Perception and Decision Making

Chapter 6: Perception and Individual Decision Making

• Perception is the process by which individuals organize and interpret sensory impressions to give meaning to their environment.
• Factors influencing perception: the perceiver (attitudes, motives, interests, experience, expectations), the target (novelty, motion, sounds, size, background, proximity, similarity), and the situation (time, work setting, social setting).
• The attribution theory explains how we judge people differently based on the meaning we attribute to their behavior, determining if it is internally or externally caused.
• The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate external factors and overestimate internal factors when judging others' behavior.
• Self-serving bias: individuals attribute their own successes to internal factors and blame failures on external factors.
• Selective perception: The tendency to interpret what one sees based on one's interests, background, experience, and attitudes.
• Halo effect: Drawing a positive general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic.
• Horns effect: Drawing a negative general impression about an individual based on a single characteristic.
• Contrast effect: Evaluating a person's characteristics by comparing them to other recently encountered people.
• Self-fulfilling prophecy: A situation where expectations about another person cause that person to act in ways that confirm the expectations.
• Decisions are choices made from among two or more alternatives
• A problem is a discrepancy between the current state and some desired state.

Decision Making in Organizations

• Rational decision making: A style characterized by consistent, value-maximizing choices within specified constraints.
• Rational decision-making model: A model describing how individuals should behave to maximize an outcome, includes defining the problem, identifying decision criteria, allocating weights, developing alternatives, evaluating, and selecting the best.
• Bounded rationality: A simplified process of making decisions by focusing on essential problem features without capturing their complexity.
• Intractable problem: A problem that changes entirely/becomes irrelevant while processing thoughts, information, and judgments.
• Stereotyping involves judging someone based on one's perception of the group to which that person belongs.
• Intuitive decision making: an unconscious process created out of distilled experience.
• Overconfidence bias: A tendency to be overconfident about our own abilities or the abilities of others.
• Anchoring bias: The tendency to fixate on initial information and fail to adequately adjust for subsequent information.
• Confirmation bias: Seeking information that confirms past choices and discounting information that contradicts them.
• Availability bias: Basing judgments on readily available information.
• Escalation of commitment: An increased commitment to a previous decision despite negative information.
• Randomness error: The tendency to believe one can predict the outcome of random events.
• Risk aversion: Preferring a sure gain of moderate amount over riskier outcome with a higher payoff.
• Hindsight bias: Falsely believing, after an outcome is known, that one would have accurately predicted it.

Ethics in Decision Making

• Outcome bias: The tendency to judge the quality of a decision based on the desirability or believability of its outcome.
• Utilitarianism: Making decisions to provide the greatest good for all.
• Whistleblowers: Individuals who report unethical practices by their employer to outsiders.
• Deonance: Making ethical decisions because you 'ought to' in order to be consistent with moral norms, principles, standards, rules, or laws.
• Behavioral Ethics: Analyzing why people behave the way they do when confronted with ethical dilemmas.

Creativity in Organizations

• Creativity: The ability to produce novel and useful ideas.
• Three-stage model of creativity: causes of creative behavior (creative potential & environment) -> creative behavior (problem formulation -> information gathering -> idea generation -> idea evaluation) -> creative outcomes (innovation.)

Chapter 7: Motivation

• Motivation: The processes that account for an individual's intensity, direction, and persistence of effort toward a goal.
• Direction: The way individuals channel their efforts to achieve a goal.
• Persistence: How long a person can sustain effort toward achieving a goal.
• Intensity: How hard a person tries.
• Hierarchy of needs theory hypothesizes that within every human being there is a hierarchy of five needs humans are motivated to meet.
  • Physiological: Hunger, thirst, shelter, sex, and other bodily needs.
• Safety: Security and protection from physical and emotional harm.
• Social (belongingness): Affection, love, belongingness, acceptance, and friendship.
• Esteem: Internal factors such as self-respect, autonomy, and achievement, and external factors such as status, recognition, and attention.
• Self-actualization: Drive to become what we can become; includes growth, achieving our potential, and self-fulfillment.
• Two-factor theory: Relates intrinsic factors to job satisfaction and associates extrinsic factors with dissatisfaction (also called motivation-hygiene theory).
• McClelland's theory of needs: States that achievement, power, and affiliation are three important needs that help explain motivation.
• Need for achievement (nAch): The need to excel or achieve to a set of standards.
• Need for power (nPow): The need to make others behave in a way they would not have otherwise.
• Need for affiliation (nAff): The need to establish friendly and close interpersonal relationships.
• Self-Determination theory (SDT): Meta-theory of motivation at work concerning autonomy, intrinsic/extrinsic motivation, and satisfying psychological work needs.
• Cognitive evaluation theory (CET): Sub-theory of SDT where extrinsic rewards for behavior tend to decrease overall motivation if seen as controlling or reducing competence.
• Need for autonomy: the need to feel control and autonomous at work. Need for competence: The need to feel like we are good at what we do or proud of it.
• Promotion focus: A self-regulation strategy that involves striving for goals through advancement and accomplishment.
• Prevention focus: A self-regulation strategy that involves striving for goals by fulfilling duties and obligations and avoiding failure.
• Job engagement: Investing an employee's physical, cognitive, and emotional energies into job performance.
• Reinforcement theory: Behavior is a function of its consequences.
• Behaviorism: Behavior follows stimuli in a relatively unthinking manner.
• Social Learning theory: We can learn through observation and direct experience.
• Expectancy theory: Suggests the strength of tendency to act depends on the strength of expectation that the act will be followed by a given outcome and the attractiveness of that outcome.
• Expectancy: The effort-performance relationship; believing effort leads to performance.
• Instrumentality: The performance-reward relationship; believing performance leads to a desired outcome.
• Valence: The rewards-personal goals relationship; organizational rewards satisfy personal goals and are attractive.
• Goal-setting theory: Intentions to work toward a goal are a major source of work motivation, which lead to higher performance.
• Management by objectives (MBO): Program that encompasses specific, participatively set goals, for time period, with feedback on goal progress.
• Self-efficacy: An individual's belief of being capable of performing a task.
• Equity theory: Stating that individuals compare their job inputs and outcomes with those of others, and then respond to eliminate any inequities, makes one of six choices: change inputs/outcomes of self or others, distort perceptions of self or others, choose a different referent, and/or leave the field.
• Organizational justice: An overall perception of what is fair in the workplace, composed of distributive, procedural, informational, and interpersonal justice.

