Introduction: All nurses need to continually learn and self-development. Identifying factors affect learning and development activities are important because they show that the addition of people, contexts or situations can facilitate the self-development.

Aim: The main purpose of this study was to assessing the relationship between individual and organizational factors with self – development behavior of the nurses.

Method: This research is a descriptive-survey study that was done in Tehran large public hospitals in 2012. In this study, cluster sampling was used with proportional allocation and finally were selected 949 clinical nurses with random sampling method and answered to standardized questionnaires with Likert scale Self-development attitude, Career commitment, Islamic attitude toward the work, Intention for self-development, Organization’s support, Supervisor’s support ,and Self – development behavior. The Cronbach’s alpha was used to determine reliability that was obtained as follows: 0.85, 0.92, 0.74, 0.77, 0.81, 0.74, and 0.70. Finally, Data was analyzed by use of Spearman and Path analyze tests through SPSS 17 and Lisrel 8.72 soft wares .

Results: There are a significant correlation between the Individual factors Islamic attitude toward the work (β=0.30), Career commitment (β=0.11), Person’s Intentions (β=0.09) and Organizational factors Organization’s support (β=0.23), Supervisor’s support (β=0.23) with Self – development behavior of the nurses (p<0.05).

Conclusion: Islamic attitude toward the work is a key factor in creating self-development behavior while organizational factors have an important role in increasing the tendency to perform self - development. Managers by having the belief in the value of developing, supporting evidence and clear and strengthening religious teachings can lead to increase nurses’ intention for self-development.