

CHP 2
What is Perception?
• Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory
impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.
• However, what we perceive can be substantially different from objective reality. For
example, all employees in a firm may view it as a great place to work- favorable
working conditions, interesting job assignments, good pay, excellent benefits,
understanding and responsible management—but, as most of us know, it’s very
unusual to find such agreement.
• Why is perception important in the study of OB? Simply because people’s behavior is
based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. The world as it is
perceived is the world that is behaviorally important.
Factors That
Influence Perception

• A number of factors operate

to shape and sometimes
distort perception. These
factors can reside in the
perceiver; in the object, or
target, being perceived; or in
the context of the situation
in which the perception is
made.
• When you look at a target and attempt to interpret what you see, your
interpretation is heavily influenced by your personal characteristics—your
attitudes, personality, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations.
• For instance, if you expect police officers to be authoritative or young people to
be lazy, you may perceive them as such, regardless of their actual traits.
• Characteristics of the target also affect what we perceive. Loud people are more
likely to be noticed in a group than quiet ones.
• So, too, are extremely attractive or unattractive individuals. Because we don’t
look at targets in isolation, the relation- ship of a target to its background also
influences perception, as does our tendency to group close things and similar
things together.
• We often perceive women, men, Whites, African Americans, Asians, or members
of any other group that has clearly distinguishable characteristics as alike in other,
unrelated ways as well.
• Context matters too. The time at which we see an object or event can influence
our attention, as can location, light, heat, or any number of situational factors. At
a nightclub on Saturday night, you may not notice a young guest “dressed to the
nines.”
• Yet that same person so attired for your Monday morning management class
would certainly catch your attention (and that of the rest of the class).
• Neither the perceiver nor the target has changed between Saturday night and
Monday morning, but the situation is different.
Person Perception- Making Judgments- Attribution
Theory
• When we observe people, we attempt to explain why they behave in certain ways.
• Our perception and judgment of a person’s actions, therefore, will be significantly
influenced by the assumptions we make about that person’s internal state.
• Attribution theory tries to explain the ways in which we judge people differently,
depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior.
• It suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine
whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends
largely on three factors:
• (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency.
• First, let’s clarify the differences between internal and external causation, and then
we’ll elaborate on each of the three determining factors.
• Internally caused behaviors are those we believe to be under the personal control of
the individual.
• Externally caused behavior is what we imagine the situation forced the individual to
do.
• If one of your employees is late for work, you might attribute that to his partying into
the wee hours and then oversleeping. This is an internal attribution.
• But if you attribute lateness to an motor accident that tied up traffic, you are making
an external attribution.
DISTINCTIVENESS
• Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in
different situations.
• Is the employee who arrives late today also one who regularly “blows off”
commitments? What we want to know is whether this behavior is unusual.
• If it is, we are likely to give it an external attribution. If it’s not, we will probably
judge the behavior to be internal.
CONSENSUS
• If everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say the
behavior shows consensus.
• The behavior of our tardy employee meets this criterion if all employees who took
the same route were also late.
• From an attribution perspective, if consensus is high, you would probably give an
external attribution to the employee’s tardiness, whereas if other employees who took
the same route made it to work on time, you would attribute his lateness to an internal
cause.
CONSISTENCY
• Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Does the person
respond the same way over time?
• Coming in 10 minutes late for work is not perceived in the same way for an employee
who hasn’t been late for several months as against an employee who is late two or
three times a week.
• The more consistent the behavior, the more we are inclined to attribute it to internal
causes.
• One of the most interesting findings from attribution theory research is that errors or
biases distort attributions.
• When we make judgments about the behavior of other people, we tend to
underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of
internal or personal factors.
• This fundamental attribution error can explain why a sales manager is prone to
attribute the poor performance of her sales agents to laziness rather than to the
innovative product line introduced by a competitor.
• Individuals and organizations also tend to attribute their own successes to internal
factors such as ability or effort, while blaming failure on external factors such as bad
luck or unproductive co-workers.
• People also tend to attribute ambiguous information as relatively flattering and accept
positive feedback while rejecting negative feedback. This is the self-serving bias.
• A U.S. News & World Report study showed its power. Researchers asked one group
of people “If someone sues you and you win the case, should he pay your legal
costs?”
• Eighty-five percent responded “yes.” Another group was asked “If you sue someone
and lose the case, should you pay his costs?” Only 44 percent answered “yes.”
• The evidence on cultural differences in perception is mixed, but most suggest there
are differences across cultures in the attributions people make.
• One study found Korean managers less likely to use the self-serving bias—they
tended to accept responsibility for group failure “because I was not a capable leader”
instead of attributing failure to group members.
