Perception 

is the primary process of evaluation. It is way to understand our surroundings and ourselves.
As an MBA in an organization perception study is necessary to understand employees activates.
Perception can be process of interpreting information about another person or another organization. It is
our sensory experience and by it we evaluate thought, behaviour, organization and a situation in initial
stage of our thought.

Kelly’s Attribution Theory: it shows that attribution is a perceptual process. Kelly has proposed
attribution theory, “Individuals make attribution based on information gathered in the form f three
informational cues–consensus, distinctiveness and consistency.”

Theoreticians proposed that attributions can be affected by two very common errors – fundamental
attribution error and self-serving bias. In these two attribution errors can be cultural errors.

In the last we can say perception can be defined as personal primary sensory to evaluate a person,
organization and situations.

Gestalt Theory
A group of early experimental psychologists known as Gestalt psychologists believed that
perceptions are more than the stimuli that create them. By  more is meant that a meaningful, whole
pattern is created by the stimuli (that is, the total is more than the sum of its parts). These
psychologists developed the idea, the principle of  Prägnanz, that stimuli can be grouped and seen
as a whole. These psychologists believed that the innate, organizing tendencies of the brain would
explain organization functions in perception, including many optical illusions, for example, the phi
phenomenon and certain figure-ground relationships.
 The phi phenomenon occurs when you see two adjacent lights alternately blinking off and
on and perceive them as one light moving back and forth. This phi phenomenon illusion is
frequently used in signs to suggest movement.
 Figure (object)-ground (background) relationships are important in Gestalt theory, which
suggests that perceptions are organized to produce a figure-ground effect. One tends to see
objects against backgrounds rather than to view each separately. However, when instructed,
one may reverse the relationship and see the object as background and vice versa. In the
famous figure-ground illustration shown in Figure 1 , do you see a goblet or the profile of two
faces?

Figure 1-A Figure-Ground Illustration

Attribution: Internal and External perception

Attribution Biases

Perception process moves from selecting, starting and end on interpreting information.
Factors which influence perception are: perceiver, Object or being perceived and in the context of the
situation in which the perception is made. Barriers to perception are like burdensome whatever others
want to perceiving and interpreting.

“Attribution refers to how a person explains the cause of another’s or his or her own behaviour.”

Internal attributions: This is something within the individual’s control.

External Attributions: it means something is outside the individual’s control.

What is perceptual process? The perceptual process is sequence of steps that begins with the environment and
leads to our perception of a stimulus and an action in response to the stimulus.
The perceptual process is a sequence of steps that starts with the stimuli that happen in our surroundings and leads
through nerve transmission through peripheral and central nerves and the brain to our perception of what is going
on. It also includes our resulting action to the original stimulus.

So, the perceptual process involved when we go outside from a room with no windows on a rainy day is that the
simulus from the environment - the fact that it is raining and cold and we are getting wet - is recognised by our
senses. Our eyes,ears, cold receptors and touch receptors all send signals to the brain, which works out that its
raining.

The cognitive process within the brain then comes up with the decision to go back inside and pick up a coat and an
umbrella before we set out again. This is ourresponse to the stimulus.
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. Through the perceptual process, we gain information about
properties and elements of the environment that are critical to our survival. Perception not only creates our
experience of the world around us; it allows us to act within our environment.

