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PERCEPTION

What Is Perception, and Why Is It Important?

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• 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.

Perception

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

Factors That�Influence Perception

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Person Perception: Making Judgments About Others

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Distinctiveness: shows different behaviors in different situations.

Consensus: response is the same as others to same situation.

Consistency: responds in the same way over time.

Attribution Theory

When individuals observe behavior, they attempt to determine whether it is internally or externally caused.

Attribution Theory

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E X H I B I T 5–2

Errors and Biases in Attributions

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Fundamental Attribution Error

The tendency to underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others.

Errors and Biases in Attributions (cont’d)

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Self-Serving Bias

The tendency for individuals to attribute their own successes to internal factors while putting the blame for failures on external factors.

Frequently Used Shortcuts in Judging Others

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Selective Perception

People selectively interpret what they see on the basis of their interests, background, experience, and attitudes.

Frequently Used Shortcuts in Judging Others

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Halo Effect

Drawing a general impression about an individual on the basis of a single characteristic

Contrast Effects

Evaluation of a person’s characteristics that are affected by comparisons with other people recently encountered who rank higher or lower on the same characteristics.

Frequently Used Shortcuts in Judging Others

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Projection

Attributing one’s own characteristics to other people.

Stereotyping

Judging someone on the basis of one’s perception of the group to which that person belongs.

Specific Applications in Organizations

• Employment Interview
• Perceptual biases of raters affect the accuracy of interviewers’ judgments of applicants.
• Performance Expectations
• Self-fulfilling prophecy (pygmalion effect): The lower or higher performance of employees reflects preconceived leader expectations about employee capabilities.
• Ethnic Profiling
• A form of stereotyping in which a group of individuals is singled out—typically on the basis of race or ethnicity—for intensive inquiry, scrutinizing, or investigation.

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Specific Applications in Organizations (cont’d)

• Performance Evaluations
• Appraisals are often the subjective (judgmental) perceptions of appraisers of another employee’s job performance.
• Employee Effort
• Assessment of individual effort is a subjective judgment subject to perceptual distortion and bias.

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How Are Decisions Actually Made in Organizations

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Bounded Rationality

Individuals make decisions by constructing simplified models that extract the essential features from problems without capturing all their complexity.

Common Biases and Errors

• Overconfidence Bias
• Believing too much in our own decision competencies.
• Anchoring Bias
• Fixating on early, first received information.
• Confirmation Bias
• Using only the facts that support our decision.
• Availability Bias
• Using information that is most readily at hand.
• Representative Bias
• Assessing the likelihood of an occurrence by trying to match it with a preexisting category.

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Common Biases and Errors

• Escalation of Commitment
• Increasing commitment to a previous decision in spite of negative information.
• Randomness Error
• Trying to create meaning out of random events by falling prey to a false sense of control or superstitions.
• Hindsight Bias
• Falsely believing to have accurately predicted the outcome of an event, after that outcome is actually known.

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Assignment explain in detail Decision-Style Model ?s

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Ways to Improve Decision Making

• Analyze the situation and adjust your decision making style to fit the situation.
• Be aware of biases and try to limit their impact.
• Combine rational analysis with intuition to increase decision-making effectiveness.
• Don’t assume that your specific decision style is appropriate to every situation.
• Enhance personal creativity by looking for novel solutions or seeing problems in new ways, and using analogies.

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Toward Reducing Bias and Errors

• Focus on goals.
• Clear goals make decision making easier and help to eliminate options inconsistent with your interests.
• Look for information that disconfirms beliefs.
• Overtly considering ways we could be wrong challenges our tendencies to think we’re smarter than we actually are.
• Don’t try to create meaning out of random events.
• Don’t attempt to create meaning out of coincidence.
• Increase your options.
• The number and diversity of alternatives generated increases the chance of finding an outstanding one.