Paper Example on Perception and Individual Decision Making

Introduction

Perception helps individuals learn about their environment and make critical decisions. It influences an individual's behavior in an organization by changing how one thinks about the surrounding. It helps define favorable working conditions, identify, and evaluate the thrilling job assignments in the organization. It also helps in determining the excellent benefits associated with working in the particular organization. It helps in understanding and practicing responsible management activities. Factors such as perceiver, target, and situation affect an individual's perception leading to change in behavior in an organization. Selective perception is one the shortcut that affects the judgment of others. It allows one to speed read an individual. Valuable techniques also help one make accurate understanding rapidly and provide valid data for making productions. Hallo effect assists one draw impressions based on a single characteristic such as sociability, intelligence, and appearance. It leads to the negative opinion (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015). Contrast effect distorts one's perceptions towards others. Stereotyping shortcut is one where one judges others based on the characteristics of a group to where the individual belongs.

Is your time best spent reading someone else’s essay? Get a 100% original essay FROM A CERTIFIED WRITER!

Save 25%

Decision making in organizations occurs through three different models. Rational decision-making model has six steps. It involves defining the problem, identifying the decision criteria, weighing the previously identified criteria, generating possible alternatives, rate each option upon each standard and computing the optimal decision. In bounded rationality model, one must gather sufficient information that affects the decision-making process. It focuses on the human capabilities and the ability of the human mind to solve complex situations. Intuition model is an unconscious approach formulated from an individual has distilled experience in the organization.

Overconfidence bias occurs when an individual overestimates the probability of being correct. Anchoring bias is prevalent in decision-making processes. An individual tends to fixate on the initial information and to fail to adjust to the subsequent data. Confirmation bias arises from the case of selective perception. Availability bias refers to the act of judging based on the available data only. It leads to failure in predicting future risks. Escalation of commitment is also an error that occurs due to sticking with the initial decision even when evidence indicates it was wrong. Hindsight bias is the tendency of the decision makers to believe that knowing the outcome of event leads to accurate prediction of the result (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015). The error reduces the ability of the decision makers to learn and guarantee the success of decision making in future. Performing evaluations help avoid such mistakes and biases. Organizations also reward the best systems and formulate formal regulations to prevent such errors and biases. Elimination of both the time deadlines and historical precedence also helps in preventing the biases and errors. However, it is not possible to avoid all of them due to the nature of human error. Creative behavior occurs in organizations in four steps. It happens through actions such as problem formulation, information gathering, idea generation and idea evaluation. Such measures help in coming up with new practices and improvement on the available methods.

Motivational Concepts

The essential elements of motivation include intensity, direction, and persistence. They determine how much effort is required and how it transforms into quality work and high productivity. The four early theories of motivation include Hierarchy of Needs theory, Theory X and Theory Y, Two-factor theory and McClelland's theory of needs. The arguments apply today by determining the factors that best affect the motivation of the individuals and elements that make one work hard to succeed in life. According to the Abraham Maslow's theory of the hierarchy of needs, five levels of human needs such as physiological, safety, social, esteem and self-actualization affects an individual's motivation to succeed. Theory X and Theory Y also observe that determining the negative and positive aspects of human nature helps in motivating individuals. Organizations use such theories to understand the employees and drive them to trigger high production. They also use the method of two factors to determine the attitude of the workers and to determine the best way of stimulating the workers. The leading contemporary theories of motivation include the self-determination theory and the goal-setting theory (Bozeman & Su, 2015). Expectancy theory contains three key relationships. The relationships include effort-performance relationship, performance-reward relationship, and reward-personal goals relationship. Self-efficacy theory and goal setting theory profoundly relate to each other. When a manager set ambitious goals for workers, the employees, in turn, develop very high levels of self-efficacy and set high standards and goals. It is because the managers set lofty goals for the workers as a sign of high confidence in the team.

Motivation: From Concepts to Applications

Job rotation is a means of redesigning jobs that involves shifting an employee from one work to the other. It mainly works when the employees suffer from the organization's routine tasks. It reduces the employee's boredom and motivates them by diversifying the employee's activities. It also assists the employees to understand their significance to the organization. The approach, however, increases the firm's training costs and reduces the productivity of the employee as one shift from one area to the next position. It also contains social distractions, as the employees have to adjust to the new team. Job enrichment refers to the vertical expansion of the job and allows the employs to finish the entire work. It increases the employee's freedom, independence, and responsibility. Rational job design focuses on doing work motivating to the workers. It promotes the employee's well-being and protects the lives of those affected by the work done by the employees (Bozeman & Su, 2015). Organizations motivate employees through changing the work environment by focusing on the employee's engagement activities. They engage employees through processes such as participative management and representative participation. It allows employees to participate in the decision-making process and share the factors affecting employees and how to solve such factors. Managers use the employee involvement programs to motivate the employees and evoke active participation from the employees. It leads to high productivity from the workers. An organization's management establishes a pay structure of the employees by considering the various factors that affect both the organization and the employees. It creates the pay structure through processes such as internal and external equity. Internal equity is where the management evaluates to determine the significance of the job to the organization. External equity pertains assessing the competitiveness of the pay to the other firms in the market. Different strategic reward decisions help organizations to reward the workers effectively. They include determining what to pay the employees, how to pay them, what benefits to offer them and how to recognize them. Motivational theories are significant in increasing the productivity of the firm and maintaining the loyalty and commitment of the workers (Ferrell & Fraedrich, 2015).The methods apply to all the cultures depending on the job diversity and demands of the employees. It also depends on the prevailing cultural and market forces.

Public Employees with High Levels of Public Service Motivation

Employees in public sector and nonprofit sector enjoy employee protection policies and long civil service (Bozeman & Su, 2015). The government sector has stipulated rules that significantly protect the right of the employees. Such employees also experience high levels of rewards in the form of bonuses and allowances. Employees in private sectors work under special conditions set by individual firms. Though some are paid highly, they face hostile environments and strict rules. They also experience minimal protection of their rights as compared to those in public. The employees in public and nonprofit sector are, therefore, motivated than those in the private sector. One is attracted to the public sector because of rational, efficient and normative reasons. The public sector tempts one because of the permanent nature of jobs as compared to the private sector where most engagements based on contracts. One would also be attracted to public service because of the high level of the civil service and protection of the individual employee rights. Public service is safer than the private sector.

References

Bozeman, B., & Su, X. (2015). Public service motivation concepts and theory: A critique. Public Administration Review, 75(5), 700-710.

Ferrell, O. C., & Fraedrich, J. (2015). Business ethics: Ethical decision-making & cases. Nelson Education.