The role that perception plays in the making of decisions in organisations
Individual differences are the result of specificity of the cognitive processes. Perception is one of them. It forms an understanding of the situation and the behaviour of an individual and therefore directly related to the study of organizational behaviour. For instance, through the perception process, people can better explain why employees in the same situations usually behave differently.
It is well-known that among the existing cognitive processes, such as thinking and imagination, the process of perception is one of the most significant. It could be defined as a cognitive process by which individuals can select and give meaning to environmental stimuli. The crucial thing is that individual’s behaviour is based on their perception and answering the question: “What the reality is?” (regarding an individual understanding), rather than based on what is itself reality is. Thus, the reason for perception’s importance is quite simple: people are different and act in distinctive ways. The stereotypes, culture, knowledge, mood, needs and other characteristics can directly affect what people believe and how they see it because everyone sees the world from the different angles. Especially, understanding of perception is essential when it comes to real situations in the workplace, where an employee’s decisions depend on the perceived information. Hence, individual perception directly shapes organizational behaviour and it can have some effect on the results in both: personal and organisational success.
The study of how people perceive and interact with other people could be defined as social cognition or social information processing. People’s senses could give information which could be real, but those situations which could be experienced consciously might be misrepresented by our perceptual apparatus. With a variety experiments of many researchers, it is clear that perception formed at a very early stage of development of human lives.
By enhancing the understanding of how perception process works, employees can avoid many problems in the workplace. Let’s understand the importance of stages in the perceptual process. The first one is attention. This one is the most essential because it helps to filter the external information. Each piece of information which could be ignored could never figure into employees’ decision-making. When we are attempting to understand people, the norms of our cultures often serve as an internal frame of reference that we lean on in perception. The next stage is organization, which helps employees to simplify the filtered data in mind. The third one has a name “recall” which store information in the memory for later use. After all the stages are in the brain, the decision-making process occurs.
It is believed, that it is a strong connection between perception and individual decision-making. Decision making is the process which is accumulated with perceived information in order to sort out something.
If employees are facing the complex of decisions which need to be sorted out, they tend to stop thinking and let their unconscious decide. Employees could ‘focus on two key issues: the reliability of the effect and alternative explanations that do not necessitate the involvement of unconscious processes. Moreover, a perception, in this case, plays a tremendous role, because it can be masked stimuli which can produce implicit memory and as a result perception can modify employee’s behaviour in the future.
The role of biases is crucial in understanding the results of employees’ decisions. To solve problems accurately, and accurate device solutions, leaders, should to know where their biases lie and adjust appropriately — as the sharpshooter analogy suggests. Moreover, the mistakes in decisions usually could not be random. So that, they called cognitive biases or logical fallacies and characterised with systematic behaviour and result from emotions or motivations.
Based on the above, it must be emphasised there are a lot of factors which causes perception and in perspective, can influence on decision-making. External and internal factors have a massive influence on perception. Focusing on the internal, an individual might make differ choices in terms of sensory limits or thresholds (the noise in the workplace, for example, could be perceived differently by workers). Also, psychological factors such as learning and motives can give rise to an inclination to perceive certain stimuli with a readiness to respond in certain ways. That is why it is essential for managers to take into account needs of a particular individual. Regarding external factors, the tendency to give more attention to such kind of stimuli as bright, novel, repeated and those which in strong contrast to the background. All these factors are important in the understanding of what could be related to the nature and characteristics of the stimuli. Moreover, perceiving other people by recognising individual differences with the help of non-verbal communication, for instance, body language.
Among various factors which could influence on perception, there is one described as the Halo effect: ‘a bias that colors judgments rosy based on overall impression, or a single example.’ For instance, the situation on an interview when an HR manager bases the opinion on one characteristic of the candidate: intelligence or appearance. This tendency appears when an individual perceives others regarding a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ person. Hence, ‘good’ individuals characterised with all the good qualities and vice versa, ‘bad’ people with all the bad qualities.
Furthermore, one of the leading issue for the process of how the information could be interpreted is perceptual expectancy, which create a mindset that causes individuals to anticipate future behaviours or events. When employees have expectancies (as a result of our perception), it influences on interaction with other workers and an employer. The recent study of CIPD (2016) demonstrated a huge gap between how employees’ expectations are not fulfilled with a company they work for. Four in ten of workers (42 percent) described an inadequate line manager and a shortage of training programmes (42 percent) as primary reasons for their poor performance in the organisation. What is more, 32 percent of respondents declared disappointment of the career progress and lack of personal development. This survey highlights one critical aspect. It is about a misunderstanding between both: an employer and an employee, which caused by poor understanding of perception.
Another relevant example is a psychological contact which demonstrates how both could perceive the beliefs and expectations: an employee and an employer. Perceptions of the psychological contract are often informal and imprecise: they may be inferred from actions or from what has happened in the past, as well as from statements made by the employer, for example during the recruitment process or in performance appraisals.
In other words, the psychological contract has nothing with a legal contract which could be signed, as a result, the reality of a relationship between an employer and an employee is uncertain. Psychological breakdown contract could lead to detrimental results such as employee turnover and poor job dissatisfaction. However, if an employee perceives that the psychological contract was a breakdown from the side of an employer, the reason for that seems to be a situation of a worker’s faithless of expectations, rather than managers failure.
