Perception

Perception 1

Assignment:

Perception and Decision Making

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?????? University

Supervision and Leadership MGT 340

Professor ????????????????

Day 7, Sunday, November ??, 2006

Perception 2

Perception and Decision Making

What is Perception? The Heritage Dictionary describes perception as the process of using the senses to acquire information about the surrounding environment or situation. When applied to an organizational business structure, perception is used to gain knowledge about individuals, groups, and the effect of structure on behavior in order to make organizations work more effectively. According to our text, "perception is based on people's perception of what reality is to them, not reality itself." Moreover, whatever someone perceives can be very different from what is reality. "The world that is perceived is the world that is behaviorally important." (Robbins, 2005)

I think that a person's ability to perceive correctly the structure of his or her place within an organization is an important source of power. When it comes down to how well a persons perception skills are I think it has to do with the person's position in the social makeup of the organization, and his or her personality traits.

I believe people with keen perceptive abilities can precisely structure their relationships within their work environment to get what they want, since they know which social associations allow them to access the resources they need; those who skills are not as keen may not be as successful, because of their lack of perception.

Technical skills will help a person do their job with expertise; conceptual skills will help them formulate ideas; human skills will help them get along with people. However, without skilled perception selection, organization interpretation, judgments, attributions, biases, and errors that employee will not have an accurate picture of the organizational goal of the company.

Perception 3

Perception and Decision Making

The factors that influence perceptions are: the perceiver - attitudes, motives, interests, experiences, and expectations; the target - uniqueness, actions, sounds, size, setting, and closeness; and the situation; time, work setting, and social situation. When people observe behavior, they attempt to determine whether it is internally or externally caused. The downside is that this can underestimate the influence of external factors and overestimate the influence of internal factors when making judgments about the behavior of others.

The positive relation between precision in organizational perception and the ability to obtain resources is also important to a company on many levels. As people spend time with the company, they get to understand the structure of the company, and they share knowledge with those who are in similar positions. Nevertheless, they are also positive and negative effects of using perceptive "shortcuts" when judging others. In most cases, our attitudes, persona, emotions, and needs play a major part of how we as people interpret and judge. For instance, I smile a lot; some people may assume just because I am smiling I am really nice and tend to overlook faults. (Depending on my day that assumption can be far from the truth) This is called a halo effect. The person has built a positive personality theory about me because of their first impression of me.

This can be a negative thing, because when an individual makes a general impression from one characteristic of a person's personality, he or she can develop the wrong impression concerning that person.

Perception 4

Perception and Decision Making

Selective Perception is another shortcut used in judging people. People selectively interpret what they see based on their interest, background, experience, and attitudes. An example of this would be reading a book that is published. Professional proofreaders, read books to make sure they are not any errors. Yet, by the time, we get the book, grammatical and other errors are still within the book. Because regardless of the intelligence of the mind, it only corrects the mistakes, the eyes see. To some degree, I think we all have a tendency to perceive