THE PERCEPTUAL PROCESS

It consists of the following stages:-
1. RECEIVING STIMULI
The perception process begins with the reception of stimuli, which will be received from various sources.
Through the sensory organs, we see things, hear sound, nose smells, tongue tastes, and touch things. In this
way, the reception of stimuli is a physiological aspect of the perception process. Stimuli may be external to us
such as sound waves or inside of us such as energy generation by muscles.
2. SELECTION OF STIMULI
People arc bombarded by a number of stimuli everyday. They cannot absorb or assimilate what they observe or
receive them from the environment all at a time. Hence, they select some stimuli for further processing to attach
meaning to them while the rest are screened. Selection of stimuli is not made at random, but depending on the
two types of factors, namely, external factors, and the internal factors. Normally, people selectively perceive
objects or things, which interest them most in a particular situation and avoid those for which they are
ineffective. This is also called as the SELECTIVE PERCEPTION.
3. ORGANISATION OF STIMULI
Having selected the stimuli or data, these need to be organised in some form so as to assign some meaning to
them. Thus, organising the bits of information in to a meaningful whole is called "ORGANISATION". There
are three ways by which the selected data i.e., inputs are organised. They are 1) Grouping, 2)Closure, and 3)
Simplification. Grouping is based on similarity principal. For e.g.. All the workers having similarity in certain
aspects may be perceived to have similar opinion about their supervisor or boss. The tendency to form a
complete meaning from an incomplete one is known as closure.As regards simplification, when people find
themselves overloaded with information they try to simplify it to make it more meaningful and

4. INTERPRETATION
The data collected and organised remain meaningless for the perceiver till these are assigned meanings.
Assigning meanings to data is called interpretation. Thus, interpretation of data forms one of the most important
elements in the entire perceptual process. Strictly speaking, data collected and organised do not make any sense
without interpretation. Several factors influence interpretation. The most important ones are halo effect,
attribution, stereotyping, personality, situation, person perceived etc.

FACTORS AFFECTING PERCEPTION

Factors that influence perception relate to the perceiver, perceived, and situation. All these factors are of two kinds
-1) Internal or endogenous factors, and 2) External or Exogenous factors. These are discussed in some detail below.
1. INTERNAL FACTORS
These factors reside in the person concerned. They include a person's needs, desires, personality, and experience.
2. EXTERNAL FACTORS
These factors relate to what is being perceived and the situation. These are size, intensity, frequency, and status
etc.,

IMPROVING PERCEPTION
Perception can be improved b y making various attempts. Following are the important ones that can help improve
one's perception.
1. PERCEIVING ONESELF ACCURATELY
That is to say, one should improve to know more about oneself. Frequent interactions with peers, colleagues, free,
frank and open communication with others and mutual trust are some commonly adopted practices for perceiving
more accurately.
2. IMPROVING ONE'S SELF CONCEPT
When people successfully accomplish what they want, it develops a sense of self-esteem. It also indicates that
correct perception about on self helps perceive others also more accurately.
3. HAVING POSITIVE ATTITUDE
Positive attitude makes one's perception positive or more accurate. Hence, the managers need to overcome their
personal bias, get rid of any negative feelings about others.
4. BE EMPATHET1C
Empathy means to be able to see a situation as it is perceived by other people. In a way, it is like putting your feet
in another's shoes. Looking at a problem from other's point of view enables the person to perceive the other side
of the problem.
5. AVOIDINGPERCEPTUAL DISTORTION
Some factors like the halo effect, stereotyping, attribution etc distort a person's perception about things or
problems. Therefore, sincere and continuous efforts should be made to guard oneself against such biases.
6. COMMUNICATING OPENLY
Experience suggests that sometimes perception gets distorted due to communication gap and inadequate
communication. In such case, effective communication needs to be developed to ensure that the true and right
message reaches the right place at the right time. This will enable to know the problem in a better perspective,
which in turn will improve a person's perception about the problem.

PERCEPTION AND ITS APPLICATION IN ORGANISATIONS

The perception, in many cases, has important effect on organisations. A few of these are obvious, and the same is
discussed below: -
1. EMPLOYMENT INTERVIEW
Different interviewers try to see different things in the same candidate differently, and thus arrive at differen
perceptions. Who one thinks is a good candidate, the candidate can be seen perceived by another interviewer as no good
for the job. Interviewers form early Impressions about the candidate, which ultimately weighs more in the selection
Therefore, interviewers must be given adequate training in the skills of interviewing.
2. PERFORMANCE APPRAISAL
Assessment of an employee's performance very much depends on the perception of the evaluator about the
employee, m practice, superior officers and executives closely tie an employee's future to his performance and its
appraisal. Promotions pay rises, and continuation of job is the most obvious and common outcome of the
employee's performance. Performance Appraisal is both objective and subjective. It becomes objective when
performance can be sufficiently quantified. For e.g., a salesman's performance can be assessed based S on how
many rupees of sales he generated in his territory during a given period of time. However, many employees jobs
are evaluated subjectively. Therefore, these become judgmental. Judgement will become susceptible to
distortion. It might affect the performance appraisal process.
3. PERFORMANCE EXPECTATION
New employees during their selection process acquire a set of expectations booth about the organisation and
about the job. In case there is a big gap between the expectations and realities, there will be problems of
increased alienation of employee, absenteeism, and even turnover.
4. EMPLOYEE EFFORT
Since many organisations, the level of an employee's performance is given high importance. Hence, an
employee's future in an organisation depends upon his effort made for achieving the organisational goals.
 However, assessment of an individual's performance is subjective judgement and thus, susceptible to perceptual
distortions and bias also.
5. EMPLOYEE LOYALTY
While assessing employees the managers also make another important decision whether the employee are loyal
to the organization. Like effort, assessment of loyalty is also a subjective judgement susceptible to perceptual
distortions and bias. As an example an employee looking for greener pastures outside the organisation may be
labeled as disloyal to the organisation. As a resultant behaviour, the organisation may cut his future advancement
opportunities.

DISTORTION IN PERCEPTION

(Students are required to go through the notes in the APPENDIX)

APPENDIX

Perception is the process that individual use to require and make sense out of information from the environment.
The process is complex and involves three main stages. The first stage is selecting the filtering of stimuli that
encounter so that only certain information receives our attention. For example, suppose that a manager taking over a
new unit has heard a rumor that a particular individual in the unit has a short temper. If the manager is not careful,
this piece of information may cause the manager to pay particular attention to situations in which the person is
impatient or angry.

The second stage of title perceptual process is organizing, the patterning of information from the selection stage.
Slowly pronounce each of the following (bur words:2)

M-A-C-T-A-V-I-S-H

M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D

M-A-C-B-E-T-H

M-A-C-H-I-N-E-R-Y

Like many people, you may have pronounced the last word as "MacHinery." This happens because the previous
pattern leads us to expect another word with the same type of pronunciation. This exercise illustrates an interesting
characteristic of perception: the tendency to organize information into the patterns that we expect to perceive. In the
example of the individual rumored to have a short temper, the manager may begin to organize the selectively
perceived behavior into a pattern of incidents in which the individual was angry.

The third stage is interpreting, attaching meaning to the information that we have selected and organized. In our
example, the manager may, over time, begin to interpret (perhaps unfairly) the organized information as indicating
that the person does, indeed, have a short temper.

The perceptions of individuals are affected by a variety of factors such as experiences, needs, personality, culture,
and education. As a result, it is very likely that individuals will differ in their perceptions of the very same situations
and messages. Several common tendencies to distort perceptions are particularly applicable to managerial
communication and interactions. These tendencies are stereotyping, the halo effect, projection, and perceptual
defense. Awareness of these perceptual tendencies can help managers avoid the misunderstandings that such
distortions often create.

STEREOTYPING Stereotyping is the tendency to attribute characteristics to an individual on the basis of an

assessment of the group to which the individual belongs. When a manager engages in stereotyping, two steps occur.
First, the manager categorizes the individual as belonging to a group whose members are perceived as sharing certain
common characteristics. Second, the manager uses those perceived common characteristics to draw conclusions about the
characteristics of the individual, rather than acquiring information about the person's characteristics more directly.

