Organizational Behavior
Chapter 3
Perceiving ourselves and others in organizations

Self-concept: how we perceive ourselves

Self-concept: an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations.
Defined at three levels:

• Individual
• Relational
• Collective

Specifically, we view ourselves in terms of our personal traits (individual), connections to friends and coworkers (relational)and memberships in entities (collective).

Self-concept complexity, consistency and clarity

An individual’s self-concept can be described by three characteristics

• Complexity
  The number of distinct and important roles or identities that people perceive about themselves
  Self-expansion: increase complexity
  Also the separation of those identities
  Although everyone has multiple selves, only some of those identities dominate their attention at one time.
• Consistency
  High consistency exist when the individual’s identities require similar personality traits, values, and other tributes.
  Depends on how closely the person’s identities require personal attributes that are similar to his or her actual attributes.
• Clarity
  The degree to which a person’s self-concept is clear, confidently defined and stable.
  When we are confident about who we are, can describe our important identities to others, and provide the same description of ourselves across time.
  Clarity increases with age and is clearer when a person’s multiple selves have higher consistency.

Effects of self-concept characteristics on well-being and behavior

People tend to have better psychological well-being when they have fairly distinct multiple selves (complexity), that are well established (clarity) and require similar personal attributes that are compatible with the individual’s character (consistency).

Self-concept complexity protects our self-esteem when some roles are threatened or damaged.
People tend to have better well-being when their multiple selves are in harmony with each other with the individual’s personality and values.
Also increases with clarity.

Self-concept has opposing effects on individual behavior and performance.
Employees with complex identities tend to have more adaptive decision making and performance.

Self-concept complexity often produces more diverse social networks.

Highly complex self-concepts require more effort to maintain and juggle, which can be stressful.
Self-concept clarity tends to improve performance and its considered vital for leadership roles.
Provides a clearer path forward.
Feel less threatened by interpersonal conflict.
But: inflexibility

Self-enhancement

A person’s inherent motivation to have a positive self-concept (and to others perceive him or her favorably) such as being competent, attractive, lucky, ethical and important.
Observed in many ways

• Individuals rate themselves above average
• Believe that they have a better average probability of success
• Attribute successes to personal motivation or ability

But, people rate themselves above average only for things that are important to them and that are relatively common.

Self-enhancement,

• Positive
  • Individuals tend to experience better mental and physical health when they amplify their self-concept.
  • Over-confidence generates a can-do attitude that motivates persistence in difficult or risky tasks
• Negative
  • Self-enhancement causes people to overestimate future returns in investment decisions and engage in unsafe behavior.
  • Responsible for executives repeating poor decisions, launch misguided corporate diversification strategies, and acquire excessive corporate debt

Self-verification

A person’s inherent motivation to confirm and maintain his or her existing self-concept.
Employees actively communicate their self-concept so coworkers understand it and provide verifying feedback.
Self-verification includes seeking feedback that is not necessarily flattering.

Self-verification is associated with several OB topics

• It affects the perceptual process because employees are more likely to remember information that is consistent with their self-concept. And they non-consciously screen out information that seems inconsistent with it.
• People with high self-concept clarity will consciously dismiss feedback that contradicts their self-concept.
• Employees are motivated to interact with others who affirm their self-views

Self-evaluation

Defined by three elements:

Self-esteem

The extend to which people like, respect and are satisfied with themselves.
Represents a global self-evaluation.
People have degrees of self-esteem for each of their various roles. From these multiple self-appraisals, people form an overall evaluation of themselves, → their global self-esteem.
People with high self-esteem are less influenced by others, tend to persist in spite of failure, and have a higher propensity to think logically.

Self-efficacy

A person’s belief about successfully completing a task.
Those with high self-efficacy have a ‘can-do’ attitude. Often task specific.
People have a general self-efficacy when they belief they can be successful across a variety of situations.
People whit higher general self-efficacy have a more positive overall self-evaluation.

