How can understanding perception help managers

In such a situation, the interviewer is likely to see his personality in the candidate which may compel him to skew the rating. In an organizational setup, it therefore becomes imperative to understand how others perceive you as an individual. This will help you to interact with them or deal with them. Especially important is your role when you are handling a team. A team can be effectively handled by an individual if you know what is the perception of your team members about you?

The clearer you are on this, the better equipped you would be in your interactions with them. This helps them to improve your perception. Authentic communication is yet another method which helps in improving the perception. This, in fact, becomes very important as communication has to be proper and effective and needs to be understood by others in the way you wish it to be understood.

It is observed that in most cases in an organization, incorrect perception is due to improper communication. Either the manager himself or herself is unable to communicate properly, as a result of which the subordinates form an incorrect perception or the team manager has communicated properly, however, for one reason or the other, the subordinates are unable to comprehend the instruction properly due to incorrect perception.

In either case, the situation becomes difficult and the organization faces a setback. Being empathetic also helps in improving the perception as it helps to understand the situation by keeping oneself in the shoes of others. It is recommended that managers must be empathetic in their approach in order to improve their perception about others. This would enable them to understand and handle their subordinates properly. Taking a step forward, it is often observed that excellent listening skills helps an individual to shape up perception.

Simply speaking, if an individual is a good listener, then such skills go a long way in empathizing with others and plays a major role in removing perceptual disorders. It would not be inappropriate to mention that the way in which we perceive ourselves is the way in which we present ourselves.

Keeping a positive attitude also helps in improving the perception. An individual should therefore strive to improve self perception by understanding oneself and in doing so one may face resistance from others, which an individual should overcome. The most important role perception in the workplace is its linkage to the decision making perception process.

Let us discuss the various organizational constraints that affect the perception ultimately leading to incorrect decisions. A reward system, if not perceived properly by the team members or the employees at large may largely affect the organization performance. A reward system can be effective, if it is properly understood by the team members. In most cases, it is observed that the team is not motivated to walk that extra mile and clinch the deal or complete their targets as they have not understood the reward system properly.

An improper communication has led to the formation of incorrect perception in the minds of the employees or the team members which restricts their motivational levels to perform better. It is very important from an organizational perspective that the reward system or for that matter incentive system is perceived accurately by the employees. In the absence of this, the organizational performance can be badly hit despite lucrative incentive schemes.

Proper communication therefore, by the managers or the top management, assumes greater importance in accurately perceiving the schemes. If there have been any historical precedents, good or bad, then they would largely affect the perception of individuals in their work environment. For example, consider an employee or a group of employees who had a boss, who is autocratic in his approach and is least sensitive to their issues, does not give a patient hearing to their issues and always focuses only on work.

Attribution is what happens when a person takes the information they perceived and determines a reason as to what happened. What you attribute things like success to depends on your own perception and behaviors, which may be wrong due to being unrealistic or having the incorrect information for the situation. Things like bias and misconceptions can cloud that reasoning, which can interfere with a person's proficiency in the workplace and may contribute to issues with diversity. One of the concepts used in organizational behavior to help improve perception and attribution is attribution theory.

The theory was first brought forth by psychologist Fritz Heider in the s and stated that people had a desire to explain the reasoning behind their actions and the actions of others. They also looked at what impact certain attributions can have when a person acts upon them. Today, the theory is used to help people explain the causes behind human behaviors and largely make sense of them.

In business, attribution theory is applicable to the members of a business' management team more so than it is to the standard employees. Managers are responsible for interpreting behavior and actions throughout the business to ensure that things are remaining as they should be and to keep an eye out for problems. If they make mistakes in their perceptions and attributions-or they are otherwise clouded by their own bias-then that can reflect throughout the company more so than if they were a regular employee.

This is because it's the management staff that are the primary decision makers in the business' daily operations, and their power in the business gives them more control over it.

