What Factors Affect Employee Perception?

Personal perception is the process by which individuals give meaning to their surroundings by organizing and interpreting the impressions they feel. Research on perception has always shown that even when people see the same thing, they have different perceptions. ^[1]

Personal perception is the process by which individuals give meaning to their surroundings by organizing and interpreting the impressions they feel. Research on perception has always shown that even when people see the same thing, they have different perceptions. For example, for an assistant who often takes several days to make important decisions, a manager can interpret this fact as slow action, lack of regulations, and fear of making decisions. Another manager may interpret the assistant's behavior as thoughtful, meticulous, and thoughtful. The first manager is likely to make a negative evaluation of the assistant; the second manager is likely to make a positive evaluation of the assistant. The point is that no one can see reality completely. ^[1]

In the process of perceiving others, people often have biases. These biases are characteristics of the perceptual process. One can notice it and reduce their impact, but one cannot avoid its impact. These deviations include:
The halo effect is also known as the halo effect. It means that the appraiser's evaluation of a person's multiple traits is often affected by the impression of a certain trait's high score and is generally high, just like a light-emitting object has a surrounding object. Lighting works the same. For example, once you think your classmate Zhang San is cute, you will have a high evaluation of his personality, attitude, and ability. That is to say, the high score evaluation of the cute trait affects other traits. The evaluation of others makes the evaluation of other traits generally high. Opposite to the halo effect is the anti-halo effect (Negative-halo), also known as the Forked-tail effect, which mainly refers to the appraisal of a person's multiple traits are often affected by the low score of a trait and generally low . Dion (Berscheid, Walster) and others in 1972 used photo evaluation experiments to prove the existence of the halo effect, as shown in Table 2-2: ^[2]

The process of perceiving others contains many clues, and it is through these clues that our understanding of others is accurate and convincing. In general, these clues are: ^[2]

(1) Emotions We often infer the internal psychological state of others based on their emotions, so emotions are the most important clue for us to understand others. For the external and visible traits of others, people's perception accuracy is extremely high, but for the internal state of others, such as feelings, emotions, personality, etc., it is more difficult. But even if it is difficult, people still understand it in various ways. As early as 1938, American psychologist Woodworth pointed out that human emotions can be arranged in a six-point continuous dimension, whether any two types of emotions can be distinguished, and their distance in this dimension related. Most psychologists now acknowledge that people have seven different emotions: ^[2]

Happiness, surprise, confusion, fear, sadness, anger, anger, disgust, insult, curiosity, and earnestness. In 1872, Darwin studied the cross-cultural characteristics of expressions from the perspective of evolution, and found that facial expressions expressed the same emotional state everywhere. For example, smile when you are happy, and frown when you are worried. The commonality of this expression has great survival value for human beings. Darwin claims that this common expression has evolved because it allows us to express our emotions to others and thus control the behavior of others. ^[2]

Box 2-1: What are the meanings of smiles? Generally speaking, there are two meanings of smiles. The first meaning is that smiles are basic emotions such as happiness or joy. According to this view, anything pleasant can make people smile. Another view is that smile is a communicative action and has nothing to do with basic emotions. To clarify this, Kraut and Johnston (1979) conducted an experiment to verify the two meanings of smile by observing daily interpersonal contact. In their research, they found that people who played bowling made social contact, such as smiling when looking at their friends; and escaping social contact, such as not smiling when looking at the ground. Kraut and Johnston reasoned accordingly that a smile doesn't always mean happiness. In the same experiment, researchers also found that 30% of bowling people smiled after they fell down (spare or strike), and 23% of the time they smiled. It can be seen that smiling is both a means of communication and an expression of happiness. In another observational study, researchers wanted to investigate whether runners' smiles were caused by friends traveling (being in social contact) or because the weather was good. As shown in Table 2-4: The researchers found that the impact of the weather is minimal, and that friends travelling is the most important factor. So smiling seems to be part of social interaction, a communication skill, not just a practical signal of pleasant emotions. ^[2]

Table 2-4: Percent of runners smiling Good weather Bad weather Traveling with friends 61% 57%
12% alone 5%

