Organizational Behavior

Organizational Behavior 10e
Hellriegel and Slocum

Unit 3

Chapter 3

1. Preview Case: Naveen Jain at Info Space
2. The Perceptual Process
   Perception is the process by which people select, organize, interpret and respond to information from the world around them. SInce different people perceive things differently the keywords here are selection and organization. Managers need to be aware of the way that people select, organize and interpret their perceptions.
3. Perceptual Selection
   Why do you ignore barking dogs but hear a phone ringing, the answer is selective screening. You filter out what is not important based on certain factors.
   1. External Factors
      The following are external characteristics that cause people to notice things and the more likely way it will be noticed:
      • Size: Larger
      • Intensity: Brighter, forcefulnesses
      • Contrast: stand out from background
      • Motion: things moving
      • repetition: more repetition
      • Novelty and familiarity: strange things and common things both.
   2. Internal Factors
      1. Personality
         The way that you perceive the big 5 factors (chapter 2), will influence how you see the world around you.
      2. Learning
         The place you grew up, your age, and a number of other factors influence what the way you see things in life. Realize this when putting people together to work on teams and encourage them to learn to work together. Even hand signals can mean different things in different countries.
      3. Motivation
         Urgent needs and desires play a role in what OU will perceive as important at any time. Another factor in this is the pollen prizefight, the fact that pleasant things get more notice.
4. Person Perception
   Person perception is the process by which individuals attribute characteristics or traits to other people. It is what we refer to very often as the 'first impression" of a person and it revolves around:
   1. The perceived
      You will tend to evaluate people based on things you notice about them, the gender, skin color, posture, age, voice quality, facial expressions. These bring about implicit personality theories based on what you know.
   2. The Perceiver
      the fact that you may be from a different culture than the person you are perceiving affects what you see.
   3. The Situation
      Things and peoples around the person that you are perceiving will influence what you are thinking.
   4. Impression Management
      Impression management is the attempt to manipulate or control the impressions that others form about them.This happens often with people that are in charge of the person controlling the impression. It is not good or bad and some people focus on it more than others.
5. Perceptual Errors
   1. Accuracy of Judgement
      An inaccurate judgement of a person by a manager could result in and ruin their prospects. They include:
      • similarity: predisposed to people similar to you
      • Contrast error: comparing candidates against each other instead of against a standard needed
      • Overweighing of negative information: if negative information happens, it seems to weigh higher on the perception than it should.
      • Race, gender and age bias: Based on interviewers age he/she may be predisposed to the age of interviewer
      • First-impression error: once you get a first impression, no matter what else is there to change it, you will not.
      People need to learn to avoid generalizing from one trait, avoid assuming a behavior will be repeated, and avoid placing reliance on physical appearance.
   2. Perceptual Defense
      Perceptual defence is the tendency for people to protect themselves against ideas, objects and situations that are threatening.
   3. stereotyping
      stereotyping can cause problems when managers cannot look past gender, skin color, or age.
   4. Halo Effect
      The Halo effect come from one person judging another on just one attribute and ignoring all others.
   5. Projection
      Projection is the tendency to see your own traits in other people.
   6. Expectancy Effects
      Expectancy effect is the extent to which prior expectations bias perceptions of events, objects and people. Some things that can happen is the self fulfilling prophecy, the tendency that you will cause people to act the way that you expect them to. Another is the Pygmalion effect, the fact that you will hold the person to a higher standard and they will fulfill it.
6. Attibutions: Why People Behave as They Do
   The attribution process refers to the ways people come to understand the causes of their own and other's behaviors.
   1. The Attribution Process
      This process is done in order for people to make sense of things that are happening around them. It goes from information internal to the preceiver, added to what the preceiver believes and the motivations of the preceiver.
   2. Internal Versus External Causes of Behavior
      Internal causes are things that you belive are under a persons control External causes are things that you believe that are out of that persons control. You have to be careful to avoid the fundamental attribution error, the tendency to over or under estimate the personal factors in success or failure of a person. Managers can be part of this, attributing success to themselves but failures to their underlings. Or success for employees they expect it from and failure from those they expect it from.
   3. Attribution of Success and Failure
      People attribute their success or failure to four things
      1. Ability
      2. effort
      3. task difficulty
      4. luck
      Not surprisingly the self-serving bias comes into play here. If they do well, it is because of their ability and effort. If they do poorly it is because of difficulty and bad luck.