Unit no 2.

Perception

Dr.Roza Chandele- Parashar

Assistant Professor – HRM Specialization
Chandele.roza@gmail.com
 Unit no 2. Perception
1) Perception : Meaning and concept of perception,
Factors influencing perception, Selective perception
2) Attribution theory, Perceptual process, Social
perception (stereotyping and halo effect).
3) Motivation: Definition & Concept of Motive &
Motivation, The Content Theories of Motivation
(Maslow’s Need Hierarchy & Herzberg’s Two Factor
model Theory), The Process Theories (Vroom’s
expectancy Theory & Porter Lawler model),
4) Contemporary Theories- Equity Theory of Work
Motivation. Relevant case studies on Perception and
Motivation (8+2)
1) Perception :
Meaning and concept of perception, Factors
influencing perception, Selective perception
 Perception : Meaning and concept of perception
• “Perception is the process through which the
information from outside environment is selected,
received, organized and interpreted to make it
meaningful to you. This input of meaningful
information results in decisions and actions.”
• In simple words we can say that perception is the act of
seeing what is there to be seen. But what is seen is
influenced by the perceiver, the object and its
environment. The meaning of perception emphasizes
all these three points.
• “Perception may be defined as a process by which
individuals organize and interpret their sensory
impressions in order to give meaning to their
environment.”
• According to Joseph Reitz, “Perception includes
all those processes by which an individual receives
information about his environment—seeing,
hearing, feeling, tasting and smelling. The study of
these perpetual processes shows that their
functioning is affected by three classes of
variables—the objects or events being perceived,
the environment in which perception occurs and
the individual doing the perceiving.”
 Importance of Perception:
(i) Perception is very important in understanding the
human behaviour, because every person perceives the
world and approaches the life problems differently-
Whatever we see or feel is not necessarily the same as it
really is. It is because what we hear is not what is really
said, but what we perceive as being said. When we buy
something, it is not because it is the best, but because
we take it to be the best. Thus, it is because of
perception, we can find out why one individual finds a
job satisfying while another one may not be satisfied
with it.
(ii) If people behave on the basis of their perception, we
can predict their behaviour in the changed
circumstances by understanding their present perception
of the environment. One person may be viewing the
facts in one way which may be different from the facts
as seen by another viewer.
(iii) With the help of perception, the needs of
various people can be determined, because
people’s perception is influenced by their needs.
Like the mirrors at an amusement park, they
distort the world in relation to their tensions.
(iv) Perception is very important for the manager
who wants to avoid making errors when dealing
with people and events in the work setting. This
problem is made more complicated by the fact
that different people perceive the same situation
differently. In order to deal with the subordinates
effectively, the managers must understand their
perceptions properly.
 Factors influencing perception
• Individual Differences
• Every person is unique and brings different attitudes to a team. You may work
well when collaborating with others while your coworker prefers to work in
isolation. Each of these differences affects your perception of your team and
organization. You’ll behave differently when you’re working with your colleague
as opposed to someone else. Your perception of your coworker shapes the way
you work as well. In the workplace, it’s necessary to respect these differences and
work with others to create harmony.
• Motivations
• Say you want to work for a few years and gain enough experience to get into
business school for an MBA. Your motivations will impact your perception of
your work. You’re more likely to make just enough effort to work well, get
positive feedback and fulfill your requirements. So, our motivations affect the way
we approach a situation. When it comes to teamwork, each member’s motivations
will be different. But to achieve collective goals, management has to bring
everyone on the same page and communicate their expectations.
• Organizational Behavior
• For Priyanka, her informal organization transformed into a traditional hierarchical
office. Her behavior as a professional had to change to accommodate her external
environment. When you’re working with others and aiming to accomplish
long-term goals, you have to meet them halfway. An organization’s values,
mission and beliefs are important factors influencing perception.
• Past Experiences
• Our past experiences shape us into who we are today.
