Behavior Organizational

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Perception And Individual
Decision Making
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DENI TRIYANTO
14020114410003

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1. Define perception and explain the factors that influence it.
a. Perception is a process by which individuals organize and interprent their sensory impression in order to give meaning to their enivironment. However, what we perceive can be substantially different from objectice reality. Why is perception important in the study of organizational behavior? Simply because people’s behavior is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality itself. The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviorally important.
b. Factors That Influence Perception
A number of factors operate to shape and sometimes distort perception. These factors can reside in the perceiver, in the object, or target, being perceived, or in the context of the situation in which the perception is made. (see Exhibit 6- 1).
When you look at target and attempt to interpret what you see, your interpretation is heavily influenced by your personal characteristics-you at titudes, personality, motives, interests, past experiences, and expectations. For instance, if you expect police officer to be authoritative or young people to be lazy, you may perceive them as such, regardless of their actual traits.
Characteristics of the target also affect what we perceive. Loud people are more likely to be noticed in a group than quiet ones. So, too are extremely attractive or unattractive individuals. Because we don’t look at targets in isolation, the relationship of a target to its background also influences perception, as does our tendency to group close things and similar things together.
Context matters too. The time at which we see an object or event can influence our attention, as can location, light, heat, or any number of situational factors.
Summary
Perception and Individual Decision Making
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2. Explain Attribution Theory and list the three determinants of attribution.
a) Attribution Theory tries to explain the ways in which we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behavior. It suggests that when we observe an individual’s behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors: (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency.
Internally caused behaviors are those we believe to be under the personal control of the individual. Externally caused behavior is what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do. If one of your employees is late for work, you minght attribute that to this partying into the wee hours and then
Perception
Factors in the perceiver
 Attitudes
 Motives
 Interest
 Experience
 Expectation
Factors in the target
 novelty
 Motion
 Sound
 Size
 Background
 Proximity
 similarity
Factors in the Situation
 Time
 Work Setting
 Social Setting
Exhibit 6-1
Factor That Influence Preception

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oversleeping. This is an internal attribution. But if you attribute lateness to an
automobile accident that tied up traffic, you are making an external attribution.
Now let’s discuss the three determining factors. Distinctiveness refers to
whether an individual displays different behaviors in defferent situations. If
everyone who faces a similar situation responds in the same way, we can say
the behavior shows consensus. Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a
person’s actions. Does the person responds the same way over time? The more
consistent the behavior, the more we are inclined to attribute it to internal
causes.
Exhibit 6-2 summarize the key elements in attribution theory.
Observation interprestation attribution of cause
hight
low
high
low
hight
low
Exhibit 6-2
Attribution Theory
Individual behavior
Distinctiveness
Consensus
Consistency
External
Internal
External
Internal
Internal
External

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3. Explain the link between perception and decision making
Individuals in organizations make decisions, choices from among two or more alternatives. Decision making accurs as a reaction to a problem, that is, a discrepancy exist between the current state o affairs and some desired state, requiring us to consider alternative courses of action.
Every decision requires us to interpret and evaluate information. We typically receive data from multiple sources and need to screen, process, and interpret them. Which data are relavant to the decision, and which are not? Our perceptions will answer that question. We also need to develop alternatives and evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. Again, our perceptual process will affect the final outcome. Finally, trouhout the entire decision making process, perceptual distortions often surface that can bias analysis and conclusions.
4. Decision Making in Organizations
a. Rational Decision Making we aften think the best decision maker is rational and makes consistent. Value maximizing choices within specified constrains. These decision follow a six step rational decision making model. The six steps are listed in exhibit 6-3.
b. Bounded rationality our limited information processing capability makes it imposibble to assimilate and understand all the information necessary to optimize. So most people respond to a complex problem by reducing it to a level at which they can readily understand it. Also many problem by reducing it
1. Define the problem
2. Identify the decision criteria
3. Allocate weights to the criteria
4. Develop the alternatives
5. Evaluate the alternative
6. Select the bast alternatives
Exhibit 6-3 Steps in the Rational Decision Making Model

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to a level an optimal solution because they are too complicated to fit the rational decision making model. So people satisfice the seek solutions that are satisfactory and sufficient.
c. Intuition perhaps the least rational way of making decision is intuitive decision making, an unconscious process created from distilled experience. It accurs outside conscious thought it relies on holistic associations, or link between disparaye pieces of information, it’s fast and it’s affectively charged, meaning it usually engages the emotions.
5. Common Biases and Errors in Decision Making
a. Overconfidence Bias it’s been said that no problem in judgment and decision making is more prevalent and more potentially catastrophic than overconfidence.
b. Anchoring Bias is a tendency to fixate on initial information and fail to adequately adjust for subsequent information.
c. Confirmation Bias the rational decision making process assume we objectively gather information. But we don’t. we selectively gather it.
d. Availability Bias is our tendency to base judgements on information readily available. Events that evoke emotions, are particularly vivid, or are more recent tend to be more available in our momory, leading us to overestimate the chances of unlikely events such as an airplane crash.
e. Escalation of Commitment another distortion that creeps into decisions is a tendency to escalate commitmement. Escalation of commitment refers to staying with a decision even when there is clear evidence it’s wrong.
f. Randomness Error Most of us like to think we have some control over our world and our destiny. Our tendency to believe we can predict the outcome of random event is the randomness error.
g. Risk aversion the tendency to prefer a sure gain of a moderate amount over a riskier outcome, even if the riskier outcome might have a higher expected payoff.
h. Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe falsely, after the outcome is know, that we’d have accurately predicted it. When we have accrate feedback on the outcame, we seem pretty good at concluding it was obvious.

