definition

 A cognitive process of processing information

 A unique interpretation of a situation
 Perception leads people to react differently to the same
situation
 The perception in the world of manager could be
different form that of subordinates
 Perception.
 The process by which people select, organize, interpret,
retrieve, and respond to information.
 Perceptual information is gathered from:
 Sight.
 Hearing.
 Touch.
 Taste.
 Smell.
 Applied to OB an employees perception can be
thought of as a “filter” and every employee has a
unique filter and the same situation may cause
different reactions and behaviour
 The filter determines:
 which stimulus to notice and ignore
 Which stimulus to love or to hate
What is the perceptual process?
 Factors influencing the perceptual process.

 Characteristics of the perceiver.

 Characteristics of the setting.

 Characteristics of the perceived.

Perception process
 Confrontation
 Perception starts with confrontation with external stimulus
from the environment
 The external stimulus from the environment consists of:

 Sensual stimulation - consisting of the five senses ( sight,
taste, feeling, smelling, hearing)
 Physical environment – office, factory floor, store, climate etc
 Social/cultural environnent – management style, values,
discrimination

 Registration of the stimulus
 The stimulus is registered using the physical (sensory
and neutral) mechanism e.g. hearing a raised voice
 Interpretation of the stimulus
 The interpretation may depend on the employee
motivation, learning and personality
 Feedback
 After interpretation, the feedback back occurs and
may be seen in terms of fear, anger, panic, pain

 Behaviour
 This is the reaction form the feedback and can be
either covert or overt
 Run or move fact – overt behaviour
 Make a self evaluation – covert behaviour
 Consequences
 The consequences of behaviour could be
reinforcement, punishment, something destroyed or
somebody hurt etc
Perceptual selectivity principles
 Numerous stimuli are constantly confronting us: - Noise
of papers, people talking, moving cars, phone etc
 With all these stimulation on people, how and why do hey
select only a few stimuli at a given time?
 The answer can be found in the principles of perceptual
selectivity
 The principles can be divided into external and internal
principles
 Internal – a those that are based on the individual
psychological make up
 External – those arising form outside environmental
influences
External factors that affect
perceptional selectively

 Intensity
 The more intense the external stimulus, the more likely it is
to be perceived e.g. A loud noise, strong smell, bright light
 Size
 The larger the object, the more likely it is to be perceived.
e.g. full page advertisement
 Contrast
 The external stimulus which stands out against a
background or that are not what people expect will receive
more attention. E.g. white lettering against a red
background on safety sign
 Repetition
 A repeated external stimulus is more attention getting than
a single one. A worker will hear better when direction for a
task is repeated more than once. Repeated advertising is
more effective
 Motion
 People will pay more attention to moving objects in their
field of vision than those that are stationary – moving
adverts on streets
 Novelty and familiarity
 A novel or familiar external stimulus can serve as an
attention getter – new objects or events in a familiar setting
will draw the attention of the perceiver
Perceptual organisation
 Whereas perceptual selectivity is concerned with
external and internal variable than gains an individual
attention, perceptual organization focus on what takes
place in the perception process once the information is
received
Principles of perceptual
organisation
1. Figure-ground principle
 The perceived object stand out as a separable from their
general background
 When reading a book( printed in black and white) for
example, the reader perceived patches of irregularly black
and white shapes, yet he does not perceive it that way, the
reader perceives the black shares -letters, words and
sentences – printed against the white background
 The reader perceptually organizes incoming stimulus into
recognizable figures – words – against a ground – white
2. perceptual grouping
 There is a tendency to group several stimuli together
into a recognizable pattern
 People tend to group stimuli together using any of the
four sub principles:
 closure
 continuity
 Proximity
 Similarly
 Closure
 A person will sometimes perceive a whole when one
does not actually exist
 The persons perception process will close the gap that
is unfilled form the sensory input
 For example, the head of a team who perceives
complete agreement among team members, when in
fact there was opposition from several member, - the
team leader in this case closed the existing gap and
perceived a complete agreement which was not
necessarily the case
Continuity principle
 Says that a person will tend to perceive continuous
lines or patterns
 They perceive only the obvious pattern or relationship
 This type of continuity may sometimes lead to people
being inflexible, and noncreative
 Proximity principle
 states that ‘ a group of stimuli that are close together
will be perceived as a whole pattern or parts belonging
together”
 E.g. Several employee in an organisation may be
identified as a single unit because of physical
proximity
 If workers on a particular factory floor produce low
output, or report grievance, then the management
might see all workers in that group as lazy or
troubleshooters , yet some are loyal in the group
 Similarity principle
 States that “ the greater the similarity of the stimulus,
the greater the tendency to perceive them as a
common group’
 For example if a certain group of employees wear
overalls, then they are perceived to me one group
Principle of perceptual constancy
 The principle gives the person a sense of stability in a
changing word.
 Size, shapes, colour, location of the object are all fairly
constant regardless of information received by the sense
 Perceptual constancy results from pattern which re for
most part learned
 A world without perceptual constancy may lead to very
chaotic and disorganized individuals
 E.g.. If a worker must select a tool of the correct size form a
variety of tools at varying distances, from a work station, -
without perpetual constancy, the size Shape and colours
would change as the worker move from about and would
make the job almost impossible
Principle of perceptual context
 This principle gives meaning and value to simple
stimuli, objects, events and other persons in the
environment
 E.g. the organizational culture an values provides the
primary context in which workers and managers do
their perceiving. An email message is perceived
differently forma verb message ( depending on
organizational culture and values )
SOCIAL PERCEPTION
 Is concerned with how one individual perceives other
individuals
 Social perception will be influenced by whether we
look at it:
 from the perceivers perspective
 or from the person who is being perceived
From perceivers perspective:

