Elements of Perception

Perception is a process of sensory organs. The mind gets the information through the five sense organs, i.e., eyes, nose, ears, tongue, and skin.

The stimulation comes to the organs through action, written messages, oral communication, taste, touch, etc. The perception starts with the awareness of these stimuli. Recognising these stimuli takes place only after paying attention to them. These message are then translated into action.

Following are the elements of perception (subprocesses or components):

Stimuli: The receipt of information is the stimulus which results in sensation. Knowledge and behaviour depend on senses and their stimulation. These senses are influenced by a larger number of stimuli. The family, social and the economic environment are important stimuli for the people. The physiological and psychological functions are impact of these stimuli. The intensive and extensive forms of stimuli have a greater impact on the sensory organs. The physical work environment, socio-cultural environment and other factors have certain stimuli to influence the employee's perception.

In organisational settings, the supervisor may form the stimulus situation for the worker's perceptual process.

Attention: The stimuli that are paid attention depend purely on the people's selection capacity and the intensity of stimuli. Educated employees pay more attention to any stimuli, for example, announcement of bonus, appeal for efficiency, training, and motivation. The management has to find out suitable stimuli, which can appeal to the employees at the maximum level. An organisation should be aware of all those factors, which affect the attention of the employees. During the attention process, sensory and neural mechanisms are affected and the message receiver becomes involved in understanding the stimuli. Taking employees to the attention stage is essential in an organisation for making them behave in a systematic and required order.

Recognition: The messages or incoming stimuli are recognised before they are transmitted into behaviour. Perception is a two-phase activity, i.e., receiving stimuli and translating the stimuli into action. The recognition process is dependent on mental acceptability. For example, if a car driver suddenly sees a child in front of his running car, he stops the car. He recongises the stimuli, i.e., the life of the child is in danger. His mental process recognises the danger after paying attention to the stimuli. If he does not attention to the stimuli, he cannot recognise the danger. After recognising the stimuli, he translates the massage into behaviour.

Translation: The management in an organisation has to consider the various processes of translating the message into action. The employees should be assisted to translate the stimuli into action. For example, the announcement of bonus should be recognised as a stimulus for increasing production. The employee should translate it into appropriate behaviour. In other words, they should be motivated by the management to increase productivity.

Behaviour: Behaviour is the outcome of the cognitive process. It is a response to change in sensory inputs, i.e., stimuli. Perceptual behaviour is not influenced be reality, but is a result of the perception process of the individual, his learning and personality, environmental factors and other internal and external factors at the workplace. The psychological feedback that may influence the perception of an employee may be superior behaviour, his eye movement, raising of an eyebrow, the tone of voice, etc. The behaviour of employees depends on perception, which is visible in the form of action, reaction or other behaviour. The behavioral termination of perception may be overt or covert. The perception behaviour is the result of the cognitive process of the stimulus which may be a message or an action situation of management function. Perception is reflected in behaviour, which is visible in different forms of employees' action and motivation.

Performance: Proper behaviour learns to higher performance. High performers become a source of stimuli and motivation to other employees. A performance-reward relationship is established to motivate people.

Satisfaction High performance gives more satisfaction. The level of satisfaction is calculated with the difference in performance and expectation. If the performance is more than the expectation, people are delighted, but when performance is equal to expectation, it results in satisfaction. On the other hand, if performance is less than the expectation, people become frustrated and this requires a more appealing form of stimulus of developing proper employee work behaviour and high performance. It is essential to understand the factors that influence the perception process and mould employees' behaviour towards the corporate objectives and self-satisfaction.

Tutorial Activity

• Disuss the nature and significance of perception.
• Briefly explain the components of the perception process.