Chapter 4 - Social Perception and Managing Diversity

Perception

Cognitive process that enable us to interpret and understand our surroundings

Storage and Retention

Event memory, semantic memory, person memory

The Four Layers of Diversity

Personality, Internal dimensions, external dimensions, organizational dimensions

Simplification

Relying on encoding helps us to simplify what might be a bewildering range of inputs

Social Perception: A Social Information Processing Model

Stage 1: Selective attention/comprehension Stage 2: Encoding and simplification Stage 3: Storage and retention Stage 4: Retrieval and response

Cognitive categories

a number of objects that are considered equivalent

Schema

a person's mental picture or summary of a particular event or type of stimulus

Diversity climate

a subcomponent of an organization's overall climate and is defined as the employees' aggregate "perceptions about the organization's diversity-related formal structure characteristics and informal values'

Affirmative action

an artificial intervention aimed at giving management a chance to correct an imbalance, injustice, mistake, or outright discrimination that occurred in the past

Stereotype

an individual's set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group

Internal factors

behavior can be attributed within a person

External factors

behavior can be attributed within the environment

Distinctiveness

compares a person's behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks

Consensus

compares an individual's behavior with that of his or her peers

Access-and-legitimacy perspective

diversity is based in recognition that the organization's markets and constituencies are culturally diverse

Discrimination

employment decisions about an individual are due to reasons not associated with performance or are not related to the job

Managing diversity

enables people to perform up to their maximum potential. Keys: education, enforcement, exposure

Retrieval and Response

information is retrieved from memory to make judgements and decisions

Consistency

judges if the individual's performance on a given task is consistent over time

Attention

process of becoming consciously aware of something or someone

Fundamental attribution bias

reflects one's tendency to attribute another person's behavior to his or her personal characteristics, as opposed to situation factors

Psychological safety

reflects the extent to which people feel safe to express their ideas and beliefs without fear of negative consequences

Implicit cognition

represents any thoughts or beliefs that are automatically activated from memory without our conscious awareness

Self-serving bias

represents one's tendency to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure

Diversity

represents the multitude of individual differences and similarities that exist among people

On-ramping

represents the process companies use to encourage people to reenter the workforce after a temporary career break

Salient stimuli

something that stands out from its context

Demographics

statistical measurements of populations and their qualities over time

Causal attributions

suspected or inferred caused of behavior

Surface-level characteristics

those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, gender, and age

Deep-level characteristics

those that take time to emerge in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values

Encoding

to interpret and evaluate the environment using schemata and cognitive categories

Glass ceiling

used to represent an invisible but absolute barrier or solid roadblock that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions