psychology essay help

psychology essay help

The Impact of Psychological Factors on Human Behavior

1. Introduction to Psychology and Human Behavior

Although it is difficult to predict human behavior, business leaders are well aware of the impact people have on quantitative performance factors. Even if workers rebel and play saber tooth tiger when asked to be lambs with their health and safety, not to mention morale, sacrifices. The effectiveness with which people perform their jobs and relate to others is essential for organizational survival and success; indeed, in increasingly complex and ever-changing organizations, success may depend on it. The benefits of considering psychological factors when analyzing individual, group, and organizational behavior are significant. Among other things, understanding and predicting human behavior can facilitate the design of cohesive social systems, minimize occupational stress, improve leadership styles and techniques, reduce ethnic and cultural conflicts, lessen employee turnover rates, enhance worker productivity and satisfaction, and increase the probability of a smooth organizational transition. Thus, many important organizational questions have psychological answers. Indeed, while psychological knowledge can seldom solve problems definitely and without mistakes, it can prevent many mistakes and clarify many perplexing issues. Knowing when and how psychological principles are involved should never be underestimated.

Psychology is the study of human behavior. This article focuses on psychological factors. Human behavior is about the activities a person does to achieve his or her goals, meet the expectations of others, and respond to the demands of society. Behavior is not just what people do; it is also what they say and what happens to them, both physically and emotionally. The research and insights of psychologists have led to the discovery of psychological and behavioral principles and provided for the development of models for explaining and predicting human behavior. In the middle to late 1970s, business leaders began to realize that “human relations,” “labor,” and “personnel” problems had become “human resource management” challenges. By 1981, those responsible for “human resource management” had decided that “employees” and “labor” should be addressed as “human resources,” and the field was renamed “human resources management.”

2. Key Psychological Theories and Concepts

2.1 Behavior: Two Views 2.1.1 Overview How should we understand human behavior? The two most important and relevant views are that behavior arises from: 1) an individual’s beliefs, preferences, and constraints; or 2) an individual’s intention to behave in a particular way. The first approach assumes that individual preferences, constraints, and beliefs drive behavior and are the main object of interest. This may result in the individual’s behavior being eclectic, uncoordinated, and fickle, as different beliefs about the appropriate thing to do, different time pressures, and different budget constraints can lead the same person to do different things in similar circumstances. At different times, the person can also do different things or the person’s course of action would change if the price of an input changes. The second approach assumes that an individual will always act in the best possible way, given their rationality and information. This ‘revealed preference’ or utility maximization approach assumes that the most appropriate application of someone’s utility function can be used to model their ideas and actions. With appropriate information and rational choice, this ‘predicted behavior’ approach should be compatible with behavior that is predictable, coordinated, robust, and generally law-abiding.

In this section, we will explore some key psychological theories and concepts. These concepts will then lay the ground for the very specific behaviors listed as research priorities that are described in the later section of this overall report. In particular, we focus on the psychological concepts and theories that relate to how people act in organizations, how they make use of information, and how they make decisions. Firstly, however, we explore some general properties of human behavior that have implications for empirical practice.

3. The Influence of Psychological Factors on Behavior

Man has brought many branches of science that he has established close to perfection through pure reason, thinking, and research, understanding the physical and chemical condition of matter, entirely solving the whereabouts of phenomena whenever he has visualized the natural and environmental events and found the factors directly affected. In view of this, much knowledge has been provided to the service of humanity in the matter of understanding the behavior of man and enabled millions of people to level their material and moral manner of living. However, man, who gives life to these branches of science, not only manages his material and moral manner of living by showing wonderful ingenuity, but he materializes also with his behavior those activities which are in his consciousness mainly corresponding to material problems of living and preserving his life. Behavior comprises activities from the simplest to the most complicated, from the familiar to the extraordinary, sometimes ranging from religious concepts and sublimations to almost purely material matters.

The role played by his consciousness in the behavior of man is extremely large. This is natural in view of the fact that man, who is endowed with consciousness, unlike other beings, visualizes well the surrounding environmental conceptions, understands the nature of phenomena occurring around him, and doubtlessly reaches the summit in utilizing phenomena correlated with activities. Thanks to his visualization, he is delighted with the order of the universe and visualizes that every one of the phenomena forming this universe has ingenious and perfect formation. This leads him to search for the myriad number of relations existing among these natural phenomena, producing at each step unexpected and wonderful results and coming closer to explaining these phenomena more extensively and understanding them more deeply.

4. Practical Applications and Implications in Various Contexts

Research on personal relations yields methodological techniques for the investigation of work factors: The nature of true motivation; leadership; ground rules for task work (own research); participation; fame effect; personal relations; work as the route to greater welfare. Each of these nine points might be expanded into a short paper or brief discussion, and tie-ins with policies and practical techniques (training, interviewing, attitudes to rewards, etc.) are suggested. Great progress has been made on motivation, but on the others, though a good deal is known, research is still in the exploratory phase.

Development and defense of self-image is the primary determinant of human behavior, and all other behavioral motives stem from it. The individual seeks to avoid dissonance between the actual and the ideal self-image, goals, etc. not so much per se as because that dissonance, should it occur, would damage the self-image. To motivate a person by appealing to these motives, one must know what his self-perception, in fact, is. Comprehensive, systematic work on attitudes of leaders to their own organizations, or that of workers to their managers, has scarcely begun, let alone other groups. An understanding of the group to which individuals perceive themselves as belonging is needed, in addition to self-image (actual and ideal), their perceived relation to others in the group, group morale, and the social norms of the group, just to work in the organizational area.

5. Conclusion and Future Directions in Psychological Research

We extensively discussed the notion of behavioral maintenance and the salient role of self-standards and self-regulation in the process of behavioral maintenance and control. We argued that compliance depends on moral identity and the actual, subjective self-SM to trigger this identity. Established moral identities influence compliance by providing negative self-evaluative incentives to perform in mutually advantageous ways and stay away from opportunistic behavior. We also discussed the role of moral disengagement and argued that it plays a crucial role in the decision to violate self-standards. Mutual advantageousness is key to ethical behavior maintenance in that it aligns economic, social, and moral incentives. Finally, we considered the role self-evaluation, and especially negative self-evaluations, play in signaling the likelihood that someone will behave ethically, particularly in relationship with others.

Drawing on basic research in social psychology, we have argued that ego and self-evaluative concerns structure much of human behavior. Evidence suggests that people will often transgress ethical boundaries and act immorally in order to secure positive self-views and external evaluations. We observed that locus of responsibility determines the relationships of negative self-views to compensatory and restorative behavior. The self-concept includes more than just evaluations of the self; it also concerns the social identity, embraced by the self, including shared beliefs, values, and social categories.