• On the other hand, Asian managers are more likely to blame institutions or whole
organizations, whereas Western observers believe individual managers should get
blame or praise.
Common Shortcuts in Judging Others
• The shortcuts we use in judging others are frequently valuable:
• They allow us to make accurate perceptions rapidly and provide valid data for
making predictions.
• However, they are not foolproof.
• They can and do get us into trouble when they result in significant distortions.
Specific Applications of Shortcuts in Organizations
• People in organizations are always judging each other.
• Managers must appraise their employees’ performances.
• We evaluate how much effort our co-workers are putting into their jobs.
• Team members immediately “size up” a new person.
• In many cases, our judgments have important consequences for the organization.
Employment Interview
• Few people are hired without an interview. But interviewers make perceptual judgments
that are often inaccurate and draw early impressions that quickly become entrenched.
• Research shows we form impressions of others within a tenth of a second, based on our
first glance.
• If these first impressions are negative, they tend to be more heavily weighted in the
interview than if that same information came out later.
• Most interviewers’ decisions change very little after the first 4 or 5 minutes of an
interview.
• As a result, information elicited early in the interview carries greater weight than does
information elicited later, and a “good applicant” is probably characterized more by the
absence of unfavorable characteristics than by the presence of favorable ones.
Performance Expectations
• People attempt to validate their perceptions of reality even when these are faulty.
• The terms self-fulfilling prophecy and Pygmalion effect describe how an individual’s
behavior is determined by others’ expectations.
• If a manager expects big things from her people, they’re not likely to let her down.
• Similarly, if she expects only minimal performance, they’ll likely meet those low
expectations. Expectations become reality.
• The self-fulfilling prophecy has been found to affect the performance of students,
soldiers, and even accountants.
Performance Evaluation
• An employee’s future is closely tied to the appraisal—promotion, pay raises, and
continuation of employment are among the most obvious outcomes.
• Although the appraisal can be objective (for example, a sales-person is appraised on
how many dollars of sales he generates in his territory), many jobs are evaluated in
subjective terms.
• Subjective evaluations, though often necessary, are problematic because all the errors
we’ve discussed thus far— selective perception, contrast effects, halo effects, and so
on—affect them.
• Ironically, sometimes performance ratings say as much about the evaluator as they do
about the employee!
Common shortcuts in judging others
Selective perception
It is a tendency to observe people selectively and accordingly interpret based on their
interest, background, experience and attitudes.
For example, a production manager is always likely to identify the need to strengthen
the production system; the marketing manager will focus only on the marketing
research and sales promotions activities. In general, we tend to notice things which are
similar to us.
For instance, we are more likely to notice the type of cars which are similar to ours. The
simplest way of avoiding hasty or wrong decision being made due to selective
perception is to seek other people’s perceptions of “reality” in the same situation in
order to make a better assessment of the situation
Stereotyping
It is a tendency to judge people based on the perception of the group to which he belongs.
We tend to attribute favorable or unfavorable characteristics to the individual based on upon
widely held generalization about the group.
For instance, we perceive that Japanese in general are hard working, quality conscious and
industrious, and based on that we generalize that all Japanese are like that, but in reality it may
not be so. There are some Japanese who may not possess the above mentioned characteristics.
Similarly we assume that women in general are kind, caring, affectionate, considerate, gentle,
but there are some women who may not possess these characteristics. Similarly, we may
assume older people are traditional, conservative, and cranky, but not every elderly person fits
into this mould and hence we are likely to make errors of judgment.
Gender-role stereotypes and age-stereotypes adversely affect recruitment, pay, job placement,
and promotion decisions. As a result of which, organizations frequently lose good employees
• One problem of stereotypes is that they are widespread and often useful
generalizations, though they may not contain a shred of truth when applied to a
particular person or situation.
• So we constantly have to check ourselves to make sure we’re not unfairly or
inaccurately applying a stereotype in our evaluations and decisions.
• Stereotypes are an example of the warning “The more useful, the more danger from
misuse.”
Halo Effect
It is tendency to draw a general overall impression about an individual based on single
striking characteristics.
For instance, if a person speaks English fluently, we tend to assume that that person is
very knowledgeable, intelligent, smart,hard working, etc. Similarly, if a man is abrasive,
he may also be perceived as bad, awful, unkind, aggressive, harmful,etc.
Halo effect, whether it is positive or negative, will distort our perception and block us
from actually perceiving the trait that is being judged.
This phenomenon frequently occurs when students appraise their university
lecturer
Contrast effect
It is tendency to evaluate a person’s characteristics by just comparing with other people
who happened to acquire higher or lower position on the same characteristics.
For instance, while comparing the presentation of students, a good presentation made
by one student just before you will probably make you feel that you won’t be as good as
you probably are. This contrast effect can distort our perception.
In general, a person will be evaluated in isolation. But our reaction to one person is
often influenced by other people or events in which we have recently encountered. In
interview situation, a job applicant is likely to receive a more favorable evaluation if
preceded by mediocre applicants and a less favorable evaluation if preceded by strong
applicants