We can’t separate ourselves from them. Past
experiences are also significant factors influencing
perception. They shape our personal biases and
opinions as well as our expectations from others and
ourselves. It’s important to be open to changing our
perceptions when situations change. For instance, the
Earth wasn’t always considered to be round.
• External Factors
• Perception isn’t only affected by internal or personal
factors. External factors affecting perception can
include what people think of us, others’ expectations
and cultural norms such as taboos or rules followed by
society.
Selective perception
• Selective perception is the process by which
individuals perceive what they want to in
media messages while ignoring opposing
viewpoints. It is a broad term to identify the
behavior all people exhibit to tend to "see
things" based on their particular frame of
reference.
• Selective perception is a mental process which makes you
pay attention to things you feel are right, completely
ignoring the indicators of you being wrong. You very
conveniently ignore things that aren’t in favor of what you
feel is right.
• For example you have had cough or fever for a week now
and you put it on the weather or say that you can taste and
smell things just to avoid getting yourself tested for Covid
and having the report to be positive. This is also selective
perception, to be specific it is a type of selective
perception, perceptual defense.
• For example, in order to avoid completing your
assignment you keep yourself busy in doing other things
by telling yourself that they are more important than your
assignments. This is again a very simple example of
selective perception.
• The bias caused by people perceiving a situation on the
basis of their own interests, background, experiences and
attitudes, lies in the way of making objective
interpretations.
• People’s tendency towards selective perception always
happens during the hiring process within the organization.
Sometimes managers tend to think female applicants are
less competitive than male since the existed common
sense believes that women are more household-orientated,
while men are more work-orientated to earn money to
support families. People tend to think the applicants with
higher level of education are more qualified to the job for
the reason that they may have a broader range of
knowledge that they could apply to real use. Although
selective perception allows us to make quick predictions
about a person. Due to lack in a time of contacts,
selectively interpreting distracts us from making a correct
judgment.
• In order to solve this issue, people need to be
aware of the fact that getting to know a person
demands time. Here are some tips:
1.Do not let first impression or your past experience
fools you;
2. Accept the possibility of exception and do not
make arbitrary decisions based on prejudice and bias;
3. Considering all aspects of a person before you
make any judgment.
2) Attribution theory,
Perceptual process,
Social perception (stereotyping and halo effect).
 Attribution theory
• Attribution theory is the process of explaining the
world around us. We may use this every day to explain
things, such as the causes of certain behaviours or
outcomes. Knowing this theory and how it applies to
aspects of our daily lives can help you identify our own
biases towards certain people and situations, and those
of other people.
• Attribution theory is how we attribute feelings and
intentions to people to understand their behaviour. For
example, we may unconsciously apply this theory
when we see someone shouting on public transport.
You may blame their character, assuming they are an
angry person. Alternatively, you might blame the
situation they are in, such as, if the train is busy, it
might make them nervous and more likely to act out.
• Dispositional attribution
• Dispositional attribution puts the cause of someone's
behaviour down to internal traits. These might include
personality, core beliefs, and motivations. By
attempting to explain intentional behaviour, we tend to
look internally and analyse the personality of an
individual. By overstating the internal causes of
someone's behaviour and ignoring the external causes,
we commit something called a fundamental attribution
error. That's when we assume people's actions relate to
the type of person they are and nothing else. Some
further examples of dispositional attribution are:
 Dispositional attribution
• Your colleague receives a promotion, and you
attribute this to their dedication to the role.
• A person studies at medical school, and you
attribute this to their caregiving personality.
• A person is glaring at you on the bus, and you
attribute this to them having a hostile
personality.
• Situational attribution
• Situational attribution looks less towards
personality and more towards situations and
events. We can think of this as a more external
attribution type. This type of attribution is more
common when explaining our behaviour. We look
outwards and blame circumstances outside of
ourselves. This is because it is often easier than
self-analysing. Some examples of situational
attribution include:
 Situational attribution
• Being late for work and blaming the weather
or public transport.
