Perception Within the Business World

The success of a business or organization is dependent on numerous factors such as employee’s level of education, relevant experience, valuable past or present contributions to the organization etc. Yet a key ingredient is perception and attribution. How employees perceive the stimuli of their workplace plays a major role in forming an environment that is productive and profitable. Thus I would like to concentrate on the perception and attribution theory and its general implications in the workplace. The process by which we select, organize, and evaluate the stimuli in our environment to make it meaningful for ourselves is perception. Thus if a staunch Republican and an avid Democrat watch the same presidential debate, both would have very strong arguments as to why their candidate won the debate even though both may have lost or only one won. Thus the effect of our environmental stimuli is directly dependent on how we perceive and attribute changes throughout our everyday lives. There are three stages of the perceptual process: selection, organization, and evaluation. A key element of how we perceive the stimuli within our world is selection. This concerns with how we filter the information our senses receive. Thus an employee working in a new department may hear words that are unfamiliar yet part of the day-to-day jargon within the department. Even though the employee knows and understand the word, he/she was not perceiving or ‘hearing’ it used in the context yet soon the employee will begin to use the new word regularly. What causes a particular perception of an employee as opposed to another employee within the same workplace environment? The differentiation underlies within the internal and external factors of the associate. The sensory sensors they have ‘turned on’ are driven by their internal motives for working, their moral values, interests, attitudes, past experience and workplace expectations. Thus an employee seeking advancement within an