The fundamental view on employees’ perception was made by Holitz (2015). He focused his research on organisational justice which includes facial characteristics of a potential candidate. In other words, he aimed to know: can an employee’s initial impression of trustworthiness (which based on surface cues) have a tremendous impact on subsequent viewpoint on the company? Evaluations of trustworthiness involve subjective impressions that an entity possesses the requisite characteristics (e.g., ability, benevolence, integrity) to be a favourable exchange partner. The results of the study indicated that employees with a high rate of trust expected decent treatment and gave a trusted object ‘the benefit of the doubt,’ rather than employees with a low trust who expect disadvantageous treatment and appraise all actions of managers as detrimental. Moreover, the more willing people were to accept vulnerability (i.e., trust), the less likely they were to imagine that the decision maker could or should have acted differently or that they would be better off had the decision maker taken a different course of action. Thus, this study recognizes a significant role of perceiving the trust which can play in shaping perceptions of employees’ trust and in perspective influence on decision-making.
Stereotyping is a part of perception because it can shape judgments which workers can make about other persons. Consequently, if a manager relies on some stereotypes, it can lead to poor decision-making within an organisation. For instance, older workers are tended to be more and more discriminated. The reason for that is an assumption that older people are less engaged in training programmes and less motivated. Moreover, their frequent problems with health can affect the quality of their work. The research accumulated the results from the interview of 37 workers with 55 years old in the United Kingdom organisations. The outcomes demonstrated that organisations who had older people increased in performance because workers were high in cognitive functioning, more stable and had skills of influencing on other employees. Moreover, some workers reported that they did not find it challenging to use technologies and to keep ‘lifelong learning.’ Employers are tended to perceive late-career workers as unprofitable workers, rather than give them a chance to be an integral part of the workplace. Therefore, there are little examples of the most widespread stereotypes which based on nationality (Australians like cricket); occupation (accountants are boring); physical (people with visible tattoos are exhibitionists); education (graduates from Oxford and Cambridge are exceptionally bright); social (unemployed people are lazy); politics (Labour voters favour strong trade unions).
Hence, there are a lot of situations when employees could ultimately arrive at conclusions which based on their perception. It is interesting, how the effect of framing could influence on decision-making. People are probably taking the sure things in situations when the options are framed (concerning gains). People are more cautious and try to keep those things they have for sure. Such situation could be defined as risk-aversive. In contrast, when people observe the condition is framed of loss, most people decide to take a risk, even when they can lose more money. Therefore, according to author’s viewpoint, people demonstrate a willingness to take their chances in vast hopes of preventing loss and such situation could be called risk-seeking. So that, framing effect plays a significant role in perception and could determine what people choose: positive or negative features in person or situation.
Another two effects which distort perception are projection and contrast. The first one focuses on perceiving others through a prism of yourself. If a person is honest, he or she will be waiting for the same trustworthiness from people around. As a result, managers who engaged in projection cannot take into account other individual differences of workers. The contrast effect occurs in a moment when reactions are influenced by other people, who were recently encountered. In other words, people make judgments about an individual and compare them with other individuals. The tendency of evaluating people by comparing them with characteristics of recently observed individuals are commonly found a perceptual error. Authors suggested that employees should try to use their mental effort at the moment of information processing to avoid misunderstandings in decision-making.
The real issue for employees and employers is to make right decisions within an organisation. There are two systems of thinking. The logical one is capable of analysing the problem and deliberate rational outcomes. Also, this part is slower and demand a lot of energy. On the contrary, another system is intuitive. This one helps individuals to make decisions faster and automatic. This method is deeply hidden and works as auto-pilot mechanism. Consequently, a real dilemma comes at the moment when employees mistakenly permit their intuitive approach to make fast decisions, rather than allow a slow, logical system to work. So, such systematic mistakes create cognitive biases, which affect everything that individuals do.
Besides, intuitive decision-making as was mentioned above is an unconscious process. People make intuitive decisions in eight circumstances and all can be identified: (1) when a high level of uncertainty exists; (2) when there is little precedent to draw on; (3) when variables are less scientifically predictable; (4) when “facts” are limited; (5) when facts do not clearly point the way; (6) when analytical data are of little use; (7) when there are several plausible alternative solutions from which to choose, with good arguments for each; and (8) when time is limited and there is pressure to come up with right decision. Employees and employers should take into account individual differences because both: rational decision-making and intuitive can define the discrepancies between people (gender factor and cultural differences).
It is significant to underline a rational decision-making model the connection between decision-making and perception is very strong, and decisions occur as a reaction to a perceived situation or problem. The study or Woiceshyn (2011) noted that individuals within the organisation should follow six steps to make a rational decision. The first one is to define the problem, then identify the decision criteria. After that employees have to allocate weights to the criteria and develop the alternatives with evaluating all of them. Only after this stage they can select the best alternatives. In order to make a rational decisions employees and employers should educate themselves through special training programmes, which also can be used to equip managers with the skills needed to handle unique situations associated with managing employees with mental disabilities.
To conclude, perception is a significant process in decision making because blind trusting individuals’ senses can lead to believing that their perceived information is a reflection of reality. Unfortunately, an individual’s perception which involves some expectations does not always reflect objective situations in the workplace. Instead of making rational decisions, employees and employers tend to make verdicts which based on their understanding what is true or false. Consequently, it has a lot of limits in the ability to make rational decisions. Relying on accumulation of multiple authors’ views about perception and its implication on the work processes, it must be highlighted, that every time an individual need to make a decision, there is a battle in mind between logic and intuition. Moreover, the intuitive part is more powerful. Overall, there are a lot of factors which influence on perception process and critical challenge for employees and employers is to make decisions which are blind to such stereotypes as gender, race, age and disabilities. Notwithstanding, the full understanding of how people perceive and interpret information with all consequences of it can help employees and employer to improve the skills in the decision-making process in the workplace.
By Natalia Cherepania. Find me on: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook.
