Perceiving Ourselves and Other in Organisations

Gurpinder Singh Sahni (2013285)

University Canada West

ORGB 601 : Human Interfaces

Dr. Sydney Scott

May 4, 2021
 Introduction

Third week learning of the course focuses on elements of self-concept and how they affect

wellbeing and behavior of individuals. Further perceptual process and factors such as stereotyping and

attribution are discussed in detail. In the last part ways to improve perceptions and importance of

global mind set it discussed.

Self-Concept

From our early childhood days we must have thought about who we are and how we are

different from others. Self-concept is how you perceive your behaviour, abilities, and unique

characteristics (Bailey, 2003). In other words it means the perception that we have in mind about

ourselves. For example, I am a hard working person is one of a self-concept. There are three

characteristics that can describe self-concept. First one is complexity, which refers to the different

number of roles and ideas an individual perceives about him like being a student, son, husband, father,

manager at same time. In order to achieve higher positions individuals are motivated to increase their

complexity and also have a clear separation between their different identities, so that they can

improve their multitasking skills. High complexity makes individuals more adaptive in decision

making and performance but sometimes requires more efforts to maintain and juggle. Also, people

with less complexity tend to perform better due to skill expertise in the specific area for a long time.

Consistency is the second characteristic which refers to the similarity in individual’s traits and values

with those who the person intends to become. The third characteristic is clarity which is the degree to

which a person’s self-concept is clear, confidently defined, and stable (Campbell, 1996). It increases

with age because people become more aware about themselves through life experiences.

There are four processes that shape self-concept and motivate the behaviour and decision of

individuals. First process is self enhancement, in which people think that they are better than others.

Whenever they are successful they give credit to their ability and motivation and when they fail, they

tend to blame the external situations instead of introspecting. It can be helpful as it increases the

confidence and mental health of an individual but can be harmful as individuals can engage in unsafe
behaviours such as dangerous driving. The second process is self-verification which is basically based

on feedback with which individuals try to confirm their perceived self-concept. The feedback can be

consistent with their self-concept or negate their beliefs and depending on the type of feedback

behaviour of individuals vary to some extent. For example, individuals have a tendency to interact

more with those people who affirm their self-views. Self-evaluation is the third process which is

defined by self-esteem, self-efficacy and locus of control. Self-esteem refers to the feel individuals

have about themselves such believing themselves to be a good driver or good teacher. Self-efficacy is

similar to the confidence that individuals have to complete a task or achieve the desired goals. Locus

of control refers to the extents of control one has on the events of life. People with external locus of

control tend to blame external situations such as luck, circumstances for events whereas people having

internal locus of control give credit to their skills, abilities and other personal characters and these

people have more positive self-evaluation and tend to perform better in most of the situations. The

fourth process is the social self, which refers to how heavily individuals can define their self-concept

by social identities. For example, some individuals have social identity as a American, a doctor, or an

employee of Amazon. Individuals high in this category work more effectively in teams and are easily

influenced by team leaders and co-workers.

Perception

Perception is the next important concept widely used in OB theories which refers to the

process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us (McShane, 2018).

When our senses receive the environmental stimuli, the signals are refined, organised and interpreted

in the process of selective perception where only selective information received is processed and rest

is ignored. For Example, in traffic we tend to focus on the red revolving light of an ambulance,

ignoring all the other headlights of vehicles and perceive that the person inside that red beacon vehicle

is in a state of medical emergency. This selection depends on the characteristics and awareness of

perceiver. Sometimes people tend to ignore the information which is not consistent with their beliefs,

values and assumptions and focus more on the information that supports our beliefs; this is known as

confirmation bias. Further, under categorical thinking people and objects are organised into categories
on the basis of gender, age, race, style and other factors, in our mind and are stored there. Next

important concept under perception is mental models which are defined by McShane (2018) as

“knowledge structures that we develop to describe, explain, and predict the world around us” (p. 75).

In other words they are the visuals in our mind regarding how the things would work and look like.

For example, before joining a job we have a perception in our mind that a separate cabin would be

provided because of mental models developed regarding that job in our mind. Culture, society, values,

upbringing are some of the factors which shape our mental models.

