There have been done many studies in human performance and their behaviours in the past. In the early time on 1920s, Henry Ford was influenced by the work of Fredrick Taylor to improve the efficiency of the line workers. Fredrick Taylor had stated his view that "Hardly a worker can be found who does not devote his time to studying just how slowly he can work". This statement made Henry Ford to devote his time to speed up the workers’ performance. He developed new idea at Ford’s Detroit factory where he divided car production into simple repetitive tasks so that there was not to be need for skilled labour and men could learn to do any job quickly, as each job was broken into smaller operations. It was being done by many different men at many different machines.
Since 1927 to 1932, Roethlisberger and Dickson researched on work situations that affect the morale and productive efficiency of shop-workers. They unexpectedly observed that people’s performance reflects the way they are measured. This study is known as the Hawthorne Effect nowadays.
In the mid of 1930, Kurt Lewin developed a dynamic theory of personality. This was based on empirical observation to predict psychological behaviour in which researcher has to consider the whole situation: the momentary structure and the state of the person and the psychological environment. This observation leads to a new way of thinking. Lewin established that the behaviour of the people could be described in terms of the person and environment. This definition can be expressed as follows:
B = f (P, E)
where, B stands for behaviour, E stands for Environment and P stands for the Psychological profile of a person.
In 1930s, Tolman and Lewin formulated the general "expectancy-theory" model of human motivations that provides one way to analysing and predicting which courses of action an individual will follow when he has the opportunity to make personal choices about his/her behaviour. The motivational "force" to engage in behaviour is a multiplicative function of (a) the expectancies the person holds about what outcomes are likely to result from that behaviour and (b) the valence of these outcomes. Recently it has been usefully applied to behaviour in organisational setting (Vroom, 1964; Porter & Lawler, 1968) which can be expressed in symbols as follows:
MF = E x V
where, MF stands for motivational force, E stands for expectancy and V stands for valence.
There has been done other research about people at work which includes of behavioural research and applied psychology. Bonnes and Secchiaroli analysed the literate in environment psychology in which they found that physical factors such a light, noise and temperature can affect performance of an individual. Some of the recent studies also include factors such as air quality and colours.
Lewinian research helps to conceptualise the relationship between people, their environment and their behaviour. The main focus of previous work has been on understanding the interactions between physical, social and economic environment and behaviour.
Newell and Simon argued that an environment cannot be defined independently from the tasks an agent sets out to do. However in their models, tasks typically do not require sensitivity to background social and cultural constraints. Real work environments are a complex in social, cultural, cognitive, and physical constraints. Newell and Simon chose to study do not involve dense common interactions typical of the way we deal with complex machinery such as airplanes, automobiles (car), etc.
Coordination is that we engage in a real world activity or task, our effective environment is a shifting coalition of resources and constraints, some physical, some social, some cultural, some computational (involving both internal and external computational resources). When this shifting coalition of resources and constraints is appropriately coordinated, the tasks we set out to achieve are accomplished. Lack of coordination leads to lack of success.
Today, the dominant assumption in psychology is that the point of activity is to change the environment in a manner that leads, or ought to lead, to goal satisfaction. This view restated in the language of problem solving is that actions should advance an agent to states in the task environment that lie closer to the goal state. In particular, people undertake actions to save attention, memory and computation; they recruit external elements to reduce their own cognitive effort by distributing computational load. This makes sense only if they are closely coupled to the world. If this observation is accepted it has important outcome for design. Not only we must design environments to make it easier to take the next step toward goal accomplishment; we need to design them to make it easier for us to perform our other actions that are easier to perform epistemic, complementary, coordinative actions.
The need for human factors research in a future manufacturing design environment is great especially considering the changing role of the engineer for manufacturing system. In the current manufacturing system design, a single engineer is a ‘manual controller’s such that he/she controls the manufacturing design and makes the decisions.
