Identification and analysis of South African managers' latent behavioral drivers towards proactive health care

Abstract

This article identifies and analyses behavioral drivers of South African managers' behaviour to proactive health care. More specifically, the results enlighten patients' attitude-driven behaviour aiming at how to avoid buying the unsought medical products and service. A convenience snowball sample of approximately 300 managers in Gauteng and North-West Provinces in South Africa were drawn, and a total of 180 complete questionnaires were received back. The validated questionnaire by Fullerton and McCullough (2014) were used to collect the data on a six-point Likert scale. Exploratory factor analysis identified seven factors, namely: Health is my own responsibility (16.9%), Preventative health (10.2%), Information on illnesses (8.0%), Really ill before visiting doctor (7.7%), Follow medical advice (6.5%), Health plan (5.8%), Corrective health actions (5.2%) and State Health plan (4.4%). The factors explain a cumulative variance of 64.9%%. The first five factors are reliability since their Cronbach Alpha coefficients exceed 0.60. The last two factors, Health plan and Corrective health actions are not regarded as reliable factors because their alpha coefficients are below 0.30. The predictive abilities of the demographic variables towards the identified factors of proactive health behaviour were determined using multiple regression as statistical tool. The demographic variable Racial group turned out to be a significant (p<0.05) predictive variable for the factor Health plan (B= -0.398; R2 = 0.340). Regarding inter-correlations between the factors, a number of the factors show significant correlations (p<0.05; p<0.010) between one another, however these correlations are low (<0.30). This indicates that the factors are individualistic in nature and that they require focussed individual managerial attention. The results are of value to management of health plans, health care facilities and also to customers aiming not to become patients. In addition, limited research in South Africa has been done on proactive buying behaviour, and this should also be of value to other researchers and academia. I