Moore PUA 5303 Unit 2 ESY

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:Page 120

LO 4-1 Describe how you form perceptions of others.

LO 4-2 Discuss how awareness of stereotypes helps you make better decisions.

LO 4-3 Explain how causal attributions help managers interpret employee ­performance.

LO 4-4 Describe the four layers of diversity and how they help organizations manage diversity effectively.

LO 4-5 Discuss the business rationale for managing diversity.

LO 4-6 Discuss the most common barriers to implementing successful diversity programs.

LO 4-7 Explain what organizations are doing to manage diversity effectively.

LO 4-8 Describe the implications of social perception and managing diversity for you and managers.

The Organizing Framework shown in Figure 4.1 summarizes the key concepts discussed in ­Chapter 4. We discuss the impact of three important person factors—diversity, demographics, and stereotypes, and the situation factor of diversity climate on a host of processes at the individual, group/team, and organizational levels. These person and situation factors affect the individual level processes pertaining to perception, attributions, and psychological safety. They also influence processes at the group/team and organizational levels. One of the biggest takeaways from this chapter is the fact that the combination of inputs and processes shown in Figure 4.1 have a broad effect on individual, group/team, and organizational level outcomes. Try to observe how the inputs and processes affect individual level outcomes such as task performance, work attitudes, well-being, flourishing, turnover, and career outcomes such as promotions. At the same time, you should learn that concepts discussed in this chapter also affect group/team level outcomes of performance and satisfaction as well as organizational outcomes like being an employer of choice, customer satisfaction, and reputation.Page 121

FIGURE 4.1 Organizing Framework for Understanding and Applying OB

©2021 Angelo Kinicki and Mel Fugate. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without permission of the authors.

This team of professionals is focused on finalizing plans for a new office space. Success in this effort requires coordination among a diverse set of people, and this is not always an easy task. Research and anecdotal evidence reveals that diversity can promote greater performance once people learn to work effectively with people different from themselves.Page 122

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Winning at Work

Perception Plays a Key Role in Getting a Job

More recruiters than ever are using social media to find good employees. A recent U.S. survey of 800 recruiters by Jobvite revealed that 25 percent of hiring companies overall are developing recruiting methods that rely on Instagram; the rate is 63 percent among technology companies. Results also showed that nearly half the companies surveyed (43 percent) have used texting to communicate with job applicants, and they report a high approval rating for those communications.1

Another survey reveals that nearly 3 in 4 Millennial job seekers (aged 18 to 34) found their most recent job through social media. That’s not too surprising if you consider that 82 percent of hiring organizations report using social media to recruit “passive” candidates; that is, those who are not actively looking for a job.2

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Perceptions Start with Social Media Posts

A national CareerBuilder survey of more than 1,000 hiring and HR managers found that 7 in 10 research job candidates online, using their social network profiles to assess their potential fit with the company. Nearly half said if they couldn’t find a candidate online, they would hesitate to get in touch for an interview. Although the Internet is a gold mine of information for recruiters, a poorly managed online image can hurt your chances of finding a job. Forty percent of employers in the CareerBuilder survey report forming a negative impression of candidates who posted “provocative or inappropriate” photos; 36 percent disliked online revelations of alcohol or drug use; and 31 percent were turned off by expressions of race, gender, or religious bias.3

Consider the experience of Pete Maulik, chief strategy officer at Fahrenheit 212. Maulik was ready to make an offer to an applicant, but after checking out the man’s LinkedIn profile he decided the applicant was not a team player. “He took credit for everything short of splitting the atom,” ­Maulik said. “Everything was ‘I did this.’ He seemed like a lone wolf. He did everything himself.”

Maulik recalls another seemingly good applicant who used his Twitter account “to disparage just about every new innovation in the marketplace.” Maulik concluded the applicant “was much more comfortable as the critic than the collaborative creator.”4 This candidate was not hired either.

Recommended Tips

The following suggestions can help you manage the impression you are projecting based on the information you post on social media.

Do’s

Be aware of each platform’s policies and procedures because they tend to vary.

Focus on the quality of your posts rather than the quantity.

Use Twitter and LinkedIn to play up your professional interests (like sharing relevant news articles).

Cross-check your résumé and LinkedIn profile to make sure there are no discrepancies.

Share information about your volunteer activities and work with professional associations.

Make sure there are no typos or grammatical errors in your materials.

