Perceiving Ourselves and Others in Our Organization (Chapter 3) Flashcards
Define/describe self-enhancement and self-verification. How do they influence how people deal with feedback?
Self-enhancement - A person’s motivation to have a positive self-concept and to have others perceive them in such as a way as well and as competent, attractive, lucky, ethical and important.
Self-verification - Motivations to confirm and maintain existing self-concept. Stables individual’s self-view which provides an anchor that guides thoughts/actions. Includes seeking feedback that is not necessarily flattering.
Describe each type of self-evaluation and explain the ways that the latter two influence work behavior.
Self-esteem - Extent to which people like, respect, and are satisfied with themselves. Global self-eval. People with high levels are less influence by others, tend to persist in spite of failure, and think more rationally.
Self-efficacy - A person’s belief that he or she can successfully complete a task. High = can-do attitude, believe they possess motivation, ability, have clear expectations and resources to perform task. Indiv percept regarding MARS in specific situation. General perception of one’s probability of performing well across a variety of situations.
Locus of control - Person’s beliefs about control they have over personal life events. People with more internal believe abilities and motivation affects their lives’ outcomes, while external believe events mostly due to fate, luck, etc. Internals more positive self-eval. Perform better in employment situations, more successful careers, more $, better suited for leadership, higher job satisfaction, cope better, motivated by performance-based systems.
Explain the different parts of the perception process.
Receiving information about and making sense of the world around us (perception). Emotional stimuli bombard our sense and most are screened out, rest are organized and interpreted. Attending to some info and ignoring the rest is selective attention. Influenced by the characteristics of person or object being perceived, especially size, intensity, motion, repetition and novelty. Characteristics of perceiver and context also influence. Effect of assumption and expectations about future events. After selective attention comes perceptual organization and interpretation. Operates quickly, if you see a group that has several professors you will assume the rest are is well if they look similar. Quick judgments made of info as good or bad in mere milliseconds based on emotional stimuli, facial image recognition, etc.
What are different kinds of organization processes?
Stereotyping -
Describe the 3 processes in social identity.
Categorization - Identify somebody by the group they belong to and putting them there. Rather than seeing the individual you see them as the prototypical representative of that group.
Homogenization - “Homogenize” the outgroup; make them similar to one another. Texans, Californians, etc., all have the same attitutdes and characteristics.
Differentiation - We assign more favorable characteristics to people within our groups; we put ourselves in a “better” group and by extension increase self-esteem.
Social identity promotes bias by causing us to deindividualize those outside our group, enhance our own group and perhaps even create stereotypes about the outgroup to put them down.
Describe how social identity can promote bias.
Social identity promotes bias by causing us to deindividualize those outside our group, enhance our own group and perhaps even create stereotypes about the outgroup to put them down.
Why do stereotypes tend to be resistant to change?
Categorical thinking (including stereotyping) is an automatic and not conscious process. While it is fallible, it helps us in minimizing effort, fill in missing information, and support our social identity. It is very difficult to prevent the activation of our stereotypes.
How do self-enhancement and self-verification influence how people deal with feedback?
Self-enhancement - Individuals tend to rate themselves above average as a result. Tends to experience better mental/physical health/adjustment and overconfidence generates can do attitude that motivates persistence in difficulty or risky tasks. Can take longer to recognize mistakes and overestimate or be less conservative.
Self-verification - OB implications; likely to remember info consistent w/self-concept and unconsciously screen out info that isn’t, clearly it is less people will consciously accept feedback that contradicts self-concept, motivated to interact with others that affirm self-views.
Describe the first two main processes used to improve social perception.
By improving one’s awareness of perceptual biases (via training) it can help reduce biases and make people more mindful; however, this training sometimes reinforces biases. Improving self-awareness (review Johari Window, pp 57-58) allows you to find information known to others but not you improve awareness of your perceptual limitations. People near you are good sources of information about many of your traits and behavior and they can offer you feedback on your behavior and reduce your blind area.
What is the last process used to improve social perception and what practice within it can help reduce stereotyping?
Mutual interaction (founded on contact hypothesis). When people work towards a common goal that requires cooperation and reliance on one another, you reduce perceptual biases because you gain a more personal understanding of others in the group. Reduces reliance on stereotypes since we have better knowledge about individuals and their unique attributes. This closeness improves empathy towards others (understanding and being sensitive of feelings, thoughts and situations of others). Reduces fundamental attribution error by improving our sensitivity to external causes of others’ performance.
Describe fundamental attribution error in attribution.
The fundamental attribution error is a process by which we attribute others performance or habits to their internal causes (such as abilities and motivations) rather than taking into account external factors they may have dealt with, such as being late and not considering traffic may have been bad.
Describe the self-serving bias in attribution.
A process where we attribute failures to external causes, such as bad luck, and any successes to internal causes, such as our strong abilities or motivation. (A success in the company is caused by us but we have nothing to do with the company’s failures).
How do you promote a positive SFP?
In order to foster a positive SFP, leaders must develop and maintain a positive, yet realistic, expectation toward all employees. Higher expectancy employees generally receive more frequent feedback and reinforcement, more challenging goals and better training and more opportunities to demonstrate performance. Promoted through positive organizational development with an emphasis on optimism, self-efficacy and learning. Promotes a strong learning and development environment.
