Concept of Perception:

Perception is a process which involves the organism selecting, organising, and interpreting
the stimulus. Thus, perception is the process of selecting, organising, and interpreting or
attaching meaning to the events happening in the environment. However, what one perceives
can be substantially different from objective reality. It need not be, but there is often
disagreement. People’s behaviour is based on their perception of what reality is, not on reality
itself. The world as it is perceived is the world that is behaviourally important.

People often see the same phenomenon differently both within organisational context and
outside the organisation. For example, in relation to a strike, a manager may perceive the
immediate cause of the strike as trivial, while the workers may see it as a very serious.
Similarly, when there any accident in the factory, the supervisor may treat it as the
carelessness of workers while the workers may treat it as the high-handedness of
management and lack of adequate provisions of security measures.

Thus, the situations remaining the same, causes have been assigned differently by different
groups of persons.

Definition:

Robbins has defined perception as follows:

“Perception may be defined as a process by which individuals organise and interpret their
sensory impressions in order to give meaning to their environment.”

Based on the definition of perception, we may identify its following features:

1. Perception is the intellectual process through which a person selects the data from the
environment, organises it , and obtains meaning from it. The physical process of
obtaining data from environment, known as sensation, is distinct from it.

2. Perception is the basic cognitive or psychological process. The manner in which a

person perceives the environment affects his behaviour. Thus, peoples actions
emotions and thoughts, or feelings are triggered by the perception of their
surroundings.

3. Perception being an intellectual and psychological process, becomes a subjective

process and different people may perceive the same environmental event different
event differently based on what particular aspects of the situation they choose to
absorb, how they organise this situation. Thus, the subjectively perceived ‘reality’ in
any given setting may be different people.
Perceptual selectivity:

Perception is a selective process and as the people can sense only limited amount of
information in the environment that are characteristically selective. By selection, certain
aspects of stimuli are screened out and others admitted. Those which are admitted remains in
the awareness of the people and those which are screened out fall below the threshold. For
example, when people read a newspaper , they do not read the entire newspaper but only
those news which interest them. Similar things happen in other cases too. This is known as
perceptual selectivity. This is caused by a variety of factors which may be divided into two
categories: external and internal.