CHAPTER THREE

PERSONALITY, PERCEPTION AND DECISION MAKING

After studying this chapter, you will be able to:

1. Discuss various theories of personality and personality traits.
2. Define the perceptual process.
3. Suggest ways to improve perceptual ability
Activity
1. Why are some people quiet and passive, while others are loud and
aggressive?
2. Are certain personality types better adapted than others for certain job types?
3. Are you shy or outgoing?

Individuals again are different in terms of their personality and perception. This
difference might have implications on the individuals’ relationship with other fellow
human being, their decision making and job performance. Therefore, in this chapter you
will learn about individual’s personality, perception ad decision making.

1.1. PERSONALITY:

In your daily life you meet different persons. Some are neatly dressed. Some are
respected more due to knowledge and decisions. Some people are nice to speak while
others tend on their temperament. Do you know that there are different dimensions of
personality? But the concept of personality is more than that. Let us understand the
original meaning and its connotation.
1.2. Definition:
Let us discuss three important definitions of personality:
“a set of characteristics and tendencies that determine those commonalities and
differences in the psychological behaviour (thoughts, feelings and actions) of people
that have continuity in time and that may not be easily understood as the sole result of
social and biological pressures of the moment”- S.R. Maddi.
“Personality is how people affect others and how they understand and view
themselves, as well as their pattern of inner and outer measurable traits and the person
situation interaction.” – Fred Luthans.
“Personality is the sum total of ways in which an individual refers to and acts
with others” – Robbins.
1.3. Features:
The above definitions of personality bring out the following features of
personality:
It refers to a stable set of characters:

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 o They are affected by biological and
social conditions.

o External physical appearance is a part of

personality.

o It includes inner psychological

mechanism which reacts

o It interacts with situation.

1.4. Factors Determining Personality

Brain
It influences the personality of an individual. The psychologists are unable to prove
empirically the contribution of human brain in influencing personality. Preliminary
results from the electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) research give indication that
better understanding of human personality and behaviour might come from the study of
the brain.

Cultural Factors
Culture is traditionally considered the major determinant of an individual’s personality.
The culture largely determines what a person is and what a person will learn. The
culture within which a person is brought up is a very important determinant of
behaviour of a person.
The personality of an individual, to a marked extent, is determined by the culture in
which he is brought up. According to Mussen “…each culture expects, and trains, its
members to behave in the ways that are acceptable to the group.” In spite of the
importance of the culture on personality, researchers are unable to establish correlation
between these two concepts of personality and culture.
Family and Social factors
Identification starts when a person begins to identify himself with some other
members of the family. Normally a child tries to emulate certain action of his parents.
Identification process can be examined from three angles: (a) it can be viewed as the
similarity of behaviour between child and the model, (b) it can be looked as the child’s
motives or desires to be like the model and (c) it can be viewed as the process through
which the child actually takes on the attributes of the model.

1.5. The Big Five Personality Model

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The Big Five Model - underlies all others and encompass most of the significant
variation in human personality. Moreover, test scores of these traits do a very good job
of predicting
how people behave in a variety of real-life situations. The following are the Big Five
factors:
● Extraversion- The extraversion dimension captures our comfort level with
relationships. Extraverts tend to be gregarious, assertive, and sociable. Introverts tend to
be reserved, timid, and quiet.
● Agreeableness-The agreeableness dimension refers to an individual’s propensity to
defer to others. Highly agreeable people are cooperative, warm, and trusting. People who
score low on agreeableness are cold, disagreeable, and antagonistic.
● Conscientiousness-The conscientiousness dimension is a measure of reliability. A
highly conscientious person is responsible, organized, dependable, and persistent. Those
who score low on this dimension are
easily distracted, disorganized, and unreliable.
● Emotional stability-The emotional stability dimension—often labeled by its converse,
neuroticism—taps a person’s ability to withstand stress.
People with positive emotional stability tend to be calm, self-confident, and secure.
Those with high negative scores tend to be nervous, anxious, depressed, and insecure.
● Openness to experience- The openness to experience dimension addresses range of
interests and fascination with novelty. Extremely open people are creative, curious, and
artistically sensitive. Those at the other end of the category are conventional and find
comfort in the familiar.