(2) Non-verbal clues Generally speaking, people use three kinds of information channels to express information related to themselves, the most obvious is Verbal communication, that is, the content of a person's conversation. The other two are non-verbal. They provide more subtle cues. Non-verbal communication includes non-verbal visual cues and hyperlinguistic cues. The former refers to human facial expressions, gestures, body posture and appearance behavior, while the latter refers to conversation content. All signals except frequency, such as frequency, amplitude, speed, sound quality, etc. ^[2]

The non-verbal visual clue is Distance: Generally speaking, when someone is more friendly and intimate with another person, he chooses a smaller distance. When people want to make others feel friendly, they also choose a smaller distance. Therefore, we can understand the attitude of others towards us from a distance chosen by others. However, here we should also consider the influence of cultural factors on interpersonal distance. As early as the 1960s, when psychologists studied human space behavior, they discovered that cultural norms determine people's distance preferences. They found that Americans choose larger distances when others interact, while Latin Americans and Arabs choose smaller distances. Such distances can sometimes cause misunderstandings between people of different cultures. For example, when an American and a Pakistani are interacting, Americans may feel that the other party is too close, while Pakistanis find Americans indifferent. ^[2]

The second is Gestures: different postures of the body convey different messages, such as dancing when you are happy, and shrinking when you are afraid. In the past decade or so, many best-selling books on the subject of body language have pointed out that by observing other people's body movements, they can correctly guess the thoughts and languages of others. But here we also need to pay attention to the fact that the body language is significant because the observer and the observed person both understand the background and culture of the interaction. Misunderstandings can result if certain cultural contexts are left out. For example, in North America, a handshake represents friendship and trust, but in Japan, bowing is used instead, and Southeast Asian countries are holding together. ^[2]

The third is Eye contact: People can also use their eyes to pass specific information. The meaning of eye contact is very different depending on the background. Hollywood movies often begin with the eye contact of a pair of men and women to describe love and affection. Contact indicates interest and interruption indicates no interest. When talking to someone, the lack of eye contact can make people feel that you are not interested in him. However, when one is communicating bad news to another, eye contact may be avoided. When people feel that they are in trouble, they don't want to be the focus of attention. Sometimes eye contact can be used as a threat, and teachers often use it. ^[2]

Hyperlingual Clues:
Hyperlinguistic cues refer to cues other than the content of speech in a language, which is expressed as a sentence with multiple meanings. For example, in an English test, the same sentence will have different meanings due to different accents, different pauses, or different intonations. Psychologists have found that nonverbal cues often reveal a person's true intentions compared to verbal cues. When a person says panic successfully, his attempts to deceive are often leaked from nonverbal cues. Ekman et al. (Ekman, Friesen 1974) believe that people tend to pay more attention to the content of their conversations rather than pay attention to their posture. For example, if a person wants to deceive others, he will tell a lie calmly, but leak his emotions from non-verbal. Panic speakers often inadvertently leak themselves from hyperverbal expressions such as anxiety, nervousness, and neuroticism. Many studies (Ekman, 1976) have found that when people lie, the average tone of the sound is higher than when telling the truth. This difference is not large, and the hearing cannot be distinguished, but the spectrometer can correctly detect someone's lying. Secondly, short answers, long response intervals, frequent speech errors, and nervousness are all considered traits of a liar. Zuckerman and others also found that body posture is more likely to reveal deception attempts than the face. ^[2]

Although non-verbal cues can to some extent reveal attempts by others to lie, in real life, people's ability to detect whether others are lying is not very strong. Kraut and Poe (1980) did a study. They randomly selected some passengers and let them carry the contraband through customs. If they can be smuggled successfully, they will get a bonus of 4,000 US dollars. A random control group was also selected. At the customs exit, observers, including anti-drug experts, customs anti-personnel officers, etc. secretly record the non-verbal communication behavior of each passenger: such as appearance, posture, relaxation, smile, avoiding the attention of customs officers, errors in conversation Reactions and more. As a result, there was no discernible difference in nonverbal communication between the smugglers and the control group. Neither customs officers nor observers can distinguish between smugglers and control groups. It was impossible for the observer to pick smugglers from the video afterwards. The study found that in real life people have limited ability to detect deception. ^[2]