Human Resources Concepts in the Workplace

Human Resources Concepts in the Workplace. Interactions between employees or between employees and the management are unavoidable in any workplace as this determines productivity and achievement of set goals. With interaction comes the notion of perceptual processes emanating from the fact that people try to make sense of the world around them mostly through the interpretation of incoming information. The notion of perceptual processes alludes to the making of judgments about individuals and groups that people interact with in the workplace or beyond.

Within the workplace setting, the perceptual processes are important since they determine how people interact and contribute to organizational productivity. Some of the concepts in perceptual processes include stereotyping, meaningful interaction, and the self-fulfilling prophecy. As will be discussed in this paper, stereotyping, self-fulfilling prophecy, and meaningful interaction are effective in deriving perceptions but are also detrimental where wrong assumptions are made.

Human Resources Concepts

In the book by McShane and Glinow (2014), the author defines stereotyping as a process that involves assigning characteristics to an identifiable group and the transferring the characteristics to anyone believed to be a member of the group. As a concept in the perceptual process, stereotyping sometimes has some truths despite the fact that it is often viewed as falsehood or exaggerations. Being a human resources manager in the hospitality industry, stereotypes are employed both by the employees as well as the customers and in both positive and negative ways.

As an example, when looking for someone to barbeque during employee social interactions, employees often point to Texans. The stereotype becomes effective when such a categorization is true and when the target of the stereotype does not consider it offensive. From the example given on Texans being good at barbeque, it is effective since employees not within the stereotype depict less knowledge.