Influence of Individual Factors on Human Behaviour

 

Reducing Error and Influencing Behaviour (HSG48) refers to Human Factors as,

 

“Human factors refer to environmental, organisational and job factors, and human and individual characteristics, which influence behaviour at work in a way which can affect health and safety.”

 

To simply understand the concept of influences of individual factors on human behaviour, different variables will be discussed with respect to their impact on people’s behaviour addressing health and safety.

The Individual:  Individual factors are personal attitudes, skills, habits and personalities may be strengths or weaknesses depending on the job demands. These characteristics influence behaviour in complex and significant ways. Their effect may be positive or negative and may not always be mitigated by the job design. Some characteristics such as personality are largely – fixed and cannot be easily changed. Others, such as skills and attitudes, may more readily be changed or enhanced.                                                            

                                                                                                             

Personality:  People do not change fundamentally from day to day; as personality is formed through a combination of mechanisms and environmental factors (nature and nurture). Each personality is unique. Cattell’s Trait theory suggests that personality is extremely difficult to change and management must consider any person’s personality when choosing people for a task because accident occurs as a result of mismatched personality and task is not the fault of the individual.

 

Attitude: “A mental and neural state of readiness, organized through experience, exerting a directive and dynamic influence upon the individual’s response to all objects and situations with which it is related.” (Malim & Birch, 1998)

 

Individual attitudes differ. They reflect an individual’s inclination to feel, think or act in a positive or negative way towards particular target, be that a person, an object or a concept.

 

“What is normal for a spider is a chaos for a fly.” (Charles Addams)

 

Different components of attitude are affective including feelings and emotions, cognitive including perceptions, beliefs and memories and behavioural including actions and intentions to act.

 

Aptitude:  Ability is the capacity to perform a particular physical or mental function. Key abilities include physical, strength, manual dexterity, spatial acuity and conceptual thinking. Abilities may be learnt or developed in the workplace. Aptitude is an inherent ability or inclination for acquiring or developing ability.

 

Motivation: It includes the forces that will stimulate an individual to act or perform. Effective management requires motivation of individuals to achieve their stated goals and objectives. Well-motivated workers will be satisfied, energetic and will be delivering what has been assigned to him/her. On the other side poorly motivated worker will be apathetic, dissatisfied and will be under performing.

 

Key driving forces for a worker will be individual’s fulfillment of personal needs, psychological satisfaction and/or tangible rewards e.g. salary, benefits or promotion.