QUESTION: As a manager in an organisation, discuss how your study of perception contributes to your understanding of behaviour of people in your organisation.
Perception varies from person to person. Different people perceive different things about the same situation. People’s behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. It is our personal perception of that reality which shapes and directs our behaviour and not some objective understanding of external reality. For example, if one person on a hillside perceives that it is cold, they will reach for their sweater.
If the person standing next to them perceives that it is warm, they will remove their sweater. Thus behaviuor is a function of the way in which we perceive the world around us and not how we perceive other people and events in that world. Perception is therefore the process of acquiring, selecting, organizing and interpreting sensory information. According to Kendra Cherry, perception is our sensory experience of the world around us and involves both the recognition of environmental stimuli and actions in response to these stimuli.It involves all the five senses: touch, sight, taste, smell and hearing.
The perceptual process involves stages of selection and attention, organisation and interpretation. The selection and attention stage concerns the way in which we process the raw data received by our sensory apparatus. We are simply not able to process all of the sensory information available to us at any given time. The stage screens or filters out redundant and less relevant information so that we can focus on what is important.The next stage which is the perceptual organisation is the process by which people group environmental stimuli into recognisable patterns or meaningful units or wholes.
In the perceptual process, once selection has occurred, organisation takes over. The stimuli selected for attention are now seen as a whole. The third activity you engage in during perception is interpretation. It is the process by which the perceiver interprets or assigns meaning to the information. In fact, perception is said to have taken place only after the data have been interpreted.
As part of the process of perceiving other people, we turn to attribute characteristics to them. This is known as the attribution theory. It is the process by which people interpret the perceived causes of behaviour. The theory suggests that when we observe an individual behaviour, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused.
In making such attributions, there are three basic criteria; distinctiveness, consensus and consistency. Distinctiveness is when a person shows different behaviours in different situations. We attribute such behaviours to external or situational factors.Consensus occurs when response are the same as others to same situation whereas for consistency, responses are the same way over time. People attribute behaviour to internal forces or personal factors when people perceive low distinctiveness, low consensus and high consistency.
Behaviour is attributed to external forces or environmental factors when people perceive high distinctiveness, high consensus and low consistency. Behaviour is defined as the way how people act as individual and as groups. It is the goal oriented activities of a person.In that case the collection of behaviours exhibited by human beings is known as human behaviour and is influenced by factors such as culture, attitude, emotions, values, ethics, genetics etc. Behaviour at work may be explained by the locus of control.
That is whether the individual perceives outcomes as controlled by themselves (internal locus of control) or by external factors (external locus of control). From the explanations given, it is therefore clear that relationships exist between perception, behaviour and attribution. As we perceive people, we then perceive their behaviour and attempt to attribute causes to that behaviour.As noted earlier, perception occurs or takes place differently in people.
A manager’s understanding of the influences of perception will help him understand why employees behave in certain way at work. Such factors include physiological forces (sex, body type and senses), past experience and roles, culture, present feelings and circumstances. For instance an employee’s past experience can affect the way he or she behaves at work. A bad experience in given situation may cause you to avoid that situation in the future.
A manager might find why a particular staff comes to work early.If such a person was sacked from his former work due to lateness, such a person might develop the habit of coming to work early in his new job to avoid such a situation from happening again. Peoples’ culture and background also affect their behaviour at work. Culture can be defined as a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviours, and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with one another and within their world. It is important that as a manager you must know the background of your employees in order to understand and respond appropriately to their behaviours.
For example a manager may find why a particular employee bows down when he or she greets. It is common to see that some tribes and even muslims in particular bow to greet when they see an elderly or person of authority. Perception also helps to find causes to an employee’s task performance. If an employee performs poorly, through the concepts of perception and attribution, the manager is able to determine whether the employee’s non-performance was due to stable or unstable factors. Stable factors include the employee’s ability or the ease or difficulty of the task whereas unstable factors are the exertions of efforts or luck.Perception helps in choosing an appropriate management style in an organisation.
Employees with an internal control orientation are more likely to believe that they can influence their level of performance through their own abilities, skills or efforts. Such employees are said to be more satisfied with their jobs and are more likely to be in management positions. In such a situation, the best management style to be adopted by a manager is the participatory management style coupled with less supervision.However, employees with an external control orientation are more likely to believe that their level of performance is determined by external forces beyond their influence. Therefore such employees always need close supervision and self belief to help them develop confidence.
The understanding of perception helps a manager to know when and how to recognize and reward employees appropriately to serve as a motivation. If for instance, a staff perceives that good performance was due to ability or effort, the lack of recognition and reward may well have a de-motivating effect which can subsequently lead to low productivity.What we should also acknowledge as managers is that, once we understand the active nature of perception and that people hold unique perceptions as a consequence, we can understand that we might make errors when we perceive other people. Such errors that affect our accuracy in judgments include stereotyping, the hallo effect, projections and self-fulfilling prophecy. Therefore we must caution ourselves as managers in any work environment to appraise or evaluate others as objectively as possible.
