Organisational Behaviour: Perception

 Perception  

Perception is an important mediating cognitive process.  Through this complex process, persons make interpretations of the stimulus or situation they are faced with. Both selectivity and organisation go into perceptual interpretations.  Externally, selectivity is affected by intensity, size, contrast,  repetition,  motion  and  novelty  and  familiarity. Internally,  perceptual  selectivity  is influenced by the individual’s motivation, learning and personality.  After the stimulus situation is filtered by the selective process, the incoming information is organised into a meaningful whole. Individual differences and  uniqueness are largely the result of  the cognitive processes. Although there are a number of cognitive processes, it is generally recognised that the perceptual 

process is a very important one that takes place between the situation and the behaviour and is most relevant  to the  study of  organisational  behaviour. For  example, the  observation that  a department head  and a  subordinate may  react quite  differently to  the same  top  management directive can be better understood and explained by the perceptual process. 

In the process of perception, people receive many different kinds of information through all five senses, assimilate them and then interpret them.  Different people used to perceive the same information differently. 

Perception  plays  a  key  role  in  determining  individual  behaviour  in  organisations. Organisations  send  messages  in  variety  of  forms  to  their  members  regarding  what they  are expected to do and not to do.  In spite of organisations sending clear messages, those messages are subject to distortion in the process of being perceived by organisation members. Hence managers need to have a general understanding of basic perceptual process. 

 

Basic Perceptual Process : 

Perception is influenced by characteristics of the object being perceived and of the person and by situational processes.   

• Characteristics  of  the  object include  contrast,  intensity,  movement,  repetition  and novelty. 

• Characteristics of the person include attitudes, self-concept and personality. The details of a particular situation affect the way a person perceives an object; the same person may perceive the same object very differently in different situations.  The processes through which  a  person’s  perceptions  are  altered  by  the  situation  include  selection,  organisation, attribution, stereotyping, the halo effect and projection.  Among these, selective perception and stereotyping are particularly relevant to organisations. 

Selective Perception:   

Selective perception is the process of screening out information that we are uncomfortable with or that contradicts our beliefs.  For example, a manager has a very positive attitude about a particular worker and one day  he  notices that the  worker seems to be  goofing off.  Selective perception may  make the  manager  to  quickly  disregard what  he observed.   Suppose  another manager has formed a very negative attitude about a particular worker and when he happens to 

observe a high performance from the worker, he too disregard it. In one sense, selective perception is beneficial because it allows us to disregard minor bits 

of information.  If selective perception causes managers to ignore important information, it can become quite detrimental. 

Stereotyping:   

Stereotyping is the process of categorising or labeling people  on the  basis of a  single attribute. Perceptions based on  stereotypes  about people’s sex exist more  or less in most  work places. Typically, these perceptions lead to the belief that an individual’s sex determines which tasks he or she will be able to perform.  For example, if a women sitting behind the table in the office is, very often,  perceived as  a clerk and  not an executive  but would make the opposite 

assumption about a man.  Stereotyping consists of three steps: identifying categories of people (like women, politician), associating certain characteristics with those categories (like passivity, dishonesty)  and  then  assuming  that  any  one  who  fits  a  certain  category  must  have  those characteristics. For example, if dishonesty is associated with politicians, we are likely to assume 

that the next politician we meet is also dishonest. 

Perception and Attribution 

Perception is also closely linked with another process called attribution.  Attribution is a mechanism through which we observe behaviour and then attribute causes to it.  According to attribution theory, once we observe behaviour we evaluate it in terms of its consensus, consistency and distinctiveness. Consensus is the extent to which other people in the same situation behave in the same way.  Consistency is the degree to which the same person behaves in the same way at 

different times.  Distinctiveness is the extent to which the same person behaves in the same way in other situations.  The forces within the person (internal) or outside the person (external) led to the behaviour. 

For instance, if you observe that an employee is much more motivated than the people around her (low consensus), is consistently motivated (high consistency), and seems to work hard no matter what the task (low distinctiveness) you might conclude that internal factors are causing 

the behaviour.  Another example, is that suppose a manager observes that an employee is late for a meeting, the manager might realise that this employee is the only one who is late (low consensus), recall that he is often late for other meetings (high consistency), and subsequently recall that the same employee is sometimes late for work (low distinctiveness).  This pattern of attributions might 

cause the manager to decide that the individual’s behaviour is something that should be changed.  At  this  point,  the  manager  might  meet  with  the  subordinate  to  establish  some  punitive consequences for future tardiness. 

Impression Management 

Whereas  social  perception  is  concerned  with  how  one  individual  perceives  other individuals, impression management is the process by which people attempt to manage or control the perceptions  others form  of them.   There  is often  a  tendency  for people  to try  to present themselves in such a way as to  impress  others in a socially desirable way.  Thus, impression management has considerable implications for areas such as the validity of performance appraisals and a pragmatic, political tool for one to climb the ladder of success in organisations.