Organizational behavior management (OBM) is the application of behavioral principles to individuals and groups in business, industry, government, and human service settings. OBM has its roots in the field of applied behavior analysis, which involves the application of operant and respondent procedures to produce socially significant change in human behavior. Modern OBM includes a number of subdisciplines such as performance management, systems analysis, and behavior-based safety. Its focus is on organizational problems such as lack of knowledge and skills, occupational injuries, productivity improvement, and quality deficits. This review provides a description of the theoretical and conceptual background of OBM, a brief history of the discipline, and a description of common topics and areas of applications. An example of a typical OBM application in a human service setting is also included.
The effects of response effort on safe behaviors (i.e., glove wearing, hand sanitizing, and electrical outlet replacement) exhibited by therapists at an autism treatment center were examined. Participants were exposed to 2 or 3 levels of effort (i.e., high, medium, low) for each dependent variable. Results showed increased safe performance during the low-effort conditions relative to other conditions across all dependent variables for all participants.
Previous research (i.e., Wilder, Rost, & McMahon, 2007) has suggested that managers perform poorly when predicting items and activities which their employees state that they might like to earn as part of performance improvement programs. The purpose of the current study was to replicate the earlier study conducted by Wilder et al. (2007) with a larger and more diverse sample of managers and employees. One hundred employees and 15 managers were asked to rank order a list of items/activities they thought their employees would most prefer to be incorporated into a performance improvement plan. Next, employee preference for these same items was directly assessed using an employee reinforcer survey. Kendall rank-order correlation coefficients were used to compare the results of the managerial rank with the employee reinforcer survey. Correlations ranged from −.6 to 1, with a mean of .25.
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