Motivation: From Concepts to Applications

• Job design: The way that elements in a job are organized
• Job characteristics model (JCM): Proposes that any job can be described in terms of five core job dimensions: skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback.
• Skill variety: Degree to which job uses variety of activities with different skills/talents.
• Task Identity: Degree to which job requires completion of a whole and identifiable piece of work.
• Task Significance: Degree to which job has substantial impact on the lives/work of people.
• Autonomy: Degree to which job provides freedom/discretion in scheduling work and determining procedures.
• Feedback: Degree to which carrying out work activities gives individual direct/clear information of their performance.
• A Motivating Potential Score (MPS) is a predictive index that reflects motivative potential: Includes skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, feedback
• Job rotation: Periodic shifting of an employee from one task to another.
• Job enrichment: Adding high-level responsibilities to a job to increase intrinsic motivation.
• Rational job design: constructing jobs so employees see the positive difference they can make in the lives of directly through their work.
• Flextime is flexible working hours
• Telecommuting is working from home, or anywhere else the employee chooses that is outside of the physical workplace.
• Job sharing: Allowing two or more individuals to split a traditional full time job
• Employee involvement and participation (EIP): Participative process which uses the input of employees to increase employee commitment to success.

Foundations of Group Behavior

• A Group is two or more individuals, interacting and interdependent, who have come together to achieve particular objectives.
• A Formal group is a designated work group defined by an organization's structure.
• An Informal group is not defined by an organization's structure, appears in response to other needs.
• Social identity theory considers when/why individuals consider themselves to be members of groups.
• Collective identification refers to how individuals connect with the aggregate characteristics of the groups to which they belong to.
• A Role is a set of expected behavior patterns attributed to someone occupying a given position in a social unit.
• Role perception: An individual's view of how to act in a given social situation.
• Role expectations: How others believe a person should act in a given situation.
• Psychological contract: Unwritten agreement between employees and employers that establishes mutual expectations.
• Role conflict: A situation in which an individual is confronted by divergent role expectations.
• Norms: Acceptable standards of behavior within a group, shared by the group's members.
• Conformity: Adjusting one's behavior to align with the norms of the group.
• Reference Groups: Important groups to which individuals belong or hope to belong, people are motivated to conform to these.
• Deviance: Spreading malicious and unfounded rumors, yelling and screaming at coworkers, and sexually harassing others are examples of this.

Decision-Making Techniques

• Groupthink: A phenomenon in which the norm for consensus overrides realistic appraisal of alternative course of action.
• Groupshift: The change between a group's decision and an individual decision; it can be toward conservatism or greater risk, but generally toward a more extreme version of the original position.
• Interacting groups: Typical groups in which members verbal & non-verbal interact between each other. Brainstorming: Process that encourages all alternatives while withholding any criticism on those alternatives.
• Nominal group technique: Group decision-making method where members pool their judgements in a systematic & independent fashion.

Understanding Work Teams

• Work Group: Group that interacts primarily to share information; members perform within their respective area of responsibility.
• Work team: Group whose individual efforts result in performance greater than the sum of the individual inputs.
• Virtual teams: Team that uses technology to tie together physically dispersed members for a common goal.
• Multiteam systems: Collection of two or more interdependent teams that share a superordinate goal; a team of teams.
• Team effectiveness model: context, composition, team effectiveness, processes and states.
• Manager: Guides and facilitates
• Motivator: Encourages energizes
• Socializer: Praises, empathises. Socialisation Coordination: Guides directs. Coordinator
• Co-operator & participant supports
• Shepherd: Guides & facilities.
• Evaluator: Evaluates performance & process
• Problem solves innovates, solves
• Produces performs, executes
• Dominator: Dominates aggravates, - critic: antagonist criticize
• Shirker a voide responsibilities, - Detractor withdraws complains down plays
• Demography: Degree to which members of a team share a common demographic.
• Reflexivity: Team characteristic reflecting on/adjusting master plan when necessary.
• Mental models: Team members share knowledge about all the elements within their task environment.
• Team efficacy: Team's collective belief that they can succeed at their tasks.
• Team identity: Team member's affinity for and sense of their team.
• Team effectiveness: Objective measure of team productivity, managers ratings of team member satisfaction.
• Cluster hiring: Practice of selecting an already existing team to work in a new module.