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MANAGING PROJECTS

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Projects represent nonroutine business activities that often have long-term strategic ramifications for a firm. In this chapter, we examined how projects differ from routine business activities and discussed the major phases of projects. We noted how environmental changes have resulted in increased attention being paid to projects and project management over the past decade. In the second half of the chapter, we introduced some basic tools that businesses can use when planning for and controlling projects. Both Gantt charts and network diagrams give managers a visual picture of how a project is going. Network diagrams have the added advantage of showing the precedence between activities, as well as the critical path(s). We wrapped up the chapter by showing how these concepts are embedded in inexpensive yet powerful software packages such as Microsoft Project. If you want to learn more about project management, we encourage you to take a look at the Web site for the Proj...
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Perceptions and Attributions

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Perception is the psychological process whereby the individual selects information from the environment and organizes it to make sense of his world. Environmental stimuli are observed, selected, organized, interpreted, and responded to as a result of the perceptual process. Understanding the two major components of this process—selection and organization—is particularly important.
Perceptual selection is used to filter out less important information in order to focus on more important environmental cues. Both external factors in the environment and factors internal to the perceiver influence perceptual selection. External factors (i.e., size, motion) can be thought of as characteristics of the event. These influence whether the event is likely to be noticed. Internal factors include personality, learning, and motivation.
How the individual perceives another is particularly important for organizational behavior. Person perception is a function of the characteristics of the person perceived, the characteristics of the perceiver, and the situation within which the perception takes place. Individuals may go to great lengths to manage the impressions that others form about them.
The perceptual process may result in errors of judgment or understanding in various ways. The more important and common perceptual errors include perceptual defense, stereotyping, the halo effect, projection, and impression management. However, through training and experience, individuals can learn to judge or perceive others more accurately.
Attribution deals with the perceived causes of behavior. Individuals infer causes to understand the behavior of others. Their perceptions of why certain behaviors occur influence their own subsequent behaviors and feelings. Whether behavior is internally caused by the nature of the individual or externally caused by circumstances over which the individual has little control has important implications for leaders. Individuals also make attributions concerning task success and failure that have important implications for organizational behavior.

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