In the organisational environment, for example, manufacturing system design is virtually eliminated. An engineer/ system design is responsible for the system control function and the system design itself will be able to ‘self-separate’ from other system in the surrounding area. Distributed cognition is needed to assist the engineer’s changing role from a manual controller to a supervisory controller. This change in the engineer’s role will occur with small repeat over many years. Research for this dissertation examined the current organisational environment and may provide a baseline for future research involving the transition of the current organisational environment to human factors.
Since 1927 to 1932, Roethlisberger and Dickson researched on work situations that affect the morale and productive efficiency of shop-workers. They unexpectedly observed that people’s performance reflects the way they are measured. This study is known as the Hawthorne Effect nowadays.
In the mid of 1930, Kurt Lewin developed a dynamic theory of personality. This was based on empirical observation to predict psychological behaviour in which researcher has to consider the whole situation: the momentary structure and the state of the person and the psychological environment. This observation leads to a new way of thinking. Lewin established that the behaviour of the people could be described in terms of the person and environment. This definition can be expressed as follows:
B = f (P, E)
where, B stands for behaviour, E stands for Environment and P stands for the Psychological profile of a person.
In 1930s, Tolman and Lewin formulated the general "expectancy-theory" model of human motivations that provides one way to analysing and predicting which courses of action an individual will follow when he has the opportunity to make personal choices about his/her behaviour. The motivational "force" to engage in behaviour is a multiplicative function of (a) the expectancies the person holds about what outcomes are likely to result from that behaviour and (b) the valence of these outcomes. Recently it has been usefully applied to behaviour in organisational setting (Vroom, 1964; Porter & Lawler, 1968) which can be expressed in symbols as follows:
MF = E x V
where, MF stands for motivational force, E stands for expectancy and V stands for valence.
There has been done other research about people at work which includes of behavioural research and applied psychology. Bonnes and Secchiaroli analysed the literate in environment psychology in which they found that physical factors such a light, noise and temperature can affect performance of an individual. Some of the recent studies also include factors such as air quality and colours.
Lewinian research helps to conceptualise the relationship between people, their environment and their behaviour. The main focus of previous work has been on understanding the interactions between physical, social and economic environment and behaviour.
Newell and Simon argued that an environment cannot be defined independently from the tasks an agent sets out to do. However in their models, tasks typically do not require sensitivity to background social and cultural constraints. Real work environments are a complex in social, cultural, cognitive, and physical constraints. Newell and Simon chose to study do not involve dense common interactions typical of the way we deal with complex machinery such as airplanes, automobiles (car), etc.
Coordination is that we engage in a real world activity or task, our effective environment is a shifting coalition of resources and constraints, some physical, some social, some cultural, some computational (involving both internal and external computational resources). When this shifting coalition of resources and constraints is appropriately coordinated, the tasks we set out to achieve are accomplished. Lack of coordination leads to lack of success.
Today, the dominant assumption in psychology is that the point of activity is to change the environment in a manner that leads, or ought to lead, to goal satisfaction. This view restated in the language of problem solving is that actions should advance an agent to states in the task environment that lie closer to the goal state. In particular, people undertake actions to save attention, memory and computation; they recruit external elements to reduce their own cognitive effort by distributing computational load. This makes sense only if they are closely coupled to the world. If this observation is accepted it has important outcome for design. Not only we must design environments to make it easier to take the next step toward goal accomplishment; we need to design them to make it easier for us to perform our other actions that are easier to perform epistemic, complementary, coordinative actions.
The need for human factors research in a future manufacturing design environment is great especially considering the changing role of the engineer for manufacturing system. In the current manufacturing system design, a single engineer is a ‘manual controller’s such that he/she controls the manufacturing design and makes the decisions.
In the organisational environment, for example, manufacturing system design is virtually eliminated. An engineer/ system design is responsible for the system control function and the system design itself will be able to ‘self-separate’ from other system in the surrounding area. Distributed cognition is needed to assist the engineer’s changing role from a manual controller to a supervisory controller. This change in the engineer’s role will occur with small repeat over many years. Research for this dissertation examined the current organisational environment and may provide a baseline for future research involving the transition of the current organisational environment to human factors.
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