In the Firm I Work At, It Is Generally Understood That Employees Are a Hardy Bunch And

The Social Information Processing Model of perception describes four processing stages that include selective attention and comprehension, encoding and simplification, storage and retention, and retrieval and response. In the first stage, the person becomes aware of something or someone based on stimuli factors that might include the size, intensity, novelty, and repetition of the stimuli, or the degree the stimuli is salient to their needs. Encoding and simplification is how different people interpret environmental stimuli differently based on previously developed cognitive categories and schema. Cognitive categories help us classify, simplify, and distinguish among objects, while schemata are cognitive scripts that provide general ideas about situations. Storage and retention refer to encoding information into the three compartments of long-term memory. Retrieval and response, is the retrieval of information from memory to make judgments and decisions about situations.

In the firm I work at, it is generally understood that employees are a hardy bunch and are expected to work relatively autonomously. Employees receive salient stimuli from many sources and the firm is working hard to develop cultural norms that include increased job training to help employees address these stimuli. Corporate culture change to reflect societal cultural changes have been difficult for the firm due to the age of the employees and the firm’s history of past attempts to change the culture. Employees, most having over 25 year’s seniority, have been through several iterations of culture change and are suspicious of any new programs intended to increase their job skills. These senior employees have developed cognitive categories and schema’s to address management’s attempts to make effective changes in the firm including the use of the union to encourage other employees to not participate in the new job training programs.

Newer employes, those with less than 25 years seniority, came into the firm understanding concepts like skill transferability and self-improvement and therefore handle change requests much differently than the more senior employees. These employees believe that they alone control their own destiny and they embrace the opportunity to increase their job skills. While not all employees fall neatly into one category or the other, there clearly are two categories in the firm and there are strong feelings on both sides regarding job improvement training programs.

Many years ago the firm learned of employees entrenched feeling toward increasing their job skills. To address this problem partially, the firm introduced continual learning in the job orientation phase for new employees. While the firm may be unable to convince all employees that continual learning will benefit them, new employees are embracing the idea and eventually old cognitive categories and schema associated with increasing job skills may be changed.