Perception, Motivation and Behavior Within Organizations

How Perception Influences Motivation and Behavior within Organizations

There are a lot of factors that affect a person’s behavior or that will influence their motivation. As leaders it is important to try and understand these underlining factors to be able to improve decision making and outcomes for the organization. One area that can have a big impact on behavior and motivation is perception. Perception is described by Gibson, Ivancevich, Donnelly, & Konopaske (2009) as the individual’s need to organize information from their environment in a way that makes sense to them. In addition, different individuals will give their own meaning to events around them resulting in no two individuals perceiving the same events in the same way. Because we all have different perceptions about our environment, it is important to remember that an individual’s perceptions are their realities.

Perception Verses Reality in Explaining Behavior

When studying employee behavior all the models have some component of employee perception. How an individual responds to a raise, more job responsibility or more autonomy is affected not only by their culture, gender, generation, and other factors, but also by how they perceive the events as well. For example, a women in her late twenties that is given more job duties without a raise my view this as inequitable since her colleagues do not have to do as much work, but they get paid the same. However, another individual may feel like their boss really values their work and that is why they are given more responsibilities and they are motivated to work even harder. Therefore, some people feel that perception is even more important when studying behavior and motivation. In addition, Dawley, A...

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... be difficult to accomplish, with practice, good listening skills and openness to differences, managers will be able to improve their ability to motivate staff.

Conclusion

Our perceptions about events and actions help us to make sense of our environment. However, they can also be based on mis-information or mis-interpretations that can cause us to resist needed change, feel unmotivated, or undervalued at work. Understanding employee behavior and motivation starts with understanding our own perceptions. Are we putting our own values, ideas or beliefs onto the situations; and are we listening to what the employee’s concerns are whether we believe them to be true or not. As leaders we have to understand that everyone has a different perception and work towards creating an environment that will allow all employees to be motived based on their needs not ours.