Stereotyping leads to problems when the generalizations do not apply or do not apply equally to all members of the
group or when people try to generalize about less specifically related characteristics. In such situations, managers
may communicate inappropriate expectations. For example, at American Medical International, Inc., a publicly
owned hospital company based in Beverly Hills, California, the precedent and chief operating officer, Gene
Burleson ran into communication difficulties because of Stereotyping. Burleson was addressing a meeting of
several hundred employees when one asked why the company did not have any women directors or top executive.
Observes reported that Burleson’s response implied that women cannot deal with the stress of the executive suite.
His reply offended many members of the audience and caused the incident to be reported in The Wall Street journal.
Burleson later "admitted he gave a lame and a stupid answer" to the question

HALO EFFECT The halo effect is the tendency to use a general impression based on one or a few characteristics
of an individual to judge other characteristics of that same individual. For example, a manager may use a general
impression based on one thing a worker does, such as compiling a well-done or poorly prepared report, 10 judge the
worker's ability in other areas of work, such as handling customers. To avoid the halo effect, interviewers and
managers need to make special efforts to collect enough data to make reasonable judgments in all the specific areas
that they are trying to evaluate.

PROJECTION Projection is the tendency of an individual to assume that others share his or her thoughts,
feelings, and characteristics. Unfortunately, projection can encourage managers to engage in one-way
communication because they assume that they know how their employees feet on various issues. Engaging in two-
way communication to learn how other individuals really do feel about various issues can help managers avoid the
ill effects of projection.

PERCEPTUAL DEFENSE Perceptual defense is the tendency to block out or distort information that one finds
threatening or that challenges one's beliefs. As a result, managers or workers may not be very receptive to certain
types of information. This may lead to the "shoot the bearer of bad news' syndrome, in which a person tends to
"behead" the bearer of bad news even though the bearer was not the cause of the problem. Thus some managers get
angry at employees who provide information about serious problems thai cannot be ignored, even though the
manager needs to know about them.

Attribution Processes

One aid to understanding how perceptions ultimately influence managerial communication and interpersonal
processes is attribution theory. Attribution theory attempts to explain how individuals make judgments or
attributions about the causes of another's or their own behavior.25 Such judgments often form the basis for
subsequent actions. According to the theory, we make causal judgments that are either dispositional (attributed to
internal causes, such as personality traits or a person's own efforts) or situational (attributed to external causes, such
as equipment or luck). For example, if Jane does not complete a work assignment on time, should we attribute it to
an internal factor like lack of effort or ability, or should we decide some work context or other external issue is to
blame? To make such judgments we consider consensus (the degree to which the behavior is similar to the way
most people act in a given situation), consistency (the degree to which an individual behaves the same way' in this
or a similar situation at other times), and distinctiveness (the degree to which an individual behaves differently in
other situations). Thus if other staff member completed the same assignment on time, Jane has had trouble
completing the same assignment on time in the past, and she has missed deadlines on several other types of
assignments, we would make a probably make a dispositional judgement why the assignment was late. On the other
hand, if others also were late in completing the assignment, Jane normally complete such
assignments by the deadlines, we are likely to attribute the difficulty to situational factors. The attributions we make
are likely to influence how we handle resolving the late assignment.

In making causal judgments, managers need to be particularly aware of lie fundamental attribution error, the
tendency to underestimate the importance of situational influences and to overestimate the importance of
dispositional influences in explaining behavior. We are particularly likely to make this error when we are attempting
to explain the behavior of others. Moreover, when here are successes and failures involved, we are likely to
succumb to the self serving bias. The self-serving bias is the tendency to perceive oneself as responsible for
successes and others as responsible for failures. b This tendency sets lie stage for serious communication problems
between managers and their subordinates. For instance, a manager may attribute subordinates' successes to her or
his own effective leadership but conclude that failures are due to the subordinates' shortcomings. Subordinates, on
the other hand, tend to see successes as resulting from their own hard work and ability and to view failures as
stemming from bad luck or factors in the work environment, including areas controlled by their supervisor.