2 What are the unique challenges of managing employees who have low self

2. What are the unique challenges of managing employees who have low self-efficacy and self-esteem? How would you deal with this situation? 3. What are some methods that companies can use to assess employee personality? 4. Have you ever held a job where your personality did not match the demands of the job? How did you react to this situation? How were your attitudes and behaviors affected? 5. Identify ways in which the Big Five (of the manager and/or the employees) may affect how you as a manager would carry out the Leadership function. Perception Learning Objectives 1. Understand the influence of biases in the process of perception. 2. Describe how we perceive visual objects and how these tendencies may affect our behavior. 3. Describe the biases of self-perception. 4. Describe the biases inherent in our perceptions of other people. Our behavior is not only a function of our personality and values but also of the situation. We interpret our environment, formulate responses, and act accordingly. Perception may be defined as the process by which individuals detect and interpret environmental stimuli. What makes human perception so interesting is that we do not solely respond to the stimuli in our environment. We go beyond the information that is present in our environment, pay selective attention to some aspects of the environment,

and ignore other elements that may be immediately apparent to other people. Our perception of the environment is not entirely rational. For example, have you ever noticed that while glancing at a newspaper or a news Web site, information that is especially interesting or important to you jumps out of the page and catches your eye? If you are a sports fan, while scrolling down the pages, you may immediately see a news item describing the latest success of your team. If you are the mother of a picky eater, an advice column on toddler feeding may be the first thing you see when looking at the page. If you were recently turned down for a loan, an item of financial news may jump out at you. Therefore, what we see in the environment is a function of what we value, our needs, our fears, and our emotions. In fact, what we see in the environment may be objectively flat out wrong because of such mental tendencies. For example, one experiment showed that when people who were afraid of spiders were shown spiders, they inaccurately thought that the spider was moving toward them. In this section, we will describe some common perceptual tendencies we engage in when perceiving objects or other people and the consequences of such perceptions. Our coverage of these perceptual biases is not exhaustive —there are many other biases and tendencies that can be found in the way people perceive stimuli. Visual Perception Figure 2.10

What do you see? Our visual perception definitely goes beyond the physical information available to us; this phenomenon is commonly referred to as “optical illusions.” Artists and designers of everything from apparel to cars to home interiors make use of optical illusions to enhance the look of the product.