• Failing an exam and blaming your teacher for
not preparing you.
• Spilling a drink on the carpet and attributing it
to the unevenness of the carpet.
• An attribution is the causal explanation we give for an
observed behavior. If you believe that a behavior is due to
the internal characteristics of an actor, you are making
an internal attribution. For example, let’s say your
classmate Erin complained a lot when completing a finance
assignment. If you think that she complained because she is
a negative person, you are making an internal attribution.
An external attribution is explaining someone’s behavior
by referring to the situation. If you believe that Erin
complained because finance homework was difficult, you
are making an external attribution.
• When do we make internal or external attributions? Research
shows that three factors are the key to understanding what
kind of attributions we make.
• Consensus: Do other people behave the same way?
• Distinctiveness: Does this person behave the same way
across different situations?
• Consistency: Does this person behave this way in different
occasions in the same situation?
 Perceptual process
• Perception is the process of selecting,
organizing, and interpreting information.
This process includes the perception of select
stimuli that pass through our perceptual filters ,
are organized into our existing structures and
patterns, and are then interpreted based on
previous experiences
Social perception (stereotyping and halo effect).
• Social Perception. How we perceive other
people in our environment is also shaped by
our values, emotions, feelings, and
personality. Moreover, how we perceive
others will shape our behavior, which in turn
will shape the behavior of the person we are
interacting with.
•
• What is halo effect in perception?
• The halo effect occurs when our positive impressions of
people, brands, and products in one area lead us to have
positive feelings in another area. This cognitive bias leads
us to often cast judgment without having a reason.
• In the Workplace
• There are a number of ways that the halo effect can influence
perceptions of others in work settings. For example, experts
suggest that the halo effect is one of the most common biases
affecting performance appraisals and reviews. Supervisors
may rate subordinates based on the perception of a single
characteristic rather than the whole of their performance and
contribution. For example, a worker's enthusiasm or positive
attitude may overshadow their lack of knowledge or skill,
causing co-workers to rate them more highly than their actual
performance justifies.
• Stereotypes are generalizations based on group characteristics.
For example, believing that women are more cooperative than
men, or men are more assertive than women, is a stereotype.
Stereotypes may be positive, negative, or neutral.
• Human beings have a natural tendency to categorize the
information around them to make sense of their environment.
What makes stereotypes potentially discriminatory and a
perceptual bias is the tendency to generalize from a group to a
particular individual. If the belief that men are more assertive
than women leads to choosing a man over an equally (or
potentially more) qualified female candidate for a position, the
decision will be biased, potentially illegal, and unfair.
• Stereotypes persist because of a process called selective
perception. Selective perception simply means that we pay
selective attention to parts of the environment while ignoring
other parts. When we observe our environment, we see what we
want to see and ignore information that may seem out of place
3) Motivation: Definition & Concept of Motive
& Motivation, The Content Theories of
Motivation (Maslow’s Need Hierarchy &
Herzberg’s Two Factor model Theory), The
Process Theories (Vroom’s expectancy Theory
& Porter Lawler model),
 Definition & Concept of Motive & Motivation

• Motivation is derived from the word

'motive', which denotes a person's needs,
desires, wants, or urges. It is the process of
motivating individuals to take action in order
to achieve a goal. The psychological elements
fueling people's behavior in the context of job
goals might include a desire for money.
• Motive:
• It is the internal desire of an individual to work
towards the achievement of the goal. It results in
restlessness in the individual as he wants to
achieve his goal. It arises due to the needs of an
individual. For example, to fulfill the motive of
getting good results, students study hard. So
motive is the internal state of mind of an individual
to work for the achievement of the goal.
• Motivation:
• It is the process of inspiring, inducing, and
stimulating the employees to perform to their
best ability to achieve the goal of the
organization. It can not be forced on
employees.
• Motivators:
• These are the techniques or incentives which
are used to motivate the employees. For
example, increment, bonus, reward,
promotion, respect, etc.
