Perception and Job Attitudes

Perception does not necessarily lead to an accurate

portrait of the environment but rather to a unique
portrait, influenced by the needs, desires, values, and
disposition of the perceiver.
The Perceptual Process
• Perceptual Selectivity: Seeing What We See
• The individual is first exposed to an
object or stimulus a loud noise, a new
car, a tall building, another person, and
so on.

• External Influences on Selective Attention • The individual focuses attention on this

one object or stimulus, as opposed to
• Personal Influences on Selective Attention others, and concentrates his efforts on
understanding or comprehending the
• Social Perception in Organizations
stimulus.
• Characteristics of the Situation
• These various influences on selective
• Characteristics of the Perceiver attention can be divided into external
influences and internal (personal)
• It is a process of making sense out of the
influences (Exhibit 3.3).
environment in order to make an appropriate
behavioral response. • External Influences on Selective
Attention
• An individual’s perception of a given situation is
not a photographic representation of the • External influences consist of the
physical world characteristics of the observed object or
person that activate the senses.
The process on how individual view for attention
• Most external influences affect
• Perceptual Selectivity.- Once
selective attention because of either
individuals notice a particular object,
their physical properties or their
they then attempt to make sense out of
dynamic properties.
it by organizing or categorizing it
according to their unique frame of
reference and their needs.

• Perceptual Organization.- When

meaning has been attached to an
object, individuals are in a position to
determine an appropriate response or
reaction to it.

Perceptual Selectivity: Seeing What We See

• Perceptual selectivity refers to the process by

which individuals select objects in the
External Influences on Selective Attention
environment for attention.
• Physical Properties- The physical properties of
• Without this ability to focus on one or a few
the objects themselves often affect which
stimuli instead of the hundreds constantly
objects receive attention by the perceiver.
surrounding us, we would be unable to process
all the information necessary to initiate Emphasis here is on the unique, different, and out of
behavior. the ordinary.

A particularly important physical property is size.

Generally, larger objects receive more attention than
smaller ones.

Advertising companies use the largest signs and

billboards allowed to capture the perceiver’s attention.

External Influences on Selective Attention

• Dynamic Properties- are those that either

change over time or derive their uniqueness
from the order in which they are presented.

The most obvious dynamic property is motion

We tend to pay attention to objects that move against a

relatively static background.

This principle has long been recognized by advertisers,
who often use signs with moving lights or moving
objects to attract attention.
Personal Influences on Selective Attention
• Several important personal factors are also
capable of influencing the extent to which an
individual pays attention to a particular stimulus
or object in the environment.
Social Perception in Organizations
• The way in which we are evaluated in social
situations is greatly influenced by our own
unique sets of personal characteristics.
• In particular, four categories of personal
characteristics can be identified:
Physical appearance

• The two most important personal influences on Verbal communication

perceptual readiness are response salience and
response disposition.
Personal Influences on Selective Attention
• Response Salience-. This is a tendency to focus
on objects that relate to our immediate needs
or wants.
Nonverbal communication
Ascribed attributes.
Social Perception in Organizations
• Physical Appearance-. A variety of physical
attributes influence our overall image.

• Response Disposition-. Whereas response These include many of the obvious demographic
salience deals with immediate needs and characteristics such as age, sex, race, height, and
concerns, weight.

Social perception consists of those processes by • Verbal Communication-. What we say to others
which we perceive other people. as well as how we say it can influence the
impressions others form of us.
Social Perception in Organizations

