Handbook of Organizational Performance

Behavior Analysis and Management

William K Redmon, Thomas C Mawhinney, Carl Merle Johnson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136389993
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Business allgemein

Capitalize on the principles of psychology to develop more effective leadership!Whether you work in a smokestack industry, the service sector, or a high-tech information-based business, the basic principles of industrial/organizational psychology you will find in The Handbook of Organizational Performance can help you obtain better performance from your employees. This comprehensive volume contains all the information you need to understand on-the-job behavior and effectively manage your employees. The Handbook of Organizational Performance gives you the tools and techniques you need to reward positive employee behaviors and correct undesirable ones before they become destructive habits. Using the principles of industrial/organizational psychology, you will learn how to train employees, how to determine criteria for performance appraisals, and how to establish leadership in the workplace.The Handbook of Organizational Performance is a comprehensive guide to all areas of management, including:

• designing more effective training
• managing occupational stress
• using "pay-for-performance" plans
• reducing job-related injury and illness
• taking an active role in occupational safety
• encouraging business ethics

With its clear structure and helpful charts, tables, and figures, The Handbook of Organizational Performance is an indispensable management tool and an essential text for students of business.

PART I:

FOUNDATIONS

Chapter 1

Introduction to Organizational Performance: Behavior Analysis and Management

C. Merle Johnson
Thomas C. Mawhinney
William K. Redmon

Behaviorism is a philosophy of science that rests on the assumption that a science of behavior is possible. Whether any one of the various psychologies that currently exist should be called the “scientific psychology” or the “science of behavior” is the subject of an ongoing debate. “For better or worse, the science of behavior [in the opinion of behaviorists] has come to be called behavior analysis [emphasis in the original]” (Baum, 1994, p. 3). The Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior was founded in 1958 and its objective is publishing basic research in the behavior analytic tradition. In 1968 the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis was founded with the objective of publishing research that focuses on applications of basic principles of behavior analysis to solve problems in ways that improve human society. And in 1977, the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management was founded, and its objective is extending the application of the principles of behavior analysis to improve individual, group, and organizational productivity and safety and the quality of work life among all organizational members. The evolution of behavior analysis in terms of its major contributors, organizations, and publications from 1870 to the mid-1980s is graphically depicted in Concepts and Principles of Behavior Analysis (Michael, 1993, p. 21). In this rendition of the history of behavior analysis, the community of researchers, scholars, and practitioners involved with publication of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management are depicted as members of the behavior analytic community.

Links between early behavior analysts (i.e., B. F. Skinner) and traditional management movements (e.g., the human relations school) are graphically depicted from about 1900 to the mid-1980s in Organizational Behavior Modification and Beyond (Luthans and Kreitner, 1985, p. 37). This rendition of the history of organizational behavior modification (O.B. Mod.) differs from the history of behavior analysis in two important ways. First, it explicitly admits to being influenced by the works of Lewin and Tolman, in addition to Skinner, and most recently by the works of Bandura, who is depicted as the most proximate source of influence on O.B. Mod. Second, it recognizes the line of influences on O.B. Mod. from the following movements, listed from temporally most distant to most recent: scientific management, Hawthorne studies, human relations movement, McGregor's Theory X and Y, and organizational behavior. In addition, by recognizing the influences of Lewin and Tolman and what is called “cognitive behaviorism,” O.B. Mod. is de facto linked with industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology. As might be expected, given these somewhat differing renderings of historical foundations that underpin organizational behavior management (OBM), exactly what OBM is depends in large measure on who is providing the characterization. At the same time, there is considerably more common ground among various contributors to the field than grounds that might be in dispute. This historical backdrop should help readers understand why OBM cannot be described by reference to a single source even though behavior analysis as the behaviorists' science of behavior can be recognized as the fundamental scientific discipline from which the discipline we call OBM has evolved.

Research concerning the efficacy of principles of behavior analysis applied to improve performance in business, industry, and other organizational settings has been called organizational behavior management (Prue, Frederiksen, and Bacon, 1978), organizational behavior modification (Luthans and Kreitner, 1975, 1985), industrial behavior modification (LB. Mod.) (O'Brien, Dickinson, and Rosow, 1982), and performance management (PM) (Daniels, 1989, 2000). Aldis (1961), in his ground-breaking article, “Of Pigeons and Men,” may have been the first to suggest that the principles of behavior analysis be systematically applied to manage behavior in organizations. The systematic analysis and management of work-related behavior and its relationship with environmental antecedents and consequences had already appeared in Frederick Taylor's (1911) scientific management and James Lincoln's (1951) methods of incentive management. They might, therefore, be considered precursors of organizational behavior management, although neither specifically reflects any influence on their methods arising directly from scientific behavior analyses of operant and respondent behavior.

