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Assess The Effect Of Selective Perception

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Selective perception is one of the perception biases introduced into the standardized selection process by Bill Gilroy while selecting employees to work at Paragon Pulp& Paper. According to David Buchanan (2004), selective perception is the the tendency to concentrate on a particular information and ignore others that contradicts with their opinion. When an individual is exposed to different stimulus, after orgranizing and interpreting their thoughts, the actual fact pertaining to it might be distorted due to different ways of perceiving this stimulus. Although this often happens unconsciously, the effect of this bias is widespread. When a person committed selective perception, very often that person might not be able to make a wise decision. …show more content…

This is because a person who committed the selective perception error tend to be in favour of people or things that have a similar background with them. A company that is hiring for example, the recruiter tends to hire people with the same background with him. While companies with diversification will have a higher rate of growth due to higher innovation and more ideas being generated by the workers, when selective perception is implemented, assimilation stops the company from having workers from different levels. For example, an individual who scored a score of Grade 3 or below is eliminated automatically. It was assumed that people who scores Grade 3 and below are workers and they do not have the ability to lead in the workplace and therefore are not hired. However, this might not be the fact. Some individuals might score very high in one aspect but fail other aspects of the test. It means that individual has a potential in that particular aspect that can contribute to the company. A company will need diversified talents in order to succeed. However, their suitability are not considered by Bill Gilroy as they are consistent with his idea of having a strong reasoning employee. These individuals might also have deep knowledge in the industry and other aspects but are not reflected in the test. Individuals who scored …show more content…

Hence, they will speed read these information and generate their own conclusion. For example, it was claimed that unfavorable information has a greater impact on hiring decisions made according to Springbett’s research in 1958. When a person is late for the interview, his/ her performance in the interview is no longer important to the interviewer. It is thus accused that selective perception is committed as the interviewers only focus on the unfavorable trait of the interviewee. However, people commit this bias is due to the cost for a bad hiring decision is higher than the cost of not hiring a good applicant. Moreover, they have limited capacity to process every information given to them. “Because we can’t observe everything going on about us, we engage in selective perception,” (Robbins, 2005, p. 138) Hence, they would rather not hire the excellent candidate as an employee than wrongly hire an unsuitable candidate. In other words, this allowed him to eliminate the hidden risk in his workforce. In summary, although the use of selective perception is explainable by making the decision process easier and to avoid the potential cost of committing the error, the use of selective perception will lead to unfair decisions being made, truth being distorted and lack of diversification of the workplace. Hence, this supports the argument

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