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6. Influences on Decision Making : Individual Differences and Organizational Constraint.
A. Individual Differences
b) Personality the little research so far conducted on personality and decision making suggests personality does influence our decision.
c) Gender research on rumination offers insight into gender differences in decision making. Rumination refers to reflecting at length. In terms of decision making, it mean overthinking problems. Twenty years of study find women spend much more time than men analyzing the past, present, and future.
d) Mental ability we know people with higher levels of mental ability are able process information more quickly, solve problems more accurately, and learn faster, so you might expect them also to be less susceptible to common decision errors. However, mental ability appears to help avoid only some of these.
e) Culture Differences the ration model makes no acknowledgment of cultural differences, nor does the bulk of organizational behavior research literature on decision making. But Indonesians , for instance, don’t necessarily make decision the same way Australia do. Therefor , we need to recognize that the cultural background of a decision maker can significantly influence the selection of problems, thedepth of analysis, the importance planced on logic and rationality, and whether organizational decisions should be made outocratically by an individual man ager or collectively in groups.
B. Organizational constrains
Organizational can contrain decision makers, creating deviations from that rational model. For instance, managers shape their decisions to reflect the organization’s performance evaluation and reward system, to comply with its formal regulation
a) Performance Evaluation managers are strongly influenced by the criteria on which they are evaluated. If a division manager belives the manufacturing plants under his responsibility are oprating best when he

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hears nothing negative. We shouldn’t be surprised to find his plant managers spending a good part of their time ensuring that negative information doesn’t reach him.
b) Reward Systems the organization’s reward system influences decision makers by suggesting which choice have better personal payoffs. If the organization rewards risk aversion, managers are more likeky to make conservative decision.
c) Formal Regulations David Gonzalez, a shift manager at a Taco Bell restaurant in san Antonio, Texas, describes constraints he faces on his job, I’ve got rules and regulations covering almost every decision I make from how to make a burrito to how often I need to clean the restrooms. My job doesn’t come with much freedom of choice.
d) System Imposed Time Constraint Almost all important decisions come with explicit dealines. A report on new product developtant may have to be ready for executive committee review by the first of the mont. Sunch conditions often make it difficult, if not impossible, for manager to gather all the information they might like before before making a final choice.
7. Three Ethical decision Criteria
The frist etchical yardstick is utilitarianism, wich proposes makin decisions solely on the basis of their outcome, ideally to provide the great good for the greatest number. This view dominates business decision making, it is consistent with goals such as efficiency, productivity, and high profits.
Another etchical criterion is to make decisions cinsistent with fundamental liberties and privileges, as set forth in documents such as the Bill of rights. An emphasis on right in decision making means respecting and protecting the basic rights of individuals, such as the right to privacy, free speech, and due process. This criterion protects whistle blowers when they reveal an organization’s unethical practices to the press or government agencies, using their right to free speech.
A hird criterion is impose and enfore rules fair and impartially to ensure justice or an equitable distribution of benefits and cost. Union members typically favor this view. It justifies paying people the same wage for a given job regardless of performance differences and using seniority as the primary determination in layoff decisions.

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8. Improving Creativity In Decision Making
Although the rational decision making model will from improve decision, a rational decision maker also need creativity, the ability to produce novel and useful ideas. These are different from what’s been done before but appropriate to the problem presented.
Creative Potential Most people have useful cerative potential. But to unleash it, they have to ascape the psychological rust many of us fall into and learn how to think about a problem in divergent ways.
A. Three Component Model Of Creativity
1) Expertise the foundation for all creative work. Film writer, producer, and director Quentin Tarantino spent his yougth working in a video rental store, where he built up an encyclopedic knowledge of movies. The potential for creativity is enhanced when individuals have abilities, knowledge, proficiencies, and similar expertise in their field of endeavor. You wouldn’t expect someone with minimal knowledge of programming to be very creative as software engineer.
2) The second component is creative thinking skills. This encompasses personality characteristics associated with creativity, the ability to use analogies, and the talent to see the familiar in a different light.
3) Creative people often love their work, to the point of seeming obsession. The finel component in the three component model creativity is intrinsic task motivation. This is the desire to work on something because it’s interesting, involving, exciting, satisfying, or personally challenging. It’s what truns creativity potential into actual creative ideas.