HRM 601 Organizational Behavior

1. HRM 601 Organizational Behavior Session 2 Perception & Behavior

2. What Is Perception? • A cognitive process that involves • detecting • selecting • organizing • interpreting • sensory inputs to make sense of our environment

3. The Perceptual Process

4. The Role of Perception In Organizations • How we perceive people affects our appraisal of them • How we perceive people affects our behavior towards them • How we perceive problems affects our analysis, interpretations, and solutions

5. Perception Is Dynamic • We are constantly interpreting sensory inputs • Our judgments change depending on variation in ourselves, others and the situation

6. Gestalt Principles of Organization • Proximity • Similarity • Closure • Figure-ground

7. Set & Contrast • Set: the effect of past experiences affects what we perceive • Contrast: We make judgments based on objects in relation to background conditions

8. Object And Person Perception • People are more complex • People are capable of intentional actions • Our judgments about people are more often colored by third hand reports • It is more difficult to determine accuracy of perception regarding people

9. Organizing Social Perception • Primacy effects • Halo effects • Contrast effects • Negative Vs positive information

10. Elements of Social Perception • The situation and saliency • The person being perceived • The perceiver

11. The Situation • Saliency Cues • Novelty: Only person in group of gender, etc. • Brightness: Wearing bright clothes • Contrast: Unusually big, small, loud, friendly • Extremely positive (celebrity) or negative (victim) • Dominant: Sitting at the head of the table, commanding room

12. The Person Perceived • Major visual cues • Face cues • Voice cues • Movement cues

13. The Perceiver • Motivation • Experience • Emotion • Personality • Field Dependence - Independence • Tolerance for Ambiguity • Levelers & Sharpeners • Perceptual vigilance & defense

14. Causal Attribution • The process by which we describe how people explain the causes of behavior • Personal Attribution -- Attributing behavior to internal characteristics of an individual • Situation Attribution -- Attributing behavior to external factors

15. Kelley’s Covariation Theory

16. Attribution Errors • Fundamental Attribution Error -- The tendency to underestimate the impact of the situation on other people’s behavior and to overestimate the role of personal causes • Actor-observer error -- The tendency to attribute our own behavior to situational causes and others to personal factors

17. Self-Fulfilling Prophecy • Defined -- The process by which a person’s expectations about someone can lead to that someone behaving in ways which confirm the expectations • Pygmalion in the Classroom -- Research by Rosenthal and Jacobson • Attractiveness in the beholder’s eye -- Research by Snyder, Tanke, & Berscheid

18. How Self-Fulfilling Prophecy Works Perceiver forms impressions Perceiver treats target differently than others Target adjust s behavior to match perceiver’s actions

19. Confirmatory Bias • Defined -- The tendency to seek, interpret, and create information that verifies existing beliefs • Seeking information -- Snyder and Swann research on interviewing intro- and extro- verts • Interpreting information -- the case of Hannah

20. The Function of Expectations • Add stability to perceptual world • Permit economy of effort • Give us good enough accuracy • Allow attention to focus on new information

21. Forming Stereotypes • Learning to stereotype • putting people in to pigeon holes • if you see one pigeon, you’ve seen them all • The belief - congruence theory • assume that those who appear different have different values

22. When and Why We Stereotype • Superficial contact • Ego-defensive purpose • Instrumental to goals • Dysfunctionality of stereotypes

23. Applications in the Organization • Performance appraisals • attribution bias • confirmatory bias • recency effects • Impression management • self promotion • conforming to norms • flattery