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. For example, both people and animals recognize familiar objects in their environments.
People must recognize objects to meaningfully interact with their environment.
But since organizational behavior’s (OB’s) principal focus is on people, social perception is emphasized rather than object perception.
Characteristics of the Perceiver:
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.
Needs and goals: We are more likely to perceive whatever is related to our goals and to our needs.
Experience with target: Our perception of a target is influenced by our past experience with him or her.
Category-based knowledge: This knowledge consists of perceptions, including stereotypes, that we have stored in memory about various categories of people that we use to interpret what we see and hear.
Gender and emotional status: Women recognize emotions more accurately than men, and experiencing negative emotions such as anger and frustration is likely to make your perceptions more negative.
Cognitive load: Cognitive load represents the amount of activity going on in your brain; your perceptions are more likely to be distorted and susceptible to stereotypical judgments if you are tired.
Characteristics of the Target:
Direction of gaze: We form different perceptions of people based on whether they are looking at us while conversing.
Facial features and body shape: We often use faces as markers for gender, race, and age, but face and body characteristics can lead us to fall back on cultural stereotypes.
Nonverbal cues: Gestures, touching, facial expressions, eye contact, and body movements like slouching all convey messages, and these nonverbal actions are highly influential in perception.
Appearance or dress: We all are susceptible to being influenced by appearance and attire.
Physical attractiveness: The beauty-is-good stereotype leads us to perceive attractive people positively.
Characteristics of the Situation:
Context of interaction: Perceptions are affected by the social context in which the interaction takes place.
Culture and race consistency: We more accurately recognize emotions and expressions displayed by people from our own culture or from other familiar cultures.
Interviewers make hiring decisions based on their impression of how an applicant fits the perceived requirements of a job. Unfortunately, many of these decisions are made on the basis of implicit cognition.
Implicit cognition represents any thoughts or beliefs that are automatically activated from memory without our conscious awareness.
The existence of implicit cognition leads people to make biased decisions without an understanding that it is occurring.
Managers can be trained to understand and reduce this type of hidden bias. Bias can be reduced by using structured as opposed to unstructured interviews, and by relying on evaluations from multiple interviewers rather than just one or two people. More and more companies are using virtual interviews as a tool for reducing problems associated with implicit cognition.
Faulty schemata about good versus poor performance can lead to inaccurate performance appraisals, which erode morale.
Therefore, managers must accurately identify and communicate the behavioral characteristics and results they look for in good performance at the beginning of a review cycle.
Furthermore, because memory for specific instances of employee performance deteriorates over time, managers need a mechanism for accurately recalling employee behavior.
Research demonstrates that employees’ evaluations of leader effectiveness are influenced strongly by their schemata of good and poor leaders.
The answer is E, all of the above. All four will reduce bias.
Stereotypes represent a key component of the perception process because they are used during encoding.
A stereotype is an individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group.
Stereotypes are not always negative. For example, the belief that engineers are good at math is certainly part of a stereotype.
Stereotypes may or may not be accurate.
Unfortunately, stereotypes can lead to poor decisions. Specifically they can create barriers for women, older individuals, people of color, and people with disabilities, all while undermining loyalty and job satisfaction.
Stereotyping is based on the following four-step process:
Categorization. We categorize people into groups according to criteria (such as gender, age, race, and occupation).
Inferences. Next, we infer that all people within a particular category possess the same traits or characteristics.
Expectations. We form expectations of others and interpret their behavior according to our stereotypes.
Maintenance. We maintain stereotypes by overestimating the frequency of stereotypic behaviors exhibited by others, incorrectly explaining expected and unexpected behaviors, differentiating minority individuals from ourselves.
Research shows that it takes accurate information and motivation to reduce the use of stereotypes.
The key managerial challenge is to reduce the extent to which stereotypes influence decision making and interpersonal processes throughout the organization.
Three ways that this can be achieved:
Managers should educate people about stereotypes and how they can influence our behavior and decision making.
Managers should create opportunities for diverse employees to meet and work together in cooperative groups of equal status.
Managers should encourage all employees to strive to increase their awareness regarding stereotypes. Awareness helps reduce the application of stereotypes when making decisions and when interacting with others.
The answer is B, all stereotypes are negative. Stereotypes can be positive.
Attribution theory is based on a simple premise: People infer causes for observed behavior. Rightly or wrongly, we constantly formulate cause-and-effect explanations for how we and others behave.
Formally defined, causal attributions are suspected or inferred causes of behavior.
Managers need to understand how people formulate these attributions because the attributions profoundly affect organizational behavior.
Behavior can be attributed either to internal factors within a person (such as ability) or to external factors in the environment (such as a difficult task).
Kelley hypothesized that people make causal attributions by observing three dimensions of behavior: consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
These dimensions vary independently, forming various combinations and leading to differing attributions.
Consensus compares an individual’s behavior with that of his or her peers. There is high consensus when one acts like the rest of the group and low consensus when one acts differently.
Distinctiveness compares a person’s behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks. High distinctiveness means the individual has performed the task in question in a significantly different manner than he or she has performed other tasks.
Consistency judges if the individual’s performance on a given task is consistent over time. Low consistency is undesirable for obvious reasons, and implies that a person is unable to perform a certain task at some standard level. High consistency implies that a person performs a certain task the same way, with little or no variation over time.
Kelley theorized that people attribute behavior to either internal causes (personal factors) or external causes (environmental factors) depending on the ranking of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency.
While other combinations are possible, the two options shown above have been most frequently studied.
Say all employees are performing poorly (high consensus) on only one of several tasks (high distinctiveness) and during only one time period (low consistency). A supervisor will probably attribute the employees’ poor performance to an external source such as a temporary distraction or event.
In contrast, if only one employee performs poorly (low consensus), across several tasks (low distinctiveness), and over time (high consistency), the supervisor will likely attribute performance to personal factors.
The fundamental attribution bias reflects one’s tendency to attribute another person’s behavior to his or her personal characteristics, as opposed to situational factors. This bias causes perceivers to ignore important environmental factors that often significantly affect behavior. This leads to inaccurate assessments of performance, which in turn foster inappropriate responses to poor performance.
The self-serving bias represents one’s tendency to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure. The self-serving bias suggests employees will attribute their success to internal factors (high ability or hard work) and their failures to uncontrollable external factors (tough job, bad luck, unproductive coworkers, or an unsympathetic boss). This tendency plays out in all aspects of life.
We tend to disproportionately attribute behavior to internal causes. This can result in inaccurate evaluations of performance, leading to reduced employee motivation. No one likes to be blamed because of factors they perceive to be beyond their control. The Organizing Framework for Understanding and Applying OB offers a simple solution for overcoming this tendency. You must remind yourself that behavior and performance is a function of both person factors and environmental characteristics.
Other attributional biases may lead managers to take inappropriate actions. Such actions could include promotions, transfers, layoffs, and so forth. This can dampen motivation and performance.
Attributional training sessions can help. Basic attributional processes can be explained, and we can be taught to detect and avoid attributional biases.
An employee’s attributions for his or her own performance have dramatic effects on subsequent motivation, performance, and personal attitudes such as self- esteem. For instance, people tend to give up, develop lower expectations for future success, and experience decreased self-esteem when they attribute failure to a lack of ability. Employees are more likely to display high performance and job satisfaction when they attribute success to internal factors such as ability and effort.
The answer is A, fundamental attribution error. The manager is assuming it was Megan’s fault.
SOURCE: Gardenswartz, Lee, and Anita Rowe. Diverse Teams at Work: Capitalizing on the Power of Diversity. Virginia: Society For Human Resource Management, 2003.
Figure 4.5 shows that personality is at the center of the diversity wheel because it represents a stable set of characteristics responsible for a person’s identity.
The next layer of diversity includes internal dimensions that are referred to as surface-level dimensions of diversity. Surface-level characteristics are those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, gender, and age. Because these characteristics are viewed as unchangeable, they strongly influence our attitudes, expectations, and assumptions about others, which, in turn, influence our behavior.
Figure 4.3 shows that the next layer of diversity comprises external influences. They represent individual differences that we have a greater ability to influence or control. Examples include where you live today, your religious affiliation, whether you are married and have children, and your work experiences. These dimensions also exert a significant influence on our perceptions, behavior, and attitudes.
The final layer of diversity includes organizational dimensions such as seniority, work location, and job title and function. Integrating these last two layers results in what is called deep-level characteristics of diversity. Deep-level characteristics are those that take time to emerge in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values. These characteristics are definitely under our control.
It’s important to understand that affirmative action is not a law in and of itself. It is an outgrowth of equal employment opportunity (EEO) legislation. The goal of this legislation is to outlaw discrimination and to encourage organizations to proactively prevent discrimination.
Discrimination occurs when employment decisions about an individual are due to reasons not associated with performance or are not related to the job. For example, organizations cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, sex, age, physical or mental disabilities, or pregnancy.
The answer is D, deep-level characteristics.
The rationale for managing diversity is more than its legal, social, or moral dimension. Quite simply, it’s good business. Managing diversity gives the organization the ability to grow and maintain a business in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
An access-and-legitimacy perspective on diversity is based on recognizing that the organization’s markets and constituencies are culturally diverse.
It therefore behooves the organization to match the diversity in parts of its own workforce as a way of gaining access to and legitimacy with those markets and constituent groups.
One study discovered that customer satisfaction and employee productivity were higher when the racio-ethnic composition of customers matched that of store employees.
The glass ceiling represents an invisible but absolute barrier or solid roadblock that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions.
Various statistics support the existence of a glass ceiling. The pay gap between men and women is one example. In 2012, the median weekly income in full-time management, professional, and related occupations was $1,328 for men in contrast to $951 for women.
This gap includes MBA graduates. Female graduates from top MBA programs earned 93 cents for every dollar earned by a male graduate, and the pay gap tends to increase over time.
A WSJ/NBC national poll revealed that 40 percent of the women reported experiencing gender discrimination.
