Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
of Organizational Performance
Behavior Analysis
and Management
THE HAWORTH PRESS
Organizational Behavior Analysis
and Management
Thomas C. Mawhinney
Senior Editor
Handbook of Organizational Performance: Behavior Analysis
and Management edited by C. Merle Johnson, William K.
Redmon, and Thomas C. Mawhinney
Handbook
of Organizational Performance
Behavior Analysis
and Management
2001 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced
or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.
First published by
HD58.7.H364 2000
658.3dc21 00-040768
Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint
but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent.
CONTENTS
Index 461
ABOUT THE EDITORS
Note: As editors, we are donating all royalties from the book to the Organization-
al Behavior Management Network, a special interest group of the Association for
Behavior Analysis, International (ABA). This will be used to promote student
research or other learning activities that the OBMNetwork sanctions.
CONTRIBUTORS
The formal use of behavior analysis in business goes back only about
thirty-five years. I was fortunate to have been one of the first to make
extensive use of this technology in business.
My first application was with the staff of a mental retardation unit. The
focus was on training severely retarded, multihandicapped, nonambulato-
ry, bedfast patients. The performance management program was simple.
S&H Green Stamps gave us 50,000 stamps; we set up a token system and
awarded stamps to staff based on the acquisition of self-help skills by the
residents. The program was extremely successful. Twenty-one of twenty-
six residents, previously thought to be untrainable, made significant prog-
ress in caring for themselves. Backed by this success, we started reinforce-
ment systems for the staff on all the hospital units. Later I set up similar
systems for a vocational rehabilitation center in Atlanta and a facility in
North Carolina.
In 1967, I created my first pure business application when a friend
asked for help with pharmaceutical salespeople; my second with jewelry
sales reps. These experiences led me to leave clinical work and to form a
company specializing in behavior analysis in business and industry.
My first major business project, in 1970, involved a textile company in
South Carolina. My associates and I trained 600 supervisors in the basics
of applied behavior analysis. Absenteeism and turnover were the targets.
This project was so successful that very quickly we had similar projects
with all the major textile firms in the southern United States.
In those days, interventions were simplistic. The training we delivered
relied heavily on our experience in hospital and mental retardation set-
tings. Even though we had no business experience and no business train-
ing, the power of the technology was such that we generated amazing
results. Thirty-day personnel turnover was routinely cut in half within
ninety days of the intervention. Productivity and quality were often im-
proved by 20 percent or more in a matter of weeks.
These first consulting interventions consisted of twenty hours of train-
ing and then follow-up with supervisors on the mill floor for up to six
months. Upper management was usually only informed about what was
being done and what was being accomplished. At most, they received an
executive briefing of a couple of hours.
xv
xvi HANDBOOK OF ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
ior of the employees operating within the business system. In the final
analysis, the methodology will lead management to see behavior as the
only way to control and narrow variance in any business process.
You will notice in this book that several names are given to the applica-
tion of behavior analysis in businessorganizational behavior manage-
ment (OBM), performance management, and behavior analysis. In my
clinical work I used the then-popular term, behavior modification, to de-
scribe my work there. About the time I started to work in industry, howev-
er, a popular movie was released, A Clockwork Orange. In the movie,
aversive techniques were used to control behavior. The techniques were
referred to as "behavior modification." There were other occasions in the
popular press when the term was used in a negative context.
Since the term had negative connotations, I decided to call the business
applications of behavior analysis "behavior management," and I named
the first company Behavioral Systems, Inc. While I thought this was a
great name, I soon discovered that customers did not understand that
behavior, as they used the word, had any place in business. I often heard,
"Our people behave all right; they just don't want to work."
Therefore, in 1978 I changed the term to performance management
because I thought that even if managers did not understand what it was,
they might think they should find out about it. In fact, the name has done
that. Today when you see those terms, they all relate to the same behavior
analysis technology and research base.
Today, the word "behavior" is appearing more and more in training and
management literature. Although this is recognition at some level that
things change in business only when people change what they do, careful
examination of most of this literature shows an imprecise understanding of
what behavior really is and little or no understanding of how to change it.
Early applications of behavior analysis in industry were used to solve
problems such as absenteeism, turnover, and morale. Today's applications
are beginning to focus more on the systemwide use of the technology.
Business is now asking people to behave in ways that contribute to the
business; to ask them to be innovative, to take responsibility for the quality
of their own work, and to manage themselves as members of a team. I
have begun to use the phrase "enabling technology" to describe what
behavior analysis can do for an organization trying to incorporate the
management of behavior into their overall improvement efforts. That is, it
is a way to make all of an organization's systems and programs work and
produce better results.
