Perception, personality and attribution are characteristics that have a really big and direct influence in the organizational behavior.
“Personality is made up of the characteristic patterns of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make a person unique. “In addition to this, personality arises from within the individual and remains fairly consistent throughout life.”1 Each and every person has their own personality. People have a dynamic and organized set of characteristics which influences motivations, behaviors and cognitions in different situations. This is what makes each person unique. Some people can be extroverted and others introverted. The extroverted ones are the ones oriented towards the external, objective world; have a better interaction with others and are open mind towards certain things. The introverted people are the ones oriented towards the inner, subjective world; their interaction with others is limited and sometimes can have problems when they have to express their feelings toward something or someone.
“Perception is the process by which organisms interpret and organize sensation to produce a meaningful experience of the world… perception in humans describes the process whereby sensory stimulation is translated into organized experience.”2 This is a really basic but simple definition given by Peter Lindsay and Donald A. Norman in the book Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology.
Perception is the way in which each individual see, feel, and understand the world in a particular way. Perception is always changing because it is linked to past experiences. If a person has a bad experience about something maybe the perception will be negative because of the bad experience, or if someone has a good experience about something the perception will probably be positive. You can see that perception is reflected on the way people act and behave in different places and with different people. Perception may also vary depending on others experiences because generally people talk about their past experiences and they can influence others perspectives about things. Perception can be easily persuaded by situations, events, other people and the environment. Sometimes people even have a distorted perception about things and misplace reality.
There is a theory for attribution and it was developed by Fritz Heider, Harold Kelley, Edward E. Jones, and Lee Ross. “The attribution theory explores how individuals "attribute" causes to events and behavior.”3 There are two categories that explain behavior. The internal attribution is related with personal factors (personality, ability and motivation) and the external attribution is associated to the environment and its factors (organizational rules, luck and natural environment).
Attitudes and values
Attitude is defined as “Predisposition or a tendency to respond positively or negatively towards a certain idea, object, person, or situation.”4 The attitude can influence a person’s choice of action, and responses to challenges, incentives, and rewards. There are four major components of attitude, they are: Affective (emotions or feelings), Cognitive (belief or opinions held consciously), Conative (inclination for action) and Evaluative (positive or negative response to stimuli). Our attitudes are reflected in our actions and reactions which most of them are formed because individuals are not born with certain attitudes. People adapt certain attitudes after past experiences that have had positive or negative impacts on them. Human beings are constantly evaluating their every day experiences and start behaving according to what they learn about them. Eventual situations and persuasion may change a person’s behavior towards something. Attitude is something really important when someone is developing a job because it can affect the result and the workers commitment with the organization.
Values are the set of ideas and beliefs of a group or a society. They are defined as “Important and enduring beliefs or ideals shared by the members of a culture about what is good or desirable and what is not. Values exert major influence on the behavior of an individual and serve as broad guidelines in all situations.”5 Values can vary in each culture, group or sub-culture. Generally they contain rules and beliefs of what is right or wrong. This can also be seen inside organizations because they have their own set of values and people that make part of the enterprise have to act according to those ideas and beliefs established in the organization.
Questions
1. Please explain, using your own words, the concept of Pygmalion Effect.
What are the potential implications, uses, or challenges that this effect may pose for organizations engaging into international operations that require the understanding of diverse cultural contexts? Can you use this concept to explain the relationship between national and organizational cultures?
The Pygmalion Effect talks about the way in which what people expect can interfere in the result of things. Your expectations of people and their expectations of themselves are the key factors in how well people perform at work. The Pygmalion effect was described by J. Sterling Livingston in the September/October, 1988 Harvard Business Review. "The way managers treat their subordinates is subtly influenced by what they expect of them," Livingston said in his article, Pygmalion in Management. What he was trying to say is that when managers have high expectations on their workers they will treat them better and have preferences for them. This high expectation will have as a result a good performance of the worker and an excellent final result. But on the other hand, when managers have low and poor expectations about someone this bad energy will be transmitted in the way he treats the person and this will interfere in the final result, which will be a bad one.
We can see that in the international environment many organizations are becoming much more competitive and want to be the market leaders to any cost. Being successful companies has become their main goal. The ones in charge of the organizations are the ones that have the responsibility to make the organization a successful and profitable company. Managers are the ones that have to be responsible for the organizational environment, be aware of what workers like or dislike, team work results and make action plans in order to improve the fallacies that the organization has.
It is important to trust and belief in the people that make part of the organization because this will help maintain and achieve a positive environment. “People tend to live up to what's expected of them and they tend to do better when treated as if they are capable of success”6. It is common that people try to adapt their behavior and performance to the expectation that other’s have of them. People in an organization like to be trusted and they feel important when significant works are assigned to them. That is why when they feel that the manager trusts them and belief they can do the best, they will normally do the best and have an excellent performance in their work in order to not disappoint the boss. People in an organization can notice if they are trusted or not by their boss because it can be analyzed in the way he or she treats them. Trust can be seen as a motivational tool in order to improve the workers performance in the organization and their jobs.
It is evident that an organization in an international context will have different cultures that will eventually meet. Each organization has its own cultural environment so that is why the national culture won’t have a big impact in the organizational environment. When a person is new in a company, he adapts its behavior according to what he observes in the organization, even though his national cultural behavior is different. The organizational culture relies on the people that make part of it so cultural differences will not affect the environment in the organization but it depends on what employees think that their superiors expect from them. As we all know organizations are in constant changes and this takes workers to adapt to different circumstances that can be hard or easy to them. But a good manager that can handle a clear and fluid communication with workers will help them adapt easily to any change. The key to a successful change is to belief in them, motivate them, listen and talk to them, encourage work and have high expectations on workers as the Pygmalion effect describes.
References
1. http://psychology.about.com/od/overviewofpersonality/a/persondef.htm
2. http://www.sapdesignguild.org/resources/optical_illusions/intro_definition.html
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_theory
4. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/attitude.html
5. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/values.html
6. http://www.envisionsoftware.com/articles/Pygmalion_Effect.html
- http://humanresources.about.com/od/managementtips/a/mgmtsecret.htm
- http://www.psy.gla.ac.uk/~steve/hawth.html#pyg
- Peter Lindsay & Donald A. Norman: Human Information Processing: An Introduction to Psychology, 1977.
- Takao Inamori, Farhad Analoui, "Beyond Pygmalion effect: the role of managerial perception", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 Iss: 4, pp.306 – 321
Images Taken From:
- http://www.biziki.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/masks.jpg
- http://www.science.mcmaster.ca/psychology/images/stories/images/perception.gif
- http://www.resumecafe.net/page3/files/core_values2.jpg
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