Lecture
Psychological aspects of activity. Characteristics of work activity. From the history of research on the influence of an individual's personal qualities on the safety of his labor. Western psychological schools on the problem of studying accidents. K. Marbe's concept. Modern views on the causes of varying degrees of protection from accidents or susceptibility to them. The dependence of psychological safety on contradictions between the characteristics of the environment and the characteristics of the personality.
The fundamental difference between a human being and an animal is the capacity for purposeful activity. The concept of "activity" characterizes the active principle in the human psyche, largely determining the development of both the individual and society.
Activity is a type of human activity directed at cognizing and transforming the surrounding world, including oneself and the conditions of one's own existence.
Activity is a dynamic process of the development and realization of a person's psychological potential. The socio-historical tendency of psychological activity is its intensification. This is evidenced by the rapid growth of human creative and productive activity over the past fifty years.
The American futurologist A. Toffler proposed measuring the last fifty thousand years of human existence in terms of the number of generations, with each generation's lifespan being 62 years. This yielded about 800 such generations, 650 of which lived in caves, and only 70 generations, thanks to writing, were able to pass on their heritage, which preserved a connection between them. Only over the last 6 generations have people been familiar with the printed word, 4 generations have learned to measure time, and 2 have used an electric motor. And the overwhelming majority of values were created for the first time in the current generation .
Under conditions of scientific and technological progress, new forms of activity arise, ensuring the development of production and the incorporation of scientific achievements and automated control systems into activity, etc. The intensification of productive activity leads to significant problems in an individual's mastery and appropriation of social experience, as well as an increase in the problem of human safety in the new interaction between human beings and modern technology.
The subject of the psychological study of work activity is its psychological components. Labor is a conscious activity directed at achieving a result, regulated by will in accordance with a conscious goal. A person's work activity is characterized by its purpose, object, content, means, and conditions of labor. The purpose of work activity is its product. The object of labor is the material or intellectual objects or relations with which the given activity is connected.
Let us consider the general features of the work process of a worker employed, for example, at an industrial enterprise. His labor has conditions and content that are customarily called production factors. The term "production factors" refers to the entire complex of production conditions: buildings, technological processes, equipment, utilities, workplaces, microclimate, and other objects of the production environment.
Regarding a specific employee performing specific work, the decisive production factor is his workplace. In its broad sense, this term dictates the requirements imposed on the employee. At the workplace, the employee performs work functions and is exposed to the entire complex of production factors. The workplace, as the physical space in which the employee is located and performs work functions, forms a complex of specific production factors that affect the psyche, well-being, health, and work capacity of the employee as a whole. This refers to the spatial dimensions of the workplace, microclimate, lighting, ergonomic parameters of equipment, organization and cooperation of labor, content of work operations, pace of work, etc.
Production factors affect not only the employee's psyche. Many of them represent a real or potential threat to life. Actually dangerous factors are, at least, fenced off, marked, and observable. It is much more difficult to assess hidden potential dangers, such as, for example, the presence of methane in the atmosphere at a miner's workplace or an electrical potential on the housing of a motor. Therefore, to ensure the safety of work activity, the employee must, continuously or periodically, in the course of performing work functions, reflect in his consciousness a certain part of the production factors, assess their danger, and respond adequately.
Modern industrial production, energy, transport, construction, and a number of other spheres of human activity contain a high potential danger for the individual, society, and the environment. Due to a variety of causes (organizational, technical, personal), the normal work process is sometimes disrupted by a hazardous situation, which can develop into an incident, an accident, or a mishap. In such situations, the employee, in addition to professional knowledge, skills, and abilities (necessary under the normal course of the work process), must possess special knowledge and skills for acting in relation to the given hazardous situation, not fall into panic, and exercise willpower, etc. It should be added that the employee spends a certain part of his working time away from the workplace: moving around the territory of the enterprise, the administrative and amenities block, visiting the canteen, the medical station. Failure to comply with established safety requirements by the employee also creates a threat to his life or health.
A person's work activity is an unbroken chain of purposeful sensory, mental, and motor actions. Naturally, safety at work will be achieved if no failures or deviations occur in the production process, the cause of which may be not only faulty equipment but the person himself.
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