 The degree to which one knows oneself – knowing one

self makes it easier to see others accurately
 Your own characteristics – ones characteristics affect
the characteristics you will see of others.
 People who accept themselves will more likely be able
to see favourable aspect of others
 Skills to perceive others accurately
From the perceived perspective
 Status of the person perceived will greatly influence
the perception of the person
 The role of the person at that specific time
 Visible traits of the person - e.g.. Pleasant
Errors in social perception
 Stereo typing
 This refers to the tendency to perceive another person
as belonging to a single class or category
 Stereo typing may lead to favourable or unfavorable
traits to the person being perceived
 Because each individual is unique, the real traits will
generally be quite different form those the stereotype
would suggest
 Common stereo type groups in organisations include:
 Manager
 Supervisors
 Union members
 Young/old
 Women/men
 White collar/blue collar
 Accountants/sales people/engineers
 Customers etc
Halo effect
 This is where a person is perceived on the basis of one
trait
 E.g. during performance appraisal, a rater makes an
error in judging persons total personality or
performance based on a single positive/negative trait
like intelligence or appearance
Impressions management
 Sometimes called “ self presentation” is the process by
which people attempt to manager or control the
perception of other form of them
 The tendency is for people to present themselves so as
to impress others in a socially desirable way
 It is commonly used during recruitment and selection,
performance appraisal etc
 It is a political too for one to build image and be
successful
Components of impressions
management
 These are two:
 Impression motivation
 Impression construction

 Impression motivation
 Where employees are motivated to control how the
boss or fellow employees perceive them
 The degree of this motivation to impression manage
will depend on several factors
 The factors influencing the degree of impression
motivation:
 Relevance of the impression to individual goal
 Value of these goal
 The discrepancy between the image one would like to
hold and the image one believes others already hold

 Impressions construction
 Concerned with the specific type of impression people
want to make and how to go about it
 Factors that have been identified as being relevant to
the kind of impression people try to construct:
 Self concept
 Desire and undesired images
 Role constraint
 Targets values
 Current social image
employees impressions
management strategies
 There are two basic strategies :
 Demotion – preventive strategies
used hen an employee is trying to minimize
responsibilities for some negative event or to stay out
of trouble

 Promotion- enhancement strategies

 Used when employee is seeking to maximize
responsibility for positive outcome or looked better
than they really are
Demotion- preventive strategies
 Accounts
 These are employees attempts to excuse or justify their
actions
 For example excuse of not feeling well, not getting
something done on time because of another higher
priority
 Apologies
 When there is no logical way out, the employee may
apologise to the boss for the negative event – indicate
that the event will not happen agent
 Disassociation
 When employees are indirectly associated with
something that went wrong , they may secretly tell
their boss that they fought for the right thing but were
overruled
Promotion enhancement strategies
 Entitlement
 Where an employee feel that he has not been given the
credit for the positive outcome
 They make sure that it is known through formal
channels or they may informally note to key people

 Enhancement
 Employees may have the credit, but they point out that
they really did more and had a bigger impact than was
originally thought
 Obstacle disclosure
 Employees identify obstacles ( health , family, lack of
organizational resource, lack of cooperation) that they had to
overcome to accomplish an outcome
 They are trying to create the perception that because they
obtained the positive outcome despite the big obstacle, they
really deserve credit or merit

 Association
 Employee may makes sure that they are seen with the right
people at the right time
 This creates the impression that the employee is well connected
and is associated with successful projects/people
Attribution
 Attribution – the process through which people
explain the causes of their won or someone else's
behaviour
 Concerned with the ways in which people explain (or
attribute) the behavior of others or themselves (self-
attribution) with something else.
 It explores how individuals attribute" causes to
events and how this cognitive perception affects their
usefulness in an organization
Attribution cont..
 It is a cognitive process by which people draw
conclusion about the factors that influence or make
sense of another behaviour
 It is an aspect of social perception
Attribution theory
 Is concerned with the relationship between social
perception and interpersonal behaviour .
 Assumptions of attribution:
 we seek to make sense of our world
 we often attribute people’s actions either to internal and
external cause
 we do so in a fairly logical ways
Attribution theory cont..
 It is concerned with the “why” question of
organizational behaviour.

 Because most “causes”, “attributes” and “whys’ are

not directly observable, the theory says that people
must depend on cognitions, particularly perception.

 The attribution theorists assume that humans are

rational and motivated to identify and understand the
causal structure of their relevant environment
Two types of attributions
 Dispositional attribution -Attributes a persons
behaviour to internal factors such as personality traits ,
motivation, ability, fatigue, effort
 Situational attribution -Attributes a persons behavior to
external factors such as equipment, rules, social influence
etc
 These two combine actively to determine behaviour
 Note that it the perceived, not the actual determinant that
are important to behaviour.
 People will behave differently if they perceive internal
attributes than they will if they perceive external attributes.
 ANTICEDENTS ATTRIBUTIONS CONSEQUENCIES

Information
Perceived Behaviour
Beliefs
causes
Motivation

General model of the attribution field.

Attributions errors
 There are two potent errors biases recognize in
attribution
 The fundamental attributions error
 research has found that people tend o ignore the
powerful situational forces when explain the behaviour
of others
 People tend to attribute other behaviour to personal
factors (e.g. intelligence, attitudes, personality) even
when it is very clear that the situation or circumstances
cause the person to behave that way
 Self serving bias
 People tend to present themselves favourably – a self
serving bias
 People tend to accept credit when they are told they
have succeeded ( attributing success to their ability ) yet
often attribute failure to external l and situational forces
such as bad lack or impossible staff