• Types of Motivation
• The two main types of motivation are frequently
described as being either extrinsic or intrinsic.
• Extrinsic motivation arises from outside of the
individual and often involves external rewards such as
trophies, money, social recognition, or praise.
• Intrinsic motivation is internal and arises from within
the individual, such as doing a complicated crossword
puzzle purely for the gratification of solving a problem.
• A Third Type of Motivation?
• Some research suggests that there is a third type of
motivation: family motivation.3 An example of this
type is going to work when you are not motivated to do
so internally (no intrinsic motivation), but because it is
a means to support your family financially.
• Why Motivation Is Important
• Motivation serves as a guiding force for all human
behavior. So, understanding how motivation works and
the factors that may impact it can be important for
several reasons.
• Understanding motivation can:
• Increase your efficiency as you work toward your goals
• Drive you to take action
• Encourage you to engage in health-oriented behaviors
• Help you avoid unhealthy or maladaptive behaviors,
such as risk-taking and addiction
• Help you feel more in control of your life
• Improve your overall well-being and happiness
• Tips for Improving Your Motivation
• All people experience fluctuations in their motivation
and willpower. Sometimes you feel fired up and highly driven to
reach your goals. Other times, you might feel listless or unsure of
what you want or how to achieve it.
• If you're feeling low on motivation, there are steps you can take to
help increase your drive. Some things you can do to develop or
improve your motivation include:
• Adjust your goals to focus on things that really matter to you.
Focusing on things that are highly important to you will help push
you through your challenges more than goals based on things that
are low in importance.
• Improve your confidence. Research suggests that there is a
connection between confidence and motivation.6 So, gaining more
confidence in yourself and your skills can impact your ability to
achieve your goals.
• Remind yourself about what you've achieved in the past and where
your strengths lie. This helps keep self-doubts from limiting your
motivation.
• If there are things you feel insecure about, try working on making
improvements in those areas so you feel more skilled and capable.
Motivation - Maslow’s Need Hierarchy
• Maslow's theory of hierarchical needs
• Maslow's hierarchy is a content-based motivational theory. It outlines a few
basic needs a person wants to fulfil before progressing to more complex
needs. This hierarchy categorises needs into five levels:
• Physiological: An individual's basic physiological needs are water, shelter,
clothing and food. In a work setting, an employee's salary may fulfil their
physiological needs.
• Safety: This level refers to a feeling of protection that individuals
experience. This need may align with an employee's expectation of job
security.
• Socialisation: To meet socialisation needs, employees may develop
friendships at work to create a sense of belonging for themselves.
Management can fulfil this need by creating opportunities for employees to
bond, by hosting company lunches and team-building activities.
• Esteem: Employees often reach this level by receiving recognition, which
can help them feel confident in their work and increase their self-esteem.
Recognising a professional's achievements and providing positive feedback
are two methods that can help build their self-esteem.
• Self-actualisation: To reach this level, employees may try to achieve
complex, long-term professional or personal goals. Self-actualised
employees can motivate themselves to complete workplace goals
effectively.
• An administrative professional can use Maslow's
theory of hierarchical needs to understand the
aspirations of their team and work towards fulfilling
them. They can organise professional development and
team-building programmes in addition to the pay,
benefits and perks that an employee earns. Managers
can begin by periodically communicating with
employees about plans or operations to make them feel
that they are a part of an organisation. They can create
an environment that is naturally conducive to
cooperation and collaboration. The quality of projects,
growth opportunities and work-life balance are factors
that can motivate an employee to excel in a role.
 Motivation - Herzberg’s Two Factor model Theory
• Herzberg's two-factor theory is a content-based theory. It describes two sets
of factors that may lead to either satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Herzberg
defines the factors that lead to satisfaction or dissatisfaction as hygiene and
motivating factors:
• Hygiene factors: These are factors affecting satisfaction, relating to working
conditions, professional relationships, office policies, rules of conduct and
attitudes of supervisors. Improving a few or all hygiene factors can help
decrease dissatisfaction and improve motivation among employees.