Early work in performance management was characterized by simple applications modeled from laboratory research results in the experimental analysis of behavior and applied behavior analysis to various organizational settings (Mawhinney, 1975). Others have noted that this approach to applied organizational research is an amalgamation of the fields of organizational behavior (OB) and behavior modification (B. Mod.). This probably accounts for the use of titles such as O. B. Mod. (Luthans and Kreitner, 1975, 1985) as well as I. B. Mod. (O'Brien, Dickinson, and Rosow, 1982) as alternative ways of naming the field we now call organizational behavior management (Frederiksen, 1982). The name that is most generic and least reflective of its roots in behaviorism is performance management (Daniels, 1989, 2000). From this vantage point, O. B. Mod. and I. B. Mod. both exhibit relatively strong linkages with behavior analysis. These linkages appear in both their theoretical foundations and methods recommended for validating effects of behavior based interventions aimed at changing individual, group, and organizational performance.

As noted previously, in 1977 a major step occurred in the development of OBM. That was the year Aubrey Daniels, author of the foreword of this volume, founded the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM) while employed at Behavioral Systems, Inc. in Atlanta, Georgia. The journal developed over the next decade under the editorships of Brandon Hall and Lee Frederiksen. Recently it has continued to prosper under the editorship of Tom Mawhinney and the publisher of this text, The Haworth Press, Inc.

Meanwhile, members of the organizational behavior management community expanded their sphere of influence by creating their own magazine,Performance Management. They also made inroads into the more established journals by publishing featured articles in the Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, The Behavior Analyst, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Journal of Applied Psychology, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, and Personnel Psychology.

The field has evolved over the past twenty-five years in ways that currently make it more than the limited application of behavioral principles in the private sector and public nonprofit settings. Some of this is due to parallel developments in the experimental analysis of behavior, applied behavior analysis, behavioral economics, and verbal behavior. Other developments have occurred within the field of OBM per se.

As noted above, early work in this area was characterized by simple applications of principles of the experimental analysis of behavior in various organizational settings. More often than not, the host organizations were private forprofit businesses and industries. Systematic demonstrations of contingency management and the effects of various schedules of reinforcement in the workplace provide early examples of research in this tradition (Yukl and Latham, 1975).

Several techniques shared by management and more traditional areas in industrial/organizational psychology, such as feedback and goal setting, emerged as core themes in the OBM literature (At Emery Air Freight, 1973). Elaboration on these themes occurred as more complex contingencies evolved and the long-term efficacy of OBM procedures was demonstrated (O'Hara, Johnson, and Beehr, 1985).

As the field matured, cross-pollination with other disciplines occurred. This cross-pollination was evident when OBM began to incorporate elements of systems analysis, organization development, organizational culture, safety research, statistical process control, financial management, and marketing. Marketing, as it relates to OBM, is a particularly interesting area. This is due to the history of one of the first behaviorists, J. B. Watson (Skinner, 1959). After leaving Johns Hopkins University in 1920, Watson worked in an advertising agency in New York. He assured the success of his second career on Madison Avenue by utilizing the newly discovered Pavlovian classical conditioning procedures to increase sales of consumer goods, such as Maxwell House coffee and Johnson's Baby Powder, to American consumers (Myers, 1998; Wood and Wood, 1999).

In a process analogous to the one responsible for the formation of behavioral medicine (Schwartz and Weiss, 1978), OBM emerged as a field of study distinguishable from other applied psychological sciences in the 1970s. In 1978, a variety of books and journals were annotated in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (Prue, Frederiksen, and Bacon, 1978). For better or worse, reviews of the field published in JOBM in more recent times have focused exclusively on the contents of JOBM (Balcazar et al., 1989; Nolan, Jarema, and Austin, 1999). But the sort of narrowing of the field's focus implied by reviews focused exclusively on JOBM is to be expected.

The diversity of topics addressed from a behavior analytic vantage point and published in JOBM has, if anything, increased through the years. The idea that organizations are processing systems with feedback loops from customers or clients back to managers in organizations first conceptualized and graphically depicted in Brethower's (1972) conception of a total performance system (TPS) has been elaborated into an ecological framework by Rummler and Brache (1995); and, de facto, both of these systems approaches to OBM have been related to behavior analytic conceptions of organizational culture (Mawhinney, 1992a; Redmon and Mason, Chapter 17, this volume). After briefly reviewing what might be called legacy concepts or themes, we shall provide brief sketches of emerging concepts and themes in the OBM literature.

RECURRING THEMES IN OBM RESEARCH LITERATURE

Some themes are so fundamentally ubiquitous that they appear repeatedly throughout this book, whether formally developed or not. Goal setting and feedback are two such themes.

Goal Setting and Feedback

Goal setting and feedback are concepts and associated procedures so often used in the context of organizational behavior management that a discussion of their definitions probably seems passe. As a review and critical discussion of these concepts by Duncan and Bruwelheide (1986) clearly reveals, however, nothing could be further from the truth. Ford (1980) characterized feedback as a “cumbersome and disorganized aggregation of procedures and methods” (p. 183). This viewpoint was echoed by Peterson (1982), who criticized feedback as “professional slang.” The OBM conceptions of both goal setting and feedback have been considerably ...