This book gives you a broad-based understanding of behavior analysis,
its foundations, and its applications to business problems over a wide range
xviii HANDBOOK OF ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
xix
PART I:
FOUNDATIONS
Chapter 1
Introduction to
Organizational Performance:
Behavior Analysis and Management
C. Merle Johnson
Thomas C. Mawhinney
William K. Redmon
son, 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
FUNCTION
Consequence Antecedent
Reinforcement Punishment SD EO
DIMENSION Rule(s)
As antecedent event(s)
goal/standard-setting event(s)
fixed individual/group
individual relative to
self/group
group relative to
itself/other group(s)
model(s)
status
Mode of Transmission
oral
written
graphic
tabular
Behavioral Economics
Another topic that has recently emerged blends behavior analysis with
economic concepts (Hursh, 1980), and this field is known as behavioral
economics (Hursh, 1984). Traditional research in the experimental analy-
sis of behavior typically employed animals kept at 80 or 85 percent free
feeding weight to ensure that food was reinforcing. After daily sessions,
food-deprived rats or pigeons were fed to maintain body weight. Other
research kept animals in chambers continuously so that they earned all
their food in what Hursh termed a "closed economy." Divergent results
between the first "open economies" and findings in closed economies may
explain some inconsistent findings in basic research. Animals seem to
Introduction to Organizational Performance 17
respond differently when all their food is earned in the chamber. Economic
concepts such as demand for these reinforcers are relevant. Demand for
food is inelastic; that is, animals respond at high rates to keep supplies
available. Demand for other reinforcers are elastic because consumption
will decrease when increasing amounts of responding are required. More-
over, in open economies demand tends to be elastic for all reinforcers
because substitutable sources are provided after sessions.
This has obvious implications for OBM research. Rarely would partici-
pants be confined in a closed economy by being restricted to an organiza-
tional setting that provided the only source of reinforcement, and the
various alternative sources of reinforcement, outside the organizational
setting, can have major effects on performance. Critical differences in
design as well as findings between basic research on schedules of rein-
forcement in the experimental analysis of behavior and OBM have been
noted elsewhere (Dickinson and Poling, 1996; Hantula, Chapter 5 of this
volume). Behavioral economics provides additional contextual factors to
consider that may influence topics such as choice and the viability of the
matching law (Baum, 1973; Herrnstein, 1970; Hursh, 1980). Differences
in behavior between open and closed economies may be related to differ-
ent survival strategies (Zeiler, 1999). Although economic survival rather
than biological survival is meaningful for research on organizational per-
formance, consideration of alternative sources of reinforcement such as
money earned both in and outside the work setting under investigation
seems critical. This can have major implications for work on pay for
performance (Abernathy, 1996; Duncan and Smoot, Chapter 9 this vol-
ume), especially when individuals have choices in employment. As basic
and OBM research continue, the utility of applying economic concepts to
these fields remains viable, but clearly in its infancy.
CONCLUSION
The contents of this book concern the theoretical and practical implica-
tions of analyzing behavior based on the causal mode of selection by
consequences (or variation and selection). This causal mode effectively
explains behavior of individual persons, cultural practices among groups
of persons, and the performance of formally organized groups of persons
in complex organizational cultures. The remaining chapters in this book
provide insights not only into the causes of performance at the individual
and group levels and how such performances support ultimate organiza-
tional performance, but also concerning how to analyze and take actions to
improve performance at all three levels. Although people do create rules
that help them better manage individual, group, and formal organization
levels of performance, the ultimate measure of success is to be found in the
consequences of following such rules.
REFERENCES
Abernathy, W. B. (1996). The sin of wages: Where the conventional pay system
has led us and how to find a way out. Memphis, TN: PerfSys Press.
Introduction to Organizational Performance 19
Principles of Learning:
Respondent and Operant Conditioning
and Human Behavior
Alan Poling
Diane Braatz
This chapter was written at the University of Waikato, while the senior author
was on sabbatical leave from Western Michigan University.
23
24 HANDBOOK OF ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE
RESPONDENT CONDITIONING
OPERANT CONDITIONING
states of hunger, thirst, and desire. These states are not directly observable
and their importance to the reinforcing effects of the objects and events in
question is moot. If the distinction between positive and negative reinforc-
ers is to be preserved, and there is debate as to the usefulness of this
practice (e.g., Michael, 1975), it is important to make the distinction on the
basis of the changes in the environment caused by a stimulus (adding
something or taking something away), not in terms of subjective states.