Remember to continuously update your profiles.

Don’ts

Don’t bad-mouth a current or former employer, colleague, or company.

Avoid foul language and negative remarks.

Don’t post when you are impaired, or even when you are overly tired or emotional.

Don’t post anything that might be perceived as racist, biased, sexually oriented, or illegal.5

What’s Ahead in This Chapter

We want to help you enhance your understanding of the perceptual process so you won’t fall victim to common perceptual errors—yours or other people’s. This chapter will show you, for instance, how perception influences the way managers manage diversity. Diversity should matter to you because the way a business deals with diversity affects the way you are perceived as an individual. Diversity matters to your organization too, because it allows you to take advantage of the fullest range of human skill and talent. We also discuss barriers and challenges to managing diversity, and the practices organizations use to overcome them.Page 123

4.1 THE PERCEPTION PROCESS

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Understanding how you process information will help you see how perception affects a variety of ­important processes and outcomes within the Organizing Framework for Understanding and Applying OB. It can also assist in managing the perceptions people form about you.

Imagine you are driving on a winding mountain road at dusk and suddenly see something in the road. Is it an animal, a rock, or a person? Should you stop or just maneuver around it? Suppose you’re in a team meeting and one of your teammates makes a negative statement about your work. Is the person being political or just having a bad day? Your mind is trying to quickly answer these questions before you respond.

LO 4-1

Describe how you form perceptions of others.

Perception is key to resolving the above questions. Perception is a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings. Recognition of objects is one of this process’s major functions. But because organizational behavior’s (OB’s) principal focus is on people, our discussion will emphasize social perception rather than object perception.

Perception is important to OB because it affects our actions and decisions. It is based on our perception of reality, not on reality itself. Our exploration of this important process begins with a discussion of social perception and the four stages of processing information. We then consider a model of person perception, which provides a practical framework for understanding how we form perceptions of others. Finally we consider the managerial implications of person perception.

Stages of Social Perception

You can learn to avoid making perceptual errors by understanding the process that guides perception. As shown in Figure 4.2, there are four stages of social perception:

FIGURE 4.2 Social Perception: A Social Information Processing Model

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Stage 1: Selective attention/comprehension

Stage 2: Encoding and simplification

Stage 3: Storage and retention

Stage 4: Retrieval and responsePage 124

The first three stages describe how specific social information is observed and stored in memory. The fourth and final stage, retrieval and response, involves turning mental representations into real-world judgments and decisions.

Let’s look at the four stages of social perception by following a simple example. Suppose you were thinking of taking a personal finance course. Three professors teach the same course, using different types of instruction and testing procedures. Through personal experience, you now prefer good professors who rely on the case method of instruction and essay tests. According to social perception theory, you would likely arrive at a decision regarding which course to take based on the instructor, following the steps outlined in the following sections.

Stage 1: Selective Attention/Comprehension People are constantly bombarded by physical and social stimuli. To avoid being overwhelmed, they selectively perceive subsets of environmental stimuli. This is where attention plays a role. Attention is the ­process of becoming consciously aware of someone or something. Research has shown that people tend to pay attention to salient stimuli—that is, something that stands out from its context. For example, a 250-pound man would certainly be salient in a women’s aerobics class but not at a meeting of NFL players.

One’s needs and goals often dictate which stimuli are salient. In our personal finance example, you would begin your search for the “right” professor by asking friends who have taken classes from the three available professors. You might also interview the professors who teach the course to gather additional information. In Figure 4.2, all the information you obtain shows as competing environmental stimuli labeled A through F. You interpret and categorize your notes.

Stage 2: Encoding and Simplification Our memory does not store observed information in its original form; encoding is required. Our brains interpret or translate raw information into mental representations. To accomplish this, individuals assign pieces of information to cognitive categories, groups of objects that are considered equivalent. For example, categories are generally designated by names—for example, dog, animal.6

In social information processing theory, a particular category builds on a schema. A schema represents a person’s mental picture or summary of a particular event or type of stimulus. For example, picture a sports car. Does the picture show a small vehicle with two doors? Is it red? If you answered yes, you would tend to classify all small, two-door, red vehicles as sports cars because this type of car possesses characteristics consistent with your sports car schema. We interpret and evaluate people, events, and objects by comparing their characteristics with information contained in schemata (the plural form of schema).

