Understanding the Employee’s Perception of Their Role in the Workplace: Increasing Productivity
Understanding the Employee’s Perception of their role in the Workplace:
Increasing Productivity
Kreitner and Kinicki stated, “Perception is a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings”(p.185). When employees are evaluating their roles in the workplace, their perceptions of these roles may lead to either an increase or decrease productivity. Whether they develop positive or negative perceptions of their roles in the workplace may lead them to feel valuable, like the make a difference in the workplace, or invaluable and unimportant to the workplace. These varying perceptions are an extremely important concept for managers to understand in order to keep production up and even increase productivity. Managers must not only understand employees’ perceptions of their roles in the workplace, they must also be able to recognize the significance of these perceptions in order to meaningfully interact with employees and encourage them, therefore increasing overall productivity.
Issues, managerial activities and organizational processes are all affected by an employee’s perceptions developed from their observations and interpretations of managers and their decisions based on how they affect them. If managers are known and recognized to be positive and encouraging this will influence employees in a positive way, and vise versa. Understanding these perceptions and using them to their advantage, managers are able to alter employees’ perceptions of their treatment, equality, value, potential, and overall role in the workplace, again therefore influencing productive behavior and increased productivity.
The Model ”Perception: An Information-Processing Model” illustrates information processing of perception in four stages, selective attention/comprehension, encoding and simplification, storage and retention, and retrieval and response (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010, pg. 185 Figure 7-1). If employees are to focus their attention on
Increasing Productivity
Kreitner and Kinicki stated, “Perception is a cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings”(p.185). When employees are evaluating their roles in the workplace, their perceptions of these roles may lead to either an increase or decrease productivity. Whether they develop positive or negative perceptions of their roles in the workplace may lead them to feel valuable, like the make a difference in the workplace, or invaluable and unimportant to the workplace. These varying perceptions are an extremely important concept for managers to understand in order to keep production up and even increase productivity. Managers must not only understand employees’ perceptions of their roles in the workplace, they must also be able to recognize the significance of these perceptions in order to meaningfully interact with employees and encourage them, therefore increasing overall productivity.
Issues, managerial activities and organizational processes are all affected by an employee’s perceptions developed from their observations and interpretations of managers and their decisions based on how they affect them. If managers are known and recognized to be positive and encouraging this will influence employees in a positive way, and vise versa. Understanding these perceptions and using them to their advantage, managers are able to alter employees’ perceptions of their treatment, equality, value, potential, and overall role in the workplace, again therefore influencing productive behavior and increased productivity.
The Model ”Perception: An Information-Processing Model” illustrates information processing of perception in four stages, selective attention/comprehension, encoding and simplification, storage and retention, and retrieval and response (Kreitner & Kinicki, 2010, pg. 185 Figure 7-1). If employees are to focus their attention on
References: Elsbach, K..D., Barr, P.S., & Hargadon, A.B. (2005). Identifying situated cognition in organizations Employee Engagement [Wiki]. (n.d.) Retrieved February 3, 2012, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_engagement Fiske, S.T., & Taylor, S.E. (1984). Social Cognition. New York: Random House. Kreitner, R. & Kinicki, A. (2010). Organizational Behavior. New York: McGraw- Hill/Irwin.