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How Perceptions Impact Organizations

interpreting it in order to give meaning to their environment. What one perceives can be very

different from what someone else perceives which might be both very different from the

reality or objective. In most cases behavior is established from an individual’s perceptions of

reality rather than reality itself.

Workplace Perception

In an organization behavior is based on the employee’s perception of the workplace

conditions. Many conditions influence how something is perceived, the factors that are

involved by the perceiver are concerned about a person’s attitude, interests, experience and

what they expect. Other factors involve the context for the work, such as working time, the

social setting and the factors related to the actual organization which may involve the

organization’s background information, its size and its familiarity to an employee.

What employees perceive from their workplace influences how productive they are

within an organization. In order for employers to be able to influence productivity they must

be able to evaluate how their employees perceive their work. So, employees who have a

negative perception of their work are more likely to be involved in absenteeism and less job

satisfaction.

Decision Making in an Organization

The decisions made in an organization are usually influenced by perception. In an

example of an interview by the first few minutes of the interview the interviewer already

forms an impression of the interviewee. These perceptions are based on how good the

interviewer perceives a candidate being good for the company. The remaining time is usually

spent affirming the interviewers first decision about the candidate.

Perceptual Bias

A bias is an inclination for or against an individual, a group, an organization or

something usually in a way that is considered to be unfair. Perceptual bias is when our

perception is distorted based on inaccurate and overly simplistic assumptions this leads to

faulty judgements. These assumptions, attitudes and beliefs are in our subconscious mind.

Over time we store information about things in our minds which in turn lead to perceptual

biases and we use this information as a shortcut to make decisions and make our conclusions

much more quicky. The attitudes, stereotypes and beliefs block our ability to make sound

decisions. There are various types of perceptual biases

Stereotyping

This is a type of bias where there is a tendency to judge someone based on the how we

perceive the group a person belongs to. It’s a generalized belief about a specific group of

people. It is very important to check for stereotyping in an organization in order to avoid

making wrongful assumptions about people but be sure to understand people based on facts.

Examples include social stereotypes where assumptions are based on the different

characteristics, economic classes, their age, skills etc. Both positive and negative stereotypes

exist about various social groups. A stereotype can be established in an expression like

“Nerds are weird people” or “People from group X are not as capable as people from group

Y”

Selective Perception

This a type of perception bias where there is a tendency to interpret what is seen based

on factors such as one’s interest, attitudes, experience, conditioning, emotional state and

background. A broad term to identify the behavior all people exhibit as we all tend to “see
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things” based on our own references. In selective perception people tend to overlook, or

forget information that goes contrary to what they expect or believe.

In an organization selective perception plays a big role in the success of leaders. By

not only listening to what people are saying but also trying to understand how they came to

settle into that point of view. Also, the leader needs to scrutinize how he came into

conclusion based on their own perceptions which may be valid or not.

An example is when a manager in a company believes that working from home is not

productive. The productivity of employees who work remotely might be more than those who

work on site or the same. In such a situation it will be hard for a manager to accept that factor

due to his selective bias.

Halo effect

This is a type of a perception bias in which our impression of something is based one

outstanding property. These lead us to transfer our perception about the thing to other

unrelated attributes of it. When there is a tendency to like an attribute of something there is a

positive predisposition toward everything about it and also if you don’t like an aspect of

something you will have a negative predisposition towards everything about it.

This effect can impact organizations, locations and products as well as our judgments

of people. If a customer like an aspect of an organization’s product they are going to rate their

products favorably in future. In retrospect if customers have a bad experience with a product,

they are going to judge it unfairly in the future.

An example is in a website, an organization website can lead to a halo effect in that if

it is well done and of quality a person will perceive that the organization have high quality

services or goods. If a website is poorly done when searching for services it might lead a

potential customer to conclude that an organization doesn’t have its act together and does not
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care about its customers. Sometimes you will get a good product buying from a poorly

implemented site.

Perceptual Bias and Organizational Behavior and the Importance of Disclosure in an

Organization

The above scenarios show that perceptual biases can occur across a variety of

situations in an organization. It can be seen that leaders in an organization can utilize

selective biases in situations that are related to their departmental goals and activities. This

may impact the decision-making processes and abilities. Also, external factors of an

organization are prone to selective bias based on how they perceive an organization to be.

In an organization disclosure is a strategy of deliberately revealing information about

ourselves. This may include our personality, achievements, etc. In a relationship such as

worker, employer relationship parties should share sufficient information about each other.

This is necessary for development of positive interpersonal relationships.

The Johari a simple and useful tool used for illustrating and improving self-awareness

and disclosure within a group of individuals. It can also be used to improve a groups

relationship with other groups. This model is very relevant in the situations of interpersonal

behavior, cooperation and group collaboration.

The Johari window has four panes which art the open arena, an area of our personality

that we know and also known to other people. Hidden area this area contains information that

we would like to keep confidential. Blind spot this is information others have about us but we

do not know. The unknown this is a part of our personality that is unexplored such as the

subconscious.
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