Relying on encoding helps us to simplify what might be a bewildering range of inputs. Encoding and schemata make the world more manageable. In our personal finance example, let’s say you simplify by focusing on categories most salient to you: the method of instruction, testing procedures, and past grade distributions. Figure 4.2 shows these three salient pieces of information as lines A, C, and F.

Having collected relevant information about the three professors and their approaches, you compare this information with other details contained in schemata. This comparison leads you to form an impression of what each professor’s course might be like. In turn, the relevant information (lines A, C, and F in Figure 4.2) are passed along to the third stage of the process.

Stage 3: Storage and Retention Long-term memory is like an apartment complex consisting of separate units connected to common areas. Sometimes different people in each apartment will interact. Long-term memory similarly consists of separate but related compartments (or wings), one each for events, semantic materials, and people.7

Event memory: This compartment includes categories with information about both specific events (relying on unique details) and general events (relying on schemata). These memories describe sequences of events in familiar situations: going to a restaurant, going on a job interview, going to a movie, etc.

Semantic memory: This refers to general knowledge about the world, as a kind of mental dictionary of concepts. Each concept includes a definition (e.g., a good leader) and associated traits (outgoing), emotional states (happy), physical characteristicsPage 125 (short), and behaviors (works hard). These concepts are stored as schemata and are often subject to cultural differences.

Person memory: Categories within this compartment supply information about a single individual (your professor) or groups of people (professors). You are more likely to remember information about a person, event, or advertisement if it contains characteristics that are similar to something stored in the compartments of memory.

As time draws near for you to decide which personal finance professor to choose, your schemata of them are stored in the three categories of long-term memory and are available for immediate retrieval and comparison.

Stage 4: Retrieval and Response People retrieve information from memory when they make judgments and decisions, and these ultimately come about in one of two ways: (1) we draw on, interpret, and integrate categorial information stored in long-term memory or (2) we retrieve a summary judgment that has already been made.

On course registration day, you have to choose which professor to take for personal finance. After retrieving your schemata-based impressions from memory, you select a good professor who uses the case method and gives essay tests (line C in Figure 4.2). In contrast, you may choose your preferred professor by simply recalling the decision you made two weeks ago.

A Model of Person Perception

Figure 4.1 showed that perception is an important process in the Organizing Framework for Understanding and Applying OB because it affects our actions and decisions. Consider dieting. Recently Weight Watchers International stopped using the word diet in its advertising because of the word’s negative perception. In fact, the company slimmed down its own name to WW and is adding the word wellness to its brand. Company president and CEO Mindy Grossman noted that “We are becoming the world’s partner in wellness.”8 Weight Watchers clearly is trying to use the perception process to increase sales.

Perception is influenced by three key components: the characteristics of the perceiver, of the ­target—the person or group being observed—and of the situation (see Figure 4.3).9 Let’s take a closer look at how these components work.

Music artist DJ Khaled is one of many celebrities who endorse Weight Watchers and its wellness approach to a healthy lifestyle. Do you think more people will join WW’s programs because of celebrity endorsements?

Lu Chau/AP Images

Characteristics of the Perceiver Figure 4.3 shows six key perceiver characteristics that affect our perceptions of others.10 As you read, consider how they might have influenced your perceptions in the past.

Direction of gaze. Gaze is the first step in the perception process because it focuses your attention and tells the brain what you think is important in the immediate environment. When scanning people, we also tend to pay attention to others who are gazing at us. We usually remember people when we make direct eye contact with them.

Needs and goals. We are more likely to perceive whatever is related to our goals and needs. For example, we perceive examples of food if we are hungry. If we are looking for a friend at a party, we scan the room for familiar faces and fail to perceive strangers.

Experience with target. Our perception of a target is influenced by our past experience with him or her. You might perceive someone’s firm handshake negatively, for instance, if you know this person has attempted to exert power and control over you in the past. The same handshake is positive if you remember the target as a friendly, caring person.Page 126

Category-based knowledge. Category-based knowledge consists of perceptions, including stereotypes, that we have stored in memory about various categories of people (professors, singers, artists, police, politicians, and so on). We use this information to interpret what we see and hear. For instance, if you believe professors in general are intelligent, you are more likely to perceive that those teaching your current courses are intelligent. If your memory tells you that people who lie cannot be trusted, you are likely to perceive a politician as untrustworthy who is caught in a lie. We discuss stereotypes in the next section.