1.6. Implication of Personality on Organisation

Authoritarianism is closely related to dogmatism but is narrower in scope.
The authoritarian personality describes someone who adheres to conventional
values, obeys recognized authorities, exhibits a negative view of society,
respects power and roughness, and opposes the expression of personal feelings.
In organisations the authoritarian personality probably is subservient to authority
figures and may even prefer superiors who have a highly directive, structured
leadership style. Both dogmatism and authoritarianism are related to the
intellectual openness factor.

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 Organisational implications
It should be evident by now that the personality dimensions discussed, and the
specific relationship for each, have important implications for organisational behaviour.
However, managers and groups should not try to change or otherwise directly control
employees’ personality. Even if such control were possible, it would be highly
unethical; rather, the challenge for managers and employees is to understand the crucial
role played by personality in explaining some aspects of human behaviour in the
workplace. Knowledge of important individual differences provides managers,
employees, and students of organisational behaviour with valuable insights and a
framework that they can use to diagnose events and situations.

3.7. Perception
:
You see and experience many things in your daily life. They may be true or
may not be true. All that glitters is not gold. Educated youth prefer to white collar job
as it carries less work and ore pay. But really it is not so. An MBA student studying
through distance education may be recruited by an MNC. This is purely due to his
personality. Therefore, these examples explain you that what is seen, heard or
experienced, not be real. Perception is more than that.
Definition of perception:
Perception is what and how we understand the other. We can understand the
meaning of perception from the following definitions:
“a process by which individuals organize and interpret their sensory impressions
in order to give meaning to their environment” – Stephen P. Robbins.
“Perception is an important meditative cognitive process through which persons
make interpretations of the stimuli’s or situation they are faced with” – Fred Luthans
Components of perception:
Stimuli
The receipt of information is the stimulus, which results in sensation.
Knowledge and behaviour depend on senses and their stimulation. The physical senses
used by people are vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste. These senses are influenced
by a larger number of stimuli, which may be action, information, consideration and
feelings, etc. The stimuli may be in the form of objects or physical commodities.
Attention
Stimuli are selectively attended to by people. Some of the stimuli are reacted to
while others are ignored without being paid any 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, viz. announcement of bonus, appeal

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 for increasing productivity, training and motivation.
Recognition
The recognition process is dependent on mental acceptance. For example, if a
car driver suddenly sees a child in front of his running car, he stops the car. He
recognises 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 the does not pay attention
to the stimuli, he recognises the danger. After recognising the stimuli, he translates the
message into behaviour.
Translation
The stimuli are evaluated before being converted into action or behaviour. The
evaluation process is translation. In the above example, the car driver after recognising
the stimuli uses the clutch and brake to stop the car. He has immediately translated the
stimulus into an appropriate action. The perception process is purely mental before it is
converted into action.
Behaviour
Behaviour is the outcome of the cognitive process. It is a response to change in
sensory inputs, i.e. stimuli. It is an overt and covert response. Perceptual behaviour is
not influenced by 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.
Performance
Proper behaviour leads 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.
Factors determining perception:
Perception is influenced by various factors. They are divided into internal and external
factors. They are explained below:
External Attention Factors
The external attention factors are:
a. Intensity
b. Size
c. Contrast
d. Repetition
e. Motion
f. Novelty and familiarity
g.
Intensity
The intensity of stimulus implies that the more intense the stimulus, audio or

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visual, the more is the likelihood it will be perceived. A loud noise, strong odour or
bright light or bright colours will be more readily perceived than soft sound, weak
odour or dim light. It is because of this advantage that advertisers employ intensity to
draw the consumers’ attention.
Size
As regards the size of the stimulus, any odd size attracts attention. A Great Den
dog which is tall attracts the attention. At the same time a pocket dog also attracts
attention because of its size. However, generally the larger the object the more likely it
will be perceived.
Contrast
The contrast principle states that external stimuli, which stand out against the
background or which, are not what the people expect will receive attention. Plant safety
signs, which have black lettering on a red background, gain attention.
Repetition
The factor of repetition implies that a repeated external stimulus attracts more
attention than the one that occurs at one time alone. Perhaps, it is because of this that
supervisors tend to repeat directions regarding job instructions several times for even
simple tasks to hold the attention of their workers. Advertisers while putting T.V. or
radio advertisements repeat the brand name they are advertising.
Motion
The factor of motion implies that the individual attend to changing objects in
their field of vision than to static objects. It is because of this advantage that advertisers
involve signs, which include moving objects in their campaigns.
Novelty and familiarity
A novel object in the familiar situation or a familiar object in a novel situation
tends to attract attention. Thus a white or a black in India catches attention faster.

