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obsum4

Perception and Individual Decision Making

Making decision is very important in organizations, such decision can modify entire organization. Hence, this chapter will provide you another factor impacting on decision making, the perception. Besides, the process of making decision is also mentioned in the lesson.
Perception is an individual evaluation and understanding towards reality such as people or things. Three factor influencing perception are perceiver, target and situation. Either personal characteristics of the perceiver such as attitudes, motives, interests, experience, expectations or characteristics of the target like novelty, motion, sounds, size, background, proximity, similarity determine one’s perception. Not only that, factors in the situation as time, work setting, social setting also involve.
Going deeper to how person making judgments about other by perception, attribution theory -defined by the development of one’s explanations to another one’s behavior- is suggested. Specifically, when we detect someone’s behavior, we often attempt to find out if it is internally or externally caused. Internal cause come from that person his/her-self, while external cause come from outside factor. The determination of internal and external caused behavior relies mostly on three factors: distinctiveness, consensus, consistency. Distinctiveness bases on the level of unusualness of action evaluated, the action appearing to be unusual is considered externally caused. Consensus occurs when everyone have same responds to a given situation, when consensus is high, the reason of action can be explained by external cause. Consistency refers to the tendency to repeat an action, the more consistent the behavior, the more that behavior results from internal causes. We should have a good awareness of this theory, because of the reality we often put the internal factor higher than the external factor, which is call...