Lesson 3:Perceiving Ourselves and Others in OrganizationsCHAPTER 31.Describe the elements of self-concept and explain how each affects an individual’s behaviour and well-being.•Self-conceptincludes an individual’s self-beliefs and self-evaluations.•It has three structural characteristics—complexity, consistency, and clarity—all of which influenceemployee well-being, behaviour, and performance.•People are inherently motivated to promote and protect theirself-concept (self-enhancement)and to verify and maintain their existingself-concept (self-verification).•Self-evaluationconsists ofself-esteem, self-efficacy, and locus of control (internal vs external).Self-concept also consists of both personal identity and social identity.oSocial identitytheory explains how people define themselves by the groups to which theybelong or have an emotional attachment.•4 processes that shape self-concept and motivate a person’s decisions and behaviour. Let’s look ateach of these four “selves”:self-enhancement, self-verification, self-evaluation, and social self(social identity)oself-enhancement, is observed in many ways. Individuals tend to rate themselves aboveaverage, believe that they have a better than average probability of success, and attributetheir successes to personal motivation or ability while blaming the situation when eventsgo badly.oindividuals try to confirm and maintain their existing self-concept. This process, calledself- verification,stabilizes an individual’s self-view which, in turn, provides an importantanchor that guides his or her thoughts and actions.•As we noted throughout this section, self-concept influences perceptual and decision processes andbiases, employee motivation, team dynamics, leadership development, employee stress, andseveral other OB topics2.Outline the perceptual process and discuss the effects of categorical thinking and mental models in thatprocess.•Perceptioninvolves selecting, organizing, and interpreting information to make sense of the worldaround us.•Perceptual organizationappliescategorical thinking—the mostly nonconscious process oforganizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in our long-termmemory.
