Individual Behavior refers to the actions and mannerisms
made by organisms, systems, or artificial entities in conjunction with its
environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as
the physical environment. It is the response of the system or organism to
various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or
subconscious, overt or convert, and voluntary or involuntary.
In humans, the behavior is believed to be controlled
primarily by the endocrine system and the nervous system. It is most commonly
believed that complexity in the behavior of an organism is correlated to the
complexity of its nervous system. Generally, organisms with the more complex
nervous system have a greater capacity to learn new responses and thus adjust
their behavior.
Behavior can be either innate or learned. However, current
research in the Human Micro biome project points towards a possibility that
human behavior may be controlled by the composition of the microbe population
within a human body. Behavior can be regarded as any action of an organism that
changes its relationship to its environment. Behavior provides outputs from the
organism to the environment.
Human behavior can be common, unusual, acceptable, or
unacceptable. Humans evaluate the acceptability of behavior using social norms
and regulate behavior by means of social control. In sociology, Behavior is
considered as having no meaning, being not directed at other people and this is
the most basic human action, although it can play a part in the diagnosis of
disorders such as the autism spectrum disorders. Animal behavior is studied in
comparative psychology, ethnology, behavioral ecology and sociobiology.
According to moral values, human behavior may also depend upon the common,
usual, unusual, acceptable or unacceptable behavior of others.
Nature of Individual Human Behavior
Human behavior is complex and every individual is different
from another, the challenge of an effective organization is in successfully
matching the task, the manager and the subordinate. Under the ideal situation,
a manager would first analyze the task, then determine the required skills and
assemble a team that complement each other skills; thereby creating an
enriching and conflict-free team. In reality, a manager has to use the existing
resources for a given task, and must have the ability to understand the
differences in individual behaviors and use them appropriately to increase the
synergy.
Integrated Human Behavior Model
The Integrated human behavior model formulated an abstract
model of human behavior which explains the process that produces the individual
differences. Cognition is the thought process in humans that describe how the
information we constantly acquire is transformed, stored and used as knowledge
in future decision making. It includes a wide range of mental processes like
visual imagery, language, problem-solving, decision making, etc. The brain
receives the stimuli from the external environment through the sense, which is
immediately registered in our sensory memory, which is large but keeps the
information for a few seconds only. The observation process tries to match the
information in the sensory memory with the previous knowledge and creates a
perception of the stimuli, thereby abstracting useful information from the
sensory memory or the working memory. This abstracted information then passes
to the short-term memory or the working memory, which also caches the related
knowledge from the long term memory. the short-term memory has a slightly
longer latency than the sensory memory, it is needed only till the reaction of
the stimuli. The long term memory has enormous capacity and is the primary
knowledge base.
The stimuli demands some action, the perceived stimuli combined with a set of related and abstracted experiences forms the initial input to the mind's analytical process. The input is also influenced by the emotional and rational factors which in turn depend upon the individual's values and beliefs. The other two important parameters are the desired outcome and the required response time to the stimuli. At the center of the analytical mind is a myriad of cognitive processes that operate sequentially or in parallel, in complex permutations in order to satisfy these primary constraints. The consequence of this entire cognitive activity is a response to the environmental stimuli, which is observed as the behavior of the individual.
