Perception and attribution

Errors in social perception

• Stereo typing
• This refers to the tendency to perceive another
person as belonging to a single class or category
• Stereo typing may lead to favourable or
unfavorable traits to the person being perceived
• Because each individual is unique, the real traits
will generally be quite different form those the
stereotype would suggest
• Common stereo type groups in organisations
include:
– Manager
– Supervisors
– Union members
– Young/old
– Women/men
– White collar/blue collar
– Accountants/sales people/engineers
– Customers etc
 Halo effect
• This is where a person is perceived on the
basis of one trait
• E.g. during performance appraisal, a rater
makes an error in judging persons total
personality or performance based on a single
positive/negative trait like intelligence or
appearance
 Impressions management
• Sometimes called “ self presentation” is the
process by which people attempt to manager or
control the perception of other form of them
• The tendency is for people to present themselves
so as to impress others in a socially desirable way
• It is commonly used during recruitment and
selection, performance appraisal etc
• It is a political too for one to build image and be
successful
 Components of impressions
management
• These are two:
– Impression motivation
– Impression construction

• Impression motivation
• Where employees are motivated to control how
the boss or fellow employees perceive them
• The degree of this motivation to impression
manage will depend on several factors
• The factors influencing the degree of impression
motivation:
– Relevance of the impression to individual goal
– Value of these goal
– The discrepancy between the image one would like to
hold and the image one believes others already hold

• Impressions construction
– Concerned with the specific type of impression people
want to make and how to go about it
• Factors that have been identified as being
relevant to the kind of impression people try
to construct:
– Self concept
– Desire and undesired images
– Role constraint
– Targets values
– Current social image
 employees impressions management
strategies
• There are two basic strategies :
• Demotion – preventive strategies
used hen an employee is trying to minimize
responsibilities for some negative event or to stay
out of trouble

• Promotion- enhancement strategies

• Used when employee is seeking to maximize
responsibility for positive outcome or looked
better than they really are
 Demotion- preventive strategies
• Accounts
• These are employees attempts to excuse or
justify their actions
• For example excuse of not feeling well, not
getting something done on time because of
another higher priority
• Apologies
• When there is no logical way out, the employee
may apologise to the boss for the negative event
– indicate that the event will not happen agent
• Disassociation
• When employees are indirectly associated
with something that went wrong , they may
secretly tell their boss that they fought for the
right thing but were overruled
Promotion enhancement strategies
 Entitlement
 Where an employee feel that he has not been given the
credit for the positive outcome
 They make sure that it is known through formal
channels or they may informally note to key people

 Enhancement
 Employees may have the credit, but they point out that
they really did more and had a bigger impact than was
originally thought
 Obstacle disclosure
 Employees identify obstacles ( health , family, lack of
organizational resource, lack of cooperation) that they
had to overcome to accomplish an outcome
 They are trying to create the perception that because
they obtained the positive outcome despite the big
obstacle, they really deserve credit or merit

 Association
 Employee may makes sure that they are seen with the
right people at the right time
 This creates the impression that the employee is well
connected and is associated with successful
projects/people
 Attribution
• Attribution – the process through which people
explain the causes of their won or someone else's
behaviour
• Concerned with the ways in which people explain
(or attribute) the behavior of others or
themselves (self-attribution) with something else.
• It explores how individuals attribute" causes to
events and how this cognitive perception affects
their usefulness in an organization
 Attribution cont..
• It is a cognitive process by which people draw
conclusion about the factors that influence or
make sense of another behaviour
• It is an aspect of social perception
 Attribution theory
• Is concerned with the relationship between
social perception and interpersonal behaviour
.
• Assumptions of attribution:
– we seek to make sense of our world
– we often attribute people’s actions either to
internal and external cause
– we do so in a fairly logical ways
 Attribution theory cont..
• It is concerned with the “why” question of
organizational behaviour.

• Because most “causes”, “attributes” and “whys’ are

not directly observable, the theory says that people
must depend on cognitions, particularly perception.

• The attribution theorists assume that humans are

rational and motivated to identify and understand the
causal structure of their relevant environment
 Two types of attributions
• Dispositional attribution -Attributes a persons behaviour to
internal factors such as personality traits , motivation, ability,
fatigue, effort
• Situational attribution -Attributes a persons behavior to
external factors such as equipment, rules, social influence etc
• These two combine actively to determine behaviour
• Note that it the perceived, not the actual determinant that
are important to behaviour.
• People will behave differently if they perceive internal
attributes than they will if they perceive external attributes.
 ANTICEDENTS ATTRIBUTIONS CONSEQUENCIES

Information
Perceived Behaviour
Beliefs
causes
Motivation

General model of the attribution field.

 Attributions errors
• There are two potent errors biases recognize in
attribution
• The fundamental attributions error
– research has found that people tend o ignore the
powerful situational forces when explain the
behaviour of others
– People tend to attribute other behaviour to personal
factors (e.g. intelligence, attitudes, personality) even
when it is very clear that the situation or
circumstances cause the person to behave that way
• Self serving bias
– People tend to present themselves favourably – a
self serving bias
– People tend to accept credit when they are told
they have succeeded ( attributing success to their
ability ) yet often attribute failure to external l and
situational forces such as bad lack or impossible
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