More useful, perhaps, than the distinction between positive and nega-
tive reinforcers is the distinction between unconditioned (or primary) and
conditioned (or secondary) reinforcers. The former are objects and events
that do not depend upon a particular learning history for their reinforcing
function. The latter are objects and events that gain their ability to
strengthen behavior through learning, usually by being correlated with
established reinforcers. Examples of unconditioned positive reinforcers
are food and water, which, given appropriate deprivation, strengthen the
behaviors that acquire them in almost all humans. Unconditioned negative
reinforcers, which organisms will escape (respond to terminate), or avoid
(respond to prevent contact with) include high-intensity stimulation in
most modalities (e.g., loud sounds, bright lights, intense cold or heat).
The stimuli that serve as conditioned reinforcers differ across people
because people differ in their learning histories. In a given culture, how-
ever, some conditioned reinforcers are widely effective. These objects and
events are paired with many other reinforcers, which establish them as
generalized conditioned reinforcers, of which money and praise are fine
examples. Giving an adult American a dollar bill for each frown would
dramatically increase frowning, but the same operation would not affect
frowning by a baby. This difference reflects the fact that adults, but not
babies, have a long history in which dollar bills have been exchanged for
various reinforcers. Generalized conditioned reinforcers, like all condi-
tioned reinforcers, acquire their response-strengthening properties from
their correlation with primary reinforcers (or other established conditioned
reinforcers). When this correlation ceases, the reinforcing capacity is lost.
People do not work long for currency that is totally devalued, or for praise
not backed up by other significant events.
Some theoreticians have argued that it is the opportunity to engage in a
particular behavior that a stimulus affords, not the stimulus itself, that is
reinforcing. For example, food allows eating, and it is the eating, not the
food, that is important. Be that as it may, it is apparent that the opportunity
to engage in a particular behavior per se can function as a positive reinfor-
cer. This function is codified in the Premack principle (Premack, 1959):
For any two behaviors that occur with different probabilities, the opportu-
Principles of Learning 29
nity to engage in the higher probability behavior will reinforce the lower
probability behavior. Conversely, forcing an organism to engage in the
lower probability behavior contingent on the higher probability behavior
will punish the higher probability behavior. Consider two behaviors that a
professor might perform: grading student projects and writing articles.
When allowed to do either, much time is spent in writing, little in grading.
Arranging conditions so that the professor must grade (the lower probabil-
ity behavior) before writing (the higher probability behavior) is likely to
increase grading.
The basic disequilibrium analysis of learned performance provided by
Premack (1959,1965,1971) has been extended by other researchers. In an
important extension, Allison and Timberlake proposed a response-depri-
vation model, which states that the opportunity to engage in an activity
serves as a positive reinforcer so long as access to the activity is restricted
so that it cannot occur at its baseline rate in the absence of the operant
response (e.g., Allison and Timberlake, 1975; Timberlake and Allison,
1974). Timberlake (1980, 1984) promulgated a behavioral-regulation
analysis of learned performance that emphasizes the importance of behav-
ioral setpoints in determining whether access to an activity is reinforcing.
Further coverage of these models is beyond our scope. As Schwartz
(1989) noted, "Refinements of Premack's theory in recent years have
changed it substantially in form, though not in spirit" (p. 172). The Pre-
mack principle remains useful for scheduling activities as reinforcers in
organizational settings. Konarski, Johnson, Crowell, and Whitman (1981)
compare the Premack principle with the response-deprivation hypothesis
and make useful suggestions for determining whether access to particular
activities will be reinforcing.
Even though the reinforcing effectiveness of an unconditioned reinforc-
er does not depend upon a particular learning history, that effectiveness is
variable. Michael (1982) has proposed the term establishing operation
(EO) as a general label for operations that (1) increase (or decrease) the
effectiveness of a particular reinforcer and (2) increase (or decrease) the
likelihood of occurrence of behavior that has in the past been followed by
that reinforcer. As an example of an establishing operation, consider food
deprivation. If we have just eaten, food is not a very effective reinforcer,
and we do not engage in behaviors that have produced food in the past. In
this case, satiation is evident. Satiation refers to a momentary reduction in
the reinforcing efficacy of a stimulus as a result of repeated presentations.
It is common with most unconditioned positive reinforcers (e.g., food,
water, sex), but characteristically does not occur with negative reinforcers,
or with conditioned reinforcers alone. If, however, the unconditioned posi-