• Particular emphasis in the study of social

perception is placed on how we interpret other
people, how we categorize them, and how we
Social Perception in Organizations
form impressions of them.
• Non-Verbal Communication- Impressions are
• Social perception is far more complex than the
also influenced by nonverbal communication
perception of inanimate objects such as tables,
how people behave.
chairs, signs, and buildings.
For instance, facial expressions often serve as clues in
forming impressions of others.
• Ascribed Attributes-. We often ascribe certain
attributes to a person before or at the
beginning of an encounter; these attributes can
influence how we perceive that person.
Three ascribed attributes are status, occupation, and
personal characteristics.
Characteristics of the Situation
• The second major influence on how we perceive
others is the situation in which the perceptual
process occurs.
• Two situational influences can be identified:
The organization and the employee’s place in it,
The location of the event.
• Organizational Role-. An employee’s place in
the organizational hierarchy can also influence
his perceptions.
Characteristics of the Perceiver
• The third major influence on social perception is
the personality and viewpoint of the perceiver.
• Several characteristics unique to our
personalities can affect how we see others.
These include:
Self-concept,
Cognitive structure
Response salience,
Previous experience with the individual.
Characteristics of the Perceiver
• Self-Concept-. Our self-concept represents a
major influence on how we perceive others.
• Cognitive Structure-. Our cognitive structures
also influence how we view people. People
describe each other differently
• Response Salience-. This refers to our
sensitivity to objects in the environment as
influenced by our particular needs or desires.
• Previous Experience with the Individual-. Our
previous experiences with others often will
influence the way in which we view their
current behavior.
Barriers to Accurate Social Perception
• Stereotyping
• Selective perception
• Perceptual defense
Stereotyping
A tendency to assign attributes to people solely on the
basis of their class or category
• One of the most common barriers in
perceiving others at work is
stereotyping.
• A stereotype is a widely held
generalization about a group of people.
• It is particularly likely to occur when
one meets new people, since very little
is known about them at that time.
Selective perception
• A process by which we systematically screen
out or discredit information we don’t wish to
hear and focus instead on more salient
information
Saliency here is obviously a function of our own
experiences, needs, and orientations.
Perceptual defense
• A tendency to distort or ignore information that
is either personally threatening or culturally
unacceptable
• A final barrier to social perception is perceptual
defense. Perceptual defense is founded on
three related principles:
Emotionally disturbing or threatening stimuli have a
higher recognition threshold than neutral stimuli.

Such stimuli are likely to elicit substitute perceptions

that are radically altered so as to prevent recognition of
the presented stimuli.

These critical stimuli arouse emotional reactions even

though the stimuli are not recognized.

A major influence on how people behave is the

way they interpret the events around them.

Attributions: Interpreting the Causes of • Building upon the work of Heider, Harold Kelley
Behavior attempted to identify the major antecedents of
internal and external attributions.
• The Attribution Process
• He examined how people determine or, rather,
• Internal and External Causes of Behavior how they actually perceive whether the
• Attributional Bias behavior of another person results from
internal or external causes.
• People who feel they have control over what
happens to them are more likely to accept • Internal causes include ability and effort,
responsibility for their actions than those who whereas external causes include luck and task
feel control of events is out of their hands. ease or difficulty.

• The cognitive process by which people interpret

the reasons or causes for their behavior is
described by attribution theory.

• Attribution theory concerns the process

by which an individual interprets events
as being caused by a particular part of a
relatively stable environment

The Attribution Process

• This process may lead to the conclusion

that the promotion resulted from the
individual’s own effort or, alternatively,
from some other cause, such as luck.

• Based on such cognitive interpretations

of events, individuals revise their
cognitive structures and rethink their
assumptions about causal relationships.

Internal and External Causes of Behavior

Internal and External Causes of Behavior

 • Kelley’s conclusion, is that people actually focus Second, an attitude is a one-dimensional concept: An
on three factors when making causal attitude toward a particular person or object ranges on
attributions: a continuum from very favorable to very unfavorable.

Consensus-. The extent to which you believe that the
person being observed is behaving in a manner that is
consistent with the behavior of his or her peers.
Consistency-. The extent to which you believe that the
person being observed behaves consistently in a similar
fashion when confronted on other occasions with the
same or similar situations.
Distinctiveness-. The extent to which you believe that
the person being observed would behave consistently
when faced with different situations.
Third, attitudes are believed to be related to
subsequent behavior.
Attitudes and Behavior
• How Are Attitudes Formed?
• Behavioral Intentions and Actual Behavior
• Behavioral Justification
• An attitude can be thought of as composed of
three highly interrelated components:

Attributional Bias • Cognitive component- Dealing with the

beliefs and ideas a person has about a
• In making attributions concerning the causes of person or object
behavior, people tend to make certain errors of
interpretation. • Affective component- Dealing with a
person’s feelings toward the person or
• Two such errors, or attribution biases, should object
be noted here.
• Intentional component- Dealing with
Fundamental attribution error. the behavioral intentions a person has
with respect to the person or object.
Self-serving bias.

