Perception and Leadership Effectiveness in Organizations

Running head: ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND DESIGN 1
Organizational Behavior and Design
Name:
Institution

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND DESIGN 2
Introduction
For the organizations that seek to reach their goals, decision making is an essential skill.
The excellence of an organization is based on accurate decision making and the consequences of
a decision can either break or make an organization. In the decision-making process, perception
plays a crucial role. As such, decision-makers, often the leaders in a company make use of
perception to come up with, evaluate, and make choices between decision options. Perception is
defined as the process through which people organize and interpret their own sensory
impressions with the intention of giving the environment a meaning. However, perception is not
perfect because it is based on assumptions which are attributed to a person’s personal
characteristics. There are several factors that influence an individual’s perception. For instance, it
is likely that the perceiver may be influenced by their personal characteristics which comprise of
experiences, attitudes, expectations, as well as interests. A person is perceived through their
background, size, distinguishable characteristics, attractiveness, color, and accent. Additionally,
perception is also influenced by situational factors that consist of social setting, the work setting,
including the event. The purpose of this essay is to discuss how perception impacts on leadership
effectiveness and determining what may be done by a leader to enhance their perceived
leadership effectiveness.
How Perception Impacts on Leadership Effectiveness
In the real world organizations, decisions are made on the bases of people reacting to a
certain problem. The organizational decisions are made based on the firm’s finances, goals,
employees, schedules, along with other data (Underdahl, Walker & Woehr, 2014). In the current
world, leaders within organizations have been empowered to make decisions on behalf of the
employees. The leaders participating in intuition, bounded rationality, including common errors
and biases. Typically, the leaders or the decision makers are observed not to exhaust all the
available alternatives to a particular issue. The leaders are adept to coming up with a short list
comprising of the likely alternatives and selecting the alternative that best solves most of the
complexities associated with a problem (Dabke, 2016). Common errors and biases in the process
of making a decision include escalation of commitment, randomness, availability,
overconfidence, hindsight, anchor, representative, and confirmation. All these biases and errors

ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOUR AND DESIGN 3
can cloud the judgment of the decision makers. As a result, perception impacts on leadership
effectiveness in the following ways;
Perception helps in shaping ethical as well as moral decisions. In ethical decision making,
there are basically three criteria that comprise justice, utilitarianism, and rights. The
utilitarianism criteria are widely used to govern several businesses and it is consistent with goals
such as high profits, efficiency, along with productivity. The utilitarianism forsakes a person’s
individual rights (Brouer, Douglas, Treadway & Ferris, 2013). On the other hand, the rights
criteria entail the act of protecting and respecting a person’s individual rights. Additionally, the
ethical criteria of justice are mostly applied by the unions and it entails having equal rules, pays,
as well as benefits for all staff. The process of ethical decision making puts into consideration
every individual, object, or animal that are likely to be affected by decisions made by the leaders.
Failure to consider all the stakeholders in decision-making results in unethical decisions. Every
person tries to give an explanation about the world around them by use of perception. Making
use of perceptions can result in errors (Chen & Li, 2013). However, a perception which is
accurate may prove to be effective in the process of making decisions. The leaders cannot fully
rely on perception when making decisions but they must attribute an individual’s behavior to a
particular cause. Combining the decision-making criteria, perception, as well as the avoidance of
biases including errors, make it easy for the leaders involved in decision-making to solve
problems correctly, thus impacting on the effectiveness of their leadership.
Being a manager involves expressing good leadership skills and being effective in
leading other people. Particularly, during interviews, the perception of a leader likely influences
their decisions. For instance, if a manager is carrying out an interview, their perception assists
them in recruiting the best candidates (Lakshman, 2013). Additionally, their perpetual biases are
likely to affect the accuracy of the manager’s judgment of the candidates. In the expectation of
effectiveness and performance, perception assists the manager in making judgments that are
effective based on the expectation. As such, perception impacts on the manager’s effectiveness
since it helps them in coming up with the most effective performance appraisal of their staff
when evaluating performance (Danielsson, Wulff & Westerlund, 2013). This implies that
appraisal is subjective to performance appraisal. Having the best perception for a leader within
an organization helps the team to have safe solutions when there are risky ideas.