Educational attainment: Women earned the majority of bachelor’s and master’s degrees from 2006 through 2012.
Seats on boards of directors of Fortune 500 firms: 9.6% in 1995 and 16.6% in 2013.
Leadership positions in educational institutions: In 2010, women represented 18.7% of college presidents and 29.9% of board members.
Federal court appointments: In 2013, 32% and 30% of Federal Courts of Appeals and U.S. District Court judges, respectively, were women.
All told, minority groups will constitute approximately 57 percent of the workforce in 2060, according to the Census Bureau.
And yet, three additional trends suggest that current-day minority groups are stalled at their own glass ceiling.
Smaller percentage in the professional class: Latinos and African Americans have a smaller relative hold on managerial and professional jobs within their racial groupings.
More discrimination cases: The number of race-based charges of discrimination that were deemed to show reasonable cause by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission increased from 294 in 1995 to 957 in 2013. Companies paid a total of $112 million to resolve these claims outside of litigation in 2013.
Lower earnings. Minorities also tend to earn less personal income than whites. Median weekly earnings in 2010 were $1,103, $884, $1,275, and $895 for whites, blacks, Asians, and Latinos, respectively. Interestingly, Asians had the highest median income.
America’s population and workforce are getting older, and the workforce includes greater generational differences than ever before. We already see four generations of employees working together, soon to be joined by a fifth. Managers need to deal effectively with these generational differences in values, attitudes, and behaviors. Many companies—including IBM, Lockheed Martin, Ernst & Young, and Aetna—address this issue by providing training workshops on generational diversity.
The answer is A. Hire employees to match the diversity in the population.
Inaccurate stereotypes and prejudice: This barrier manifests itself in the belief that differences are viewed as weaknesses. In turn, this promotes the view that diversity hiring will mean sacrificing competence and quality.
Ethnocentrism: The ethnocentrism barrier represents the feeling that one’s cultural rules and norms are superior or more legitimate than the rules and norms of another culture.
Poor career planning: This barrier is associated with the lack of opportunities for diverse employees to get the type of work assignments that qualify them for senior management positions.
A negative diversity climate: We define organizational climate as employee perceptions about an organization’s formal and informal policies, practices, and procedures. Diversity climate is a subcomponent of an organization’s overall climate and is defined as the employees’ aggregate “perceptions about the organization’s diversity-related formal structure characteristics and informal values.”
An unsupportive and hostile working environment for diverse employees: Sexual, racial, and age harassment are common examples of hostile work environments. Whether perpetrated against women, men, older individuals, or LGBT people, hostile environments are demeaning, unethical, and appropriately called “work environment pollution.”
Lack of political savvy on the part of diverse employees: Diverse employees may not get promoted because they do not know how to “play the game” of getting along and getting ahead in an organization. Research reveals that women and people of color are excluded from organizational networks.
Difficulty in balancing career and family issues: Women still assume the majority of the responsibilities associated with raising children.
Fears of reverse discrimination: Some employees believe that managing diversity is a smoke screen for reverse discrimination. This belief leads to very strong resistance because people feel that one person’s gain is another’s loss.
Diversity is not seen as an organizational priority: This leads to subtle resistance that shows up in the form of complaints and negative attitudes. Employees may complain about the time, energy, and resources devoted to diversity that could have been spent doing “real work.”
The need to revamp the organization’s performance appraisal and reward system: Performance appraisals and reward systems must reinforce the need to effectively manage diversity. This means that success will be based on a new set of criteria.
Resistance to change: Effectively managing diversity entails significant organizational and personal change.
Option 1: Include or exclude.
This choice may be an outgrowth of affirmative-action programs. Its primary goal is to either increase or decrease the number of diverse people at all levels of the organization.
Option 2: Deny.
People using this option deny that differences exist. Denial may manifest itself in proclamations that all decisions are color-, gender-, and age-blind and that success is solely determined by merit and performance.
Option 3: Assimilate.
The basic premise behind this alternative is that all diverse people will learn to fit in or become like the dominant group. It only takes time and reinforcement for people to see the light.
Option 4: Suppress.
Differences are squelched or discouraged when using this approach. This can be done by telling or reinforcing others to quit whining and complaining about issues.
Option 5: Isolate.
This option maintains the current way of doing things by setting the diverse person off to the side. In this way the individual is unable to influence organizational change.
Option 6: Tolerate.
Toleration entails acknowledging differences but not valuing or accepting them. It represents a live-and-let-live approach that superficially allows organizations to give lip-service to the issue of managing diversity. Toleration is different from isolation in that it allows for the inclusion of diverse people. However, differences are not really valued or accepted when an organization uses this option.
Option 7: Build relationships.
This approach is based on the premise that good relationships can overcome differences. It addresses diversity by fostering quality relationships—characterized by acceptance and understanding—among diverse groups.
Option 8: Foster mutual adaptation.
In this option, people are willing to adapt or change their views for the sake of creating positive relationships with others. This implies that employees and management alike must be willing to accept differences, and, most important, agree that everyone and everything is open for change. Diversity training is one way to kick-start mutual adaptation.
