What is the importance of understanding motivation and perception?

Motivation and perception are two psychological factors influencing human decision-making and behavior. Since they are at the root of human choices and behavior, there is great personal and social importance attached to understanding them. Also, since motivation and perception are psychological factors, they are complex in nature, and explanations for them have been developed by numerous schools of thought. Even so, there are uniform characteristics identified through each approach, making a basic discussion profitable.Motivation...

Motivation and perception are two psychological factors influencing human decision-making and behavior. Since they are at the root of human choices and behavior, there is great personal and social importance attached to understanding them. Also, since motivation and perception are psychological factors, they are complex in nature, and explanations for them have been developed by numerous schools of thought. Even so, there are uniform characteristics identified through each approach, making a basic discussion profitable.

Motivation
Motivation is influenced by inherent need and is defined as the desire to achieve a specific goal through goal-directed behavior. In a business setting, managers are successful when they have motivation to meet company expectations of production and growth. Managers can succeed when they can properly instill motivation in their employees to understand and achieve the tasks set before them relevant to production and growth. In a market setting, businesses can succeed if they understand consumer motivation and develop their brand and marketing to accord with it. These are some factors key in the importance of understanding motivation.

Perception
Perception determines how a person selectively attends to and organizes information. It is perception that drives motivation: if perception of task relevance is low, then the task will have low achievement priority; there will be low motivation to achieve the task. Perception is fluid, and each person selects information differently and organizes it differently. This selection and organization of information (perception) is affected by, depends upon and is filtered through personal circumstances of social, cultural, economic, religious, educational exposure and other background and experience. Perception has importance in a business setting because managers' and employees' motivation depends upon their perceptions of information related to task relevance, task performance, production specifications and company growth. Perception has importance in a marketing setting because successful branding and marketing depend upon how consumers in target markets perceive the product and the company. These are some key factors in the importance of understanding perception.