Attributional Bias

• Fundamental attribution error

This error is a tendency to underestimate the effects of

external or situational causes of behavior and to
overestimate the effects of internal or personal causes.

• Self-serving bias

There is a tendency, not surprisingly, for individuals to

attribute success on an event or project to their own
actions while attributing failure to others.

Attributional Bias
• A general model of the relationship between
• An attitude can be defined as a predisposition attitudes and behavior is shown
to respond in a favorable or unfavorable way to
• As can be seen, attitudes lead to behavioral
objects or persons in one’s environment.
intentions, which, in turn, lead to actual
• Three important aspects of this definition behavior.

First, an attitude is a hypothetical construct; that is, • Following behavior, we can often identify
although its consequences can be observed, the efforts by the individual to justify his behavior.
attitude itself cannot.
How Are Attitudes Formed?
 • Dispositional approach- which argues that
attitudes represent relatively stable
predispositions to respond to people or
situations around them.
• Situational approach-. This approach argues
that attitudes emerge as a result of the
uniqueness of a given situation.
• Social-information-processing approach-. This
view, developed by Pfeffer and Salancik, asserts
that attitudes result from “socially constructed
realities” as perceived by the individual
Behavioral Intentions and Actual Behavior
• Regardless of how the attitudes are formed
either through the dispositional or social-
information-processing approach
• The next problem we face is understanding how
resulting behavioral intentions guide actual
behavior (return to Exhibit 3.8). Clearly, this
relationship is not a perfect one.
• Despite one’s intentions, various internal and
external constraints often serve to modify an
intended course of action.
Behavioral Justification
• People often feel a need for behavioral
justification to ensure that their behaviors are
consistent with their attitudes toward the event
Cognitive consistency.- When people find themselves
acting in a fashion that is inconsistent with their
attitudes when they experience
Cognitive dissonance-. They experience tension and
attempt to reduce this tension and return to a state of
cognitive consistency.
Work-Related Attitudes
• Job Involvement and Organizational
Commitment
• Job Satisfaction
A variety of work-related attitudes can be
identified, the one receiving the most attention is
job satisfaction.
Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment
• Two job attitudes that should also be
recognized: Job involvement and Organizational
commitment.
Job involvement- refers to the extent to which a person
is interested in and committed to assigned tasks.
Organizational commitment- represents the relative
strength of an individual’s identification with and
involvement in an organization.
Job Involvement and Organizational Commitment
• Commitment can be characterized by three
factors:
A strong belief in and acceptance of the organization’s
goals and values,
A willingness to exert considerable effort on behalf of
the organization, and
A strong desire to maintain membership in the
organization.
“a pleasurable or positive emotional state resulting
from the appraisal of one’s job or job experience.”
Job Satisfaction
• It results from the perception that an
employee’s job actually provides what he values
in the work situation.
• Several characteristics of the concept of job
satisfaction follow from this definition.
First, satisfaction is an emotional response to a job
situation.
Second, job satisfaction is perhaps best understood in
terms of discrepancy.

Job Satisfaction

• Dimensions of Job Satisfaction. It has been

argued that job satisfaction actually represents
several related attitudes.

Five job dimensions represent the most salient

characteristics of a job about which people have
affective responses.

Work itself.- The extent to which tasks performed by

employees are interesting and provide opportunities for
learning and for accepting responsibility.

Dimensions of Job Satisfaction

• Pay- The amount of pay received, the perceived

equity of the pay, and the method of payment.

• Promotional opportunities- The availability of

realistic opportunities for advancement

• Supervision- The technical and managerial

abilities of supervisors; the extent to which
supervisors demonstrate consideration for and
interest in employees.

• Coworkers- The extent to which coworkers are

friendly, technically competent, and supportive.

Measurement of Job Satisfaction

• Probably the most common attitude surveys in

organizations today focus on job satisfaction.

• Satisfaction is considered by many managers to

be an important indicator of organizational
effectiveness, and therefore it is regularly
monitored to assess employee feelings toward
the organization.