• Motivating factors: Factors like professional achievements, recognition,
responsibility and career and personal growth are motivating factors for
professionals. Addressing these factors increases job satisfaction.
• Management can implement Herzberg's two-factor theory by reforming
company policies, offering competitive wages and providing effective
supervision, job security and more autonomy. Administrative professionals
can take a proactive role in employee welfare initiatives. A company can
reduce dissatisfaction by offering professionals ways to find a sense of
purpose, both professionally and personally.
 The Process Theories (Vroom’s expectancy Theory
• Vroom's expectancy theory is a process-based motivation theory which
assumes that an individual's behaviour results from the conscious
choices they make from multiple available alternatives. Individuals
make specific choices believing that they may guarantee more
satisfaction and comfort. Vroom's theory suggests that an individual
gets motivation from the following three factors:
• Expectancy is an individual's belief that the harder they work, their
chances of success increases.
• Instrumentality is an individual's belief that they may receive a reward
if they meet performance expectations.
• Valence is the importance an individual places on an expected outcome.
• Vroom's expectancy theory states that if an employee believes that they
can accomplish a task, it may motivate them to work harder. An
unrealistic or unattainable goal can demotivate professionals. Managers
can assess how well employees understand their role in achieving
organisational goals. If an employee is unsure of their capability or feels
that a goal is challenging, managers can train them to align their
performance with organisational goals.
• Simply put it, we are motivated by desirable things
we expect we can achieve. Motivation is therefore
a combination of:
• Firstly, valence: the value of the perceived
outcome.
• Secondly, instrumentality: the belief that if I
complete specific actions then I will achieve a
certain outcome.
• Lastly, expectancy: the belief that I am capable to
complete the actions.
• Companies should motivate people to do
something by showing them something desirable,
indicating how straightforward it is to get it, and
then supporting their self-belief that they can get
there.
 The Process Theories-Porter Lawler
model
• The theory proposed two types of reward:
• Intrinsic Rewards: Intrinsic rewards are given to an
individual by himself for good performance. They
include feelings of accomplishment and satisfaction of
higher-level needs as defined by Maslow. Intrinsic
reward are directly related to good performance only if
the job structure is varied and challenging so an
individual can reward himself if he feels he has
performed well
• Extrinsic Rewards: Extrinsic rewards are given by the
organization and satisfy mainly lower-level needs.
They include such things as pay, promotion, status, and
job security. extrinsic rewards are weekly connection to
performance
• In the model, rewards are linked indirectly to
satisfaction through perceived equitable rewards. This
variable refers to the amount of rewards an individual
feels he should receive as a result of his performance.
This variable can also be expanded to include the
amount of rewards an individual feels should be
attached to a particular position within the
organization.
• Therefore, Porter and Lawler view satisfaction as
deficiency measure. Satisfaction is determined by the
difference between actual rewards and perceived
equitable rewards. If actual reward exceeds perceived
rewards, then it results in satisfaction. If opposite
occurs, it results in dissatisfaction. The degree to which
a person is either satisfied or dissatisfied depends on
the size of the difference between the actual and
perceived equitable rewards
4) Contemporary Theories- Equity Theory of Work
Equity theory is based on the assumption that a major
factor in job motivation is the individual’s evaluation of
the equity or fairness of the reward received.
• This theory views of what satisfies and what dissatisfies
people. The equity theory concentrates on money as the
most significant incentive in the workplace. Workers
compare what they are being paid for their efforts with
what others in similar scenario. When they feel they have
been unfairly paid, tension develops within them which
they try to resolve by changing their behavior.
• It is suggested that there will be a limit to which an
individual will tolerate a series of unfair events which will
push the individual over the brink. Strong workers who
believe that they have been unfairly treated can be
disrupted; weak ones become withdrawn and resentful.