Internal set Factors

The internal set factors are as under:
a. Habit
b. Motivation and interest
c. Learning
d. Organisational role and specialization:
Habit
A Christian will bow and beg the God for peaceful life when he/she sees a
church while walking on the road, because of his well-established habit. The motor set
may cause the likelihood of inappropriate responses.

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Motivation and interest
Two examples of motivational factors are hunger and thirst. Motivational
factors increase the individual’s sensitivity to those stimuli, which he considers as
relevant to the satisfaction of his needs in view of his past experience with them. A
thirsty individual has a perceptual set to seek a water fountain or a hotel to quench his
thirst, which increases for him the likelihood of perceiving restaurant signs and
decreases the likelihood of visualizing other objects at that moment of time.
Principles of perception:
Perception has various principles also. They are as follows:
There are several kinds of primitive perceptual organisations, which include grouping,
closure, figure-ground effect and constancy phenomenon.
Perceptual grouping
The grouping principle of perceptual organisation states that there is a tendency
to group several stimuli together into a recognizable pattern. The principle is very basic
and seems largely inborn. In the visual fields, we find that objects that are similar in
appearance tend to be grouped together. Likewise, the individual tends to create a
whole even when it is not there.
Closure
The closure principle of grouping is closely related to the gestalt school of
psychology. The principle is that a person will sometimes perceive a whole when one
does not exist. The person’s perceptual processes will close the gaps that are unfilled
from the sensory inputs.
Figure-ground
The objects are perceived with reference to their background. The figure-
ground principle means simply that perceived objects stand out as separable from their
general background. When the reader is reading this paragraph, in terms of light-wave
stimuli, the reader perceives patches of irregularly shaped blacks and whites. Yet the
reader perceives the shapes as letters and figures printed against the white background.
In other words the reader perceptually organizes these stimuli into recognizable
patterns i.e. the words.
Perceptual constancy
Constancy is one of the more sophisticated forms of perceptual organisation. It
gives a person a sense of stability in a changing world. This principle permits
the individual to have some constancy in a tremendously variable world.
Impression Management
Whereas social perception is concerned with how one individual perceives
other individuals, impression management (sometimes called “self-presentation”) is the
process by which people attempt to manage or control the perceptions others form of
them. There is often a tendency for people to try to present them in such a way as to
impress others in a socially desirable way. Thus, impression management has

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considerable implications for areas such as the validity of performance appraisals (is
the evaluator being manipulated into giving a positive rating?) and a pragmatic,
political tool for one to climb the ladder of success in organisations.

Check your progress:

1. What is personality?
2. What are the most important factors that affect individual’s personality?
3. What is perception?
4. What are the factors that affect individual’s perceptual processes?

Summary

In this chapter we learnt about individual’s personality and perception. Personality is

distinctive and relatively stable pattern of behaviors, thoughts, motives, and emotions that
characterizes an individual. Perception is a cognitive process of seeing, receiving,
selecting, organizing, interpreting and giving meaning to the situation. It is determined
and influenced by perceiver’s characters, external factors and others. It is used in
selection, performance appraisal. Perception is the process of receiving information about
and making sense of the world around us.

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 Review Questions
1. What is personality? How do we typically measure it?
2. What factors determine personality?
3. What are the Big Five personality traits?
4. What is perception, and what factors influence our perception?
5. What shortcuts do people frequently use in making judgments about others?
6. What is the link between perception and decision making? How does one affect
the other?
7. What are some of the common decision biases or errors that people make?