Errors in their judgement and interpretation of things could end up wasting time and money for the business and could hurt the business' bottom line. It can also disrupt organizational behavior, as employees themselves could interpret management's response as hostile or incompetent.

In some cases, an employee whose behavior is being misattributed by their supervisor and is being unjustly punished for it may feel like they are being singled out or victimized at work. As a result, their interactions with their supervisor and peers may become negative-especially if they do not feel like their co-workers are defending them or are even supporting the supervisor's views of them.

We focus on the ones that stand out to our senses sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch. We take information through all five of our senses, but our perceptual field includes so many stimuli that it is impossible for our brains to process and make sense of it all.

So, as information comes in through our senses, various factors influence what actually continues on through the perception process. Once we have chosen to attend to a stimulus in the environment, the choice sets off a series of reactions in our brain. This neural process starts with the activation of our sensory receptors touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. Organizing is the second part of the perception process, in which we sort and categorize information that we perceive based on innate and learned cognitive patterns.

Three ways we sort things into patterns are by using proximity, similarity, and difference Stanley, mo. After we have attended to a stimulus, and our brains have received and organized the information, we interpret it in a way that makes sense using our existing information about the world Interpretation simply means that we take the information that we have sensed and organized and turn it into something that we can categorize.

By putting different stimuli into categories, we can better understand and react to the world around us. Perception of others involves sensing, organizing, and interpreting information about people, and what they say and do.

The sensation is a main characteristic of perception as it relates to outside input. In the perceptual process, firstly the perceiver should select what will be perceived. Then, the organization takes place when listeners identify the type of sound and compare it to other sounds heard in the past.

Interpretation and categorization are generally the most subjective areas of perception, as they involve decisions about whether listeners like what they hear and want to keep listening. We make immediate evaluations that cause automatic judgments of positive and negative reactions toward others, which occur outside of our awareness. The selection, organization, and interpretation of perceptions can differ among different people.

On the basis of these, the perceptual output that means, values, attitudes, behavior, etc. Therefore, when people react differently in a situation, part of their behavior can be explained by examining their perceptual process, and how their perceptions are leading to their responses. Many times the prejudices in the individual, time of perception, unfavorable background, lack of clarity of stimulus, confusion, conflict in mind and such other factors are responsible for errors in perception.

The illusion is a false perception. Here the person will mistake a stimulus and perceive it wrongly. For example, in the dark, a rope is mistaken as a snake or vice versa. A person standing at a distance who is not known may be perceived as a known person. Sometimes we come across instances where the individual perceives some stimulus, even when it is not present.

This phenomenon is known as a hallucination. The person may see an object, person, etc. Selective perception means the situation when people selectively interpret what they see on the basis of their interests, background, experience, and attitudes.

It means any characteristics that make a person, object, or event stand out will increase the probability that it will be perceived. Because it is impossible for us to assimilate everything we see, only certain stimuli can be taken in.

The individual is evaluated on the basis of perceived positive quality, feature or trait. It works as a short cut in judging other people. Attribution : It refers to how people explain the cause of another's as their own behaviour. There are two types of attributions that people make : personal dispositions and situational attributions.

There is a general tendency among the individuals to attribute their own behaviour to situational factors but explain the behaviour of others by personal dispositions. Perceptual distortion occurs because of attributions due to two reasons : 1 Fundamental attribution error and 2 Self-serving bias.

Stereotyping : It means judging someone on the basis of one's perception of the group to which that person belongs. Some example of common stereotypes are that Americans are materialistic Japanese are nationalistic and Germans are industrious. Generalisation based upon stereotyping makes assimilation easier since it permits to maintain consistency. But the danger lies in incorrect stereotyping. Projection : When one's own personal attributes are assigned to others, then projection takes place.

If you yourself are honest and trustworthy you take it for granted that other people are equally honest and trustworthy. It is not so always. Perceptual Set : It means previously held beliefs about an object's influence on individual perception of similar objects.