Locus of control

A person’s general beliefs about the amount of control he or she has over personal life events.
Individuals with an internal locus of control belief that life events are caused mainly by their personal characteristics.
A generalized belief, but this belief varies to some extent with the situation.
People with an internal locus of control have a more positive self-evaluation. They also tend to perform better in most employment situations, are more successful in their careers, earn more money, and are better suited for leadership positions.

The social self

Social identity theory: a theory that people define themselves by the groups to which they belong or have an emotional attachment.

Social identity is a complex combination of many memberships arranged in a hierarchy of importance.
Determining importance:

• How easily you are identified as a member of a reference group
• Your minority status in a group
• The group’s status

All of us try to balance our personal and social identities, but the priority of uniqueness (personal identities) versus belongingness (social identities) differs from one person to the next.

Expressing disagreement with others is a sign of distinctiveness and can help employees form a clear self-concept, particularly when that disagreement is based on differences in personal values.

Perceiving the world around us

Perception: the process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us.
Determining which information to notice, as well as how to categorize and interpret it withing the framework of our existing knowledge.

Selective attention: the process of attending to some information received by our senses and ignoring other information.
Influenced by characteristics of the person or object being perceived. Also by context. Characteristics of the perceiver also influence selective attention, usually without the perceivers awareness.
When information is received through the senses, our brain quickly and non-consciously assesses whether it is relevant or irrelevant to us and then attaches emotional markers to the retained information.
Emotional markers help us store information in memory. Those emotions are later reproduced when recalling the perceived information.

Selective attention problems:

• The effect of our assumptions and expectations about future events
• Confirmation bias

Perceptual organization and interpretations

We pay attention to a tiny fraction of the stimuli received by the senses. Even so, the human brain further reduces the huge volume and complexity of the information received through various perceptual grouping strategies.

Perceptual grouping occurs mostly without our awareness, yet it is the foundation for making sense of things and fulfilling our need for cognitive closure.

• Categorical thinking (organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in our long-term memory).
  Usually grouped based on observable similarity.
  Or based on proximity to each other.

Another form of perceptual grouping involves filling in missing information.
Or when we think we see trends in otherwise ambiguous information.

Along with perceptual grouping, making sense of the world around us involves interpreting information.
This happens as quickly as selecting and organizing because the previously mentioned emotional markers are tagged to incoming stimuli, which are essentially quick judgments about whether information is good or bad to us.

Mental models

Knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain and predict the world around us.
They consist of visual or relational images in our mind.
Rely on the process of perceptual grouping to make sense of things. They fill in the missing pieces, including the causal connection among events.
Important for sense making, yet they also make it difficult to see the world in different ways.

The most important way to minimize the perceptual problems with mental models is to be aware of and frequently question them. We need to ask ourselves about the assumptions we make.
Working with people from diverse backgrounds is another way to break out of existing mental models.

Specific perceptual processes and problems

Stereotyping in organizations

Stereotyping: the process of assigning traits to people based on their membership in a social category.
Shared beliefs across an entire society and sometimes across several cultures.

Why people stereotype

• As a form of categorical thinking, stereotyping is usually a non-conscious ‘energy-saving’ process that simplifies our understanding of the world.
• We have an innate need to understand and anticipate how others will behave.
  The higher the perceiver’s need for cognitive closure, the higher the reliance on stereotypes.
• Motivated by the observer’s need for social identity and self-enhancement

The combination of social-identity and self-enhancement leads to the processes of:

• Categorization
• Homogenization
  We tend to think that people within each group are very similar to each other.
• Differentiation
  We tend to assign more favorable characteristics to people in our groups than to people in other groups.

Problems with stereotyping

Stereotyping distorts perceptions in various ways

• Stereotypes do not accurately describe every person in a social category
• Stereotype threat (an individual’s concern about confirming a negative stereotype about his or her group). Often results in displaying the stereotype trait they are trying to avoid.
• It lays the foundation for discriminatory attitudes and behavior

Most of this perceptual bias occurs at unintentional (systemic) discrimination whereby decision makers rely on stereotypes to establish notions to he ‘ideal’ person in specific roles.
Implicit, automatic and unintentional

Intentional discrimination or prejudice.
People hold unfounded negatived attitudes toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group.
Deliberate

Attribution theory

Attribution process: the perceptual process of deciding whether an observed behavior or event is caused largely by internal or external factors.