Perceptual Processes and Problems

There are some sub processes under perception which can have positive and negative

implications on behaviours of individuals. The first one is stereotyping, which is having a fixed idea

or perception about a particular group or a person. A stereotype person relates certain characteristics

to a group such as personality traits, abilities, and physical characteristics. For example, a person

coming from Jamaica is perceived to be a good athlete because maximum award winning sprinters

belong to that country, but it cannot be true for all the residents of Jamaica. People engage themselves

into stereotyping because of categorical thinking and to anticipate how others would behave to fill in

missing information about others. It is motivated by the need for self enhancement and social

grouping, which leads to process of categorization, homogenisation and differentiation.

Categorization is to categorize people into different groups such as Jamaicans, Canadians, or a

broader group such as Asians. When we think that people within a group are very similar to each

other, it is known as homogenisation and when we assign more favourable characteristics to people of

our group than others, it is known as differentiation. Stereotypes do not describe every individual

accurately, for example, professors are stereotyped as strict and rigid, but all the professors cannot be

included in this category. Sometimes, we when we stereotype a person we tend to attach negative

stereotype of his group to that person which is known as stereotype threat. For example, a person

coming from India is expected not to be punctual because of a negative stereotype developed

regarding all the Indians. Third problem is the unintentional discrimination where the people rely on

stereotypes to select a person for a particular job. Intentional discrimination is dangerous in which
people hold unfound negative attitudes toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group

(Fiske, 1998). For example, selectors of a cricket team not selecting the persons of short height

because they are stereotyped to be inefficient while batting and fielding.

Another phenomenon is attribution process, where causes of behaviour are believed to be

internal factors such as characteristics of a person and external factors which include environment

factors. Consistency, distinctiveness and consensus are three rules of attributing theory. If the person

has behaved similarly in the past if account for both external and internal factors according to

consistency. If a person acted in the same way in other situations also it accounts for internal factors

otherwise account for external factor according to distinctiveness. If other people also behaved in the

same way then it accounts for external factors and if not then it accounts for internal factors according

to the consensus rule. Self-serving bias is an attribution error which is a habit of blaming external

factors rather than internal factors for failure and vice versa in case of success. For example, a bowler

credits his skills and hard work after taking 4 wickets in a match and same person blames the field

conditions when batsman hit a six on his ball. Fundamental attribution error is the next error where

people blame the internal factors for behaviour of an individual completely ignoring the external

factors.

Sometimes other persons start to act according to our expectations after a certain amount of

time due to certain factors such as motivation, training and feedback, this process is known as self-

fulfilling prophecy. In this a employer forms a expectation about an employee, which effects his

behaviour towards the employee which effects his motivation and ability through training and in this

way employee’s behaviour becomes consistent with those of employer’s expectations. Employers

need to make a positive and realistic expectation towards employees to enhance the productivity and

individual well-being. Further, when we make impression of a person based on single characteristic,

ignoring all others it is known as halo effect. When people believe that all the others have beliefs

similar to them it is known as false-consensus effect, it is because we generally interact more with

people having similar belief and views. Some people have a tendency to form opinion regarding

others very quickly on the basis of first information them get about them, it is known as primacy
effect and when the recent information outweighs the earlier information it is known as recency

effect.

Improving Perceptions

We can minimise the perceptual biases with awareness of perceptual biases, self-awareness

and meaningful interaction. Perceptual bias can be reduced by making people aware about the

discrimination and prejudices that occur because of stereotyping. However, this method has a very

limited effect on reducing bias. Next method is improving self-awareness, by being more aware of our

values, beliefs and understanding the biases in our decisions. Implicit Association Test (IAT) is a

formal test that indicates any biases we might have but its accuracy if often debated as it detects only

minor racial, age, gender bias by using negative and positive words for different groups. Other way to

increase self-awareness is using the model developed by Joseph Luft and Harry Ingram which is

named as Johari Window. It has four sections, first is the open area which represents information

known to self and others. Next is the blind area which has information only known to others, followed

by hidden area which has information only known to self. Last section is unknown area which

contains the information which is unknown to self as well others. To increase self-awareness one

needs to widen the open area section by asking others about self in the form of feedback and telling

other about self. Meaningful interaction is the other way to minimize the perceptual bias where people

engage in important activities which is strongest when people work closely on a shared goal that

requires team work and cooperation. It also reduces dependence on stereotypes and increases empathy

towards co-workers. Empathetic person thinks keeping him in the position of others and realising how

they feel in the circumstances in which they are living which increases the level of understanding.

