Definition

According to Stephen P. Robbins, “A perception is a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment”.

According to Fred Luthan’s, “Perception is an important mediating cognitive process through which persons make interpretations of the stimulus or situation they are faced with”.

In general, Perception means perceiving i.e. giving meaning to the environment around us. Perception is about how an individual view others. It is also an aspect of how an individual is motivated within an organization. To make first impression the companies often introduce new employees to the existing employees highlighting the skills, achievements and knowledge, experience so that the perception are built around positives indeed of negatives.

Perceptions vary widely from one person to another on same object. For example, one individual might perceive a fast talking salesman as an aggressive person where as the other person may view him as suitable and intelligent for sales job.

Importance of Perception

• Perception is important because everyone does things for different reasons, and often enough there are several opinions on a matter.
• It is also good to have more view points on human behaviour as to always look at the situation from different angles and not to be from only one side.
• It helps to understand human abilities and limits, avoid sickness and injury. It is an intellectual process.
• It determines appropriate sensory channel to use to transfer information. It also allows having better social skills and in a relationship where we have perceptions we understand the other person better and misunderstanding are less likely if it is on positive side.
• Perception is important in the study of management in organizational behaviour because it influences behaviour and behaviour influence decision-making which is important in organization decisions, how to decide and what to choose.

Perceptual Process

The process is the sequence of psychological steps that a person uses to organize and interpret information from the outside environment.

The perception process takes place as follows:

Inputs	Transformation	Outputs
1. Receiving stimuli	2. Selection of stimuli 3. Organization of stimuli 4. Interpretation	5. Action

1. Receiving Stimuli: It is the stage of detecting stimuli in the first instant from the environment.
2. Selection of Stimuli: It is the process of eliminating some of the stimuli and retaining some sensed for further processing.
3. Organization of Stimuli: It is the storing stage of those perceptual stimuli a framework.
4. Interpreting: The started stimuli is interpreted which means given meaning for the perception.
5. Action /Response: The behaviour of this individual towards the environment is what we call action. The purpose of the process, the final stage of opinion.

Factors Influencing Perception

Perception relates to perceiver, perceived and the situation. The factors affecting the perception of people are;

a. Perceptual learning

It is based on past experience or any special training, an individual learn to focus some sensory attention towards an object.

For example: if an individual has training in arts, he can perform better than the untrained person. Experience is the best teacher for such perceptual skills. Blind person may identify the people by their voice or by sounds of their footsteps, it is all perceptual learning.

b. Mental set

It is all about an individual’s readiness to receive some sensory input. For example, when we are expecting the arrival of a train we listen to its horn or sound even if there is a lot of noise around us.

c. Motives and Needs

It is about motives and needs of an individual that influence perception. For example, a hungry person is motivated to recognize only the food item among other things. His/her attention cannot be directed towards other things until his motive towards food is satisfied.

d. Cognitive Styles

It is all about an individual’s own way of understanding the situations. Those individuals who are flexible in attitude will have less affected by interfering influence and be less dominated by internal needs and motives.

e. ESP- Extra Sensory Perception

It is about the perception that occurs without sensory stimulation called “extra sensory perception”.

It is also known as sixth sense in common mans view

Interpersonal Perceptions

Interpersonal perception is an area of research in social psychology which examines the beliefs that interacting people has about each other.

For example, a girl may believe that her parents are aggressive, that her friends are kind and intelligent. These beliefs guide people in various ways. Many people tend to place others in certain categories upon first meeting them. These labels can be friendly versus untrustworthy. People tend to judge others so quickly based on their perception without even trying to understand about them. Bias may be the major role played here in interpersonal perception, which may sometimes also damage severely the perceiver and the person he perceived. Sometimes they go to the extent of arguing to establish their stand since they perceived about the object in that sense.

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