Three attribution rules

• Consistency
  Object
• Distinctiveness
  Context
• Consensus

The attribution process is important because understanding cause-effect relationships enables us to work more effectively with others and to assign praise or blame to them.
We react differently to attributions of our own behavior and performance.

Attribution errors

We are strongly motivated to assign internal or external attributions to someone’s behavior, but hits perceptual process is also susceptible to errors.

• Self-serving bias (the tendency to attribute our favorable outcomes to internal factors and our failures to external factors)
  Associated with the self-enhancement process
• Fundamental attribution error. Or correspondence bias (the tendency to see the person rather than the situation as the main cause of that person’s behavior)

Self-fulfilling prophecy

Our perceptions can influence reality.

Contingencies of self-fulfilling prophecy

The self-fulfilling prophecy effect is stronger in some situations than in others.
It has a stronger effect at the beginning of a relationship.
It is stronger when several people hold the same expectations of the individual.
It is stronger among people with a history of low achievement, these people tend to have a low self-esteem, so they are easily influenced by others.

Positive organizational behavior: a perspective of organizational behavior that focuses on building positive qualities and traits within individuals or institutions as opposed to focusing on what is wrong with them.

Other perceptual effects

Four additional biases:

Halo effect

A perceptual error whereby our general impression of a person, usually based on one prominent characteristic, colors our perception of other characteristics of that person.
Most likely to occur when important information about the perceived target is missing or we are not sufficiently motivated to search for it.

False-consensus effect

A perceptual error in which we overestimate the extent to which others have beliefs and characteristics similar to our own.
Explanations
We are comforted believing that others are similar to us, particularly regarding less acceptable or diverse behavior
We interact more with people who have similar views and behaviors
We are more likely to remember information that is consistent with our own views and selectively screen out information that is contrary to our beliefs
Our social identity process homogenizes people withing groups

Primacy effect

A perceptual error in which we quickly form an opinion of people based on the first information we receive about them.
First impressions are lasting impressions

Recency effect

A perceptual error which the recent information dominates our perception of others.
Most common when people make a decision involving complex information.

Improving perceptions

Three potentially effective ways.

Awareness of perceptual biases

Can reduce the biases to some extent by making people more mindful of their thoughts and actions.
But it has only limited effect.

• Teaching people to reject incorrect stereotypes has the unintended effect of reinforcing rather than reducing reliance on those stereotypes.
• Diversity training is ineffective for people with deeply held prejudices against those groups

Improving self-awareness

Tends to reduce perceptual biases by making people more open-minded and nonjudgmental toward others.

Meaningful interaction

Any activity in which people engage in valued activities.

Contact hypotheses: a theory that the more we interact with someone, the less prejudiced or perceptually biased we will be against that person.

Meaningful interaction is the strongest when people work closely and frequently with each other on a shared goal that requires mutual cooperation and reliance. Everyone should have equal status in that context, should be engaged in a meaningful task, and should have positive experiences with each other in those interactions.

Meaningful interaction reduces dependence on stereotypes because we gain better knowledge about individuals and experience their unique attributes in action.
It potentially improves empathy toward others.
Empathizing reduces attribution errors by improving our sensitivity to the external causes of another person’s performance and behavior.

BUT
Trying to emphasize with others without spending time with them might actually increase rather than reduce stereotyping and other perceptual biases.

Global mindset: developing perceptions across borders

Global mindset: an individuals ability to perceive, appreciate, and emphasize with people from other cultures, and to process complex cross-cultural information.
Includes:

• An awareness of, openness to, and respect for others views and practices in the world
• The capacity to emphasize and act efficiently across cultures
• The ability to process complex information about novel environments
• The ability to comprehend and reconcile inter-cultural matters with multiple levels of thinking

Developing a global mindset

Involves improving one’s perceptions.
It begins with self-awareness
Develops through better knowledge of people and cultures