Global Mindset

It is an important attribute of job applicants in majority of global organisations. It includes respecting

and openness to the views and practices of people who belong to other parts of world, capacity to

empathise other cultures and ability to understand matters of other cultures. A global mind-set helps

understand mental models held by co-workers from different backgrounds and develop useful mental
model quickly at local and global level depending on the situation. People having global mind-set

have better network formation capacity and can form better relationships across cultures. A global

mind-set develops by improving perceptions, having better knowledge of people and culture so that

people can batter understand the attitudes and perspectives of their co-workers coming from different

cultures.

Part 2 – My Reflection

From the learning of third week, I have developed an idea to perceive myself and others working in an

organisation. I have learnt about self-concept and I can perceive about myself with the help of

complexity, consistency and clarity. Relating these to my own life I found that I am a person having

high complexity in life as I am playing roles of student, husband, son, manager, brother

simultaneously but my separation in complexity is not to the desired level. I am little low in

consistency and clarity of roles due to which I have been unable to perform on certain levels during

my job. Next, I learn about self enhancement and self-verification which help to shape self-concept.

During my job in a bank I worked for a large public sector bank of my country and I used to proudly

say that I belonged to that bank but at time, I didn’t had any idea regarding the principles of

psychology which worked in my mind, but after learning about the social self in the text, things

became clear in my mind. While learning about the concept of locus of control I had a closer view of

myself and realised that I also had external locus of control because I tend to blame my luck and other

circumstances for events in my life. Next important concept I learn is perception, though I have used

this word widely in my writings in the past but I now have a deeper understanding of this concept

after this week’s learning. I have realised how I have involved myself unknowingly in the process of

confirmation bias and learnt about the concept of mental models which shape our perception. Further,

I learnt about stereotyping and recalled while learning events from my own life when I have

stereotyped which misled me almost all the times. In my previous job I was sent by my boss to a local

college to interview the candidates for selection as junior managers. In the interview I avoided to hire

people who had physical education as on of their elective subjects because three of my colleagues

who had interest in that subject during their graduation did not performed well in any parameter, but
today I realise that at that time I was involved in stereotype threat. Further in the text I learnt about

attribution theory and how some people give credit to internal factors and other to external factors for

success and failures. After working as assistant manager for 2 years I was promoted as a manager and

was given a charge of individual branch. Management allocated annual budgets to be achieved and

monitored my monthly progress and my performance improved on monthly bases and after 8 months

came at par with the expectations of the management. This example correlates the concept of self-

fulfilling prophecy with my experience. Next I learn about improving perceptions, and know about

self-using the IAT and Johari window. I realised that my open space in Johari window is very small

and hidden area is very large and I plan to engage more with others to increase open area. In the last

part I learn about global mindset and realised its importance in today’s world as we have diverse work

force in almost every developed country and to cope up with them we need to have a large domain of

knowledge.

While doing the self-assessment to determine my locus of control my score was 47 which

keep me in between the category of people having internal and external. I think according to this

result my locus of control depends on circumstances. In perceptual structure assessment my score was

57 which mean that I quickly analyse situation and try making sense out of it. I had 25 score in

perspective taking which means that I have better ability to understand other people’s situation. In the

empathy self-assessment, my score was 34 which keep me in category of highly empathetic persons

which means that I can very well understand other’s feelings by imagining myself in other’s place.

During the peer discussion we discussed about the mental models already developed in group

members mind regarding our previous jobs and before joining MBA at UCW. We analysed the reason

for those developed knowledge structures and how they differed from the real situation and how those

differences affected our adjustments. Some members discussed about their jobs and others about the

differences between education system of Canada and of their native countries.

Bailey, J. A., (2003) Self-image, self-concept, and self-identity Journal of National Medical

Association 95(5), 383-386

Campbell, J., D., et al, (1996) Self-Concept Clarity: Measurement, Personality Correlates, and

Cultural Boundaries Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(1) 141-56

Fiske, S. T., et al, (1998). Handbook of Social Psychology (5th ed.) McGraw-Hill Education

McShane, S.L., Tasa, K., Steen, S.L., (2018). Canadian Organisational Behaviour (10th ed.) McGraw

Hill Education