Performance Management:
Do the Means Justify the Ends?

by William B. Abernathy, Ph.D.
Abernathy & Associates

Behavior Modification: A Case Study. While teaching at Ohio University I had the opportunity to conduct research at the local V.A. psychiatric hospital. I was assigned a fifty-three year old ‘paranoid schizophrenic’ who had been in the hospital for twelve years. The patient (I’ll call him Mr. Jones) yelled loudly most of the day about communism and his daughter’s loose sexual mores. This behavior prevented Mr. Jones from being discharged from the hospital. Unfortunately for Mr. Jones, the hospital (to no avail) had applied electroconvulsive therapy and now massive doses of Thorazine to stop the yelling. My assignment was to get him to lower the volume of his ramblings to a normal (tolerable) level.

My prior ‘clinical experience’ was limited to rats and pigeons. Therefore, I constructed a large Skinner box for Mr. Jones. I placed an old vending machine in a small room. The vending machine contained tokens, cigarettes, and candy. I then wired the machine’s solenoid to a voice-actuated switch I placed on the ceiling. The switch ran through a timer so that I could apply various schedules of reinforcement to Mr. Jones. These included DRL (differential reinforcement of low rates of behavior) and DRO (differential reinforcement of other behavior). If Mr. Jones met the schedule requirements, the switch would not reset which allowed the timer to trip the solenoid. Mr. Jones could then pull the handle of the desired item and obtain it. After several sessions, I chose the DRO as my intervention. Each day I increased the DRO interval a few minutes. This meant that Mr. Jones could not talk loudly for progressively longer intervals.

In around six weeks, Mr. Jones was talking (rambling) at a volume level that was acceptable to the staff for a period of four hours. The baseline averaged an instance of inappropriate volume every two minutes. I was quite pleased with the results until I found out that Mr. Jones began yelling again as soon as I left the ward. Not to be deterred, I had a local engineer construct a voice-actuated switch coupled to a battery run microprocessor. The device was housed in a dental floss box. Mr. Jones wore the box in his shirt pocket.

On the ward, I then constructed a box that housed an automated token dispenser. A large red light was programmed to illuminate on a variable interval schedule. When the light came on, Mr. Jones would take his dental floss box out of his pocket and plug it into the dispenser box. If he had met the DRO criterion, the box would dispense a token and reset the dental floss timer. In theory, Mr. Jones could travel anywhere and upon return could ‘plug in’ and receive reinforcement if he had not done any yelling.

At some point late in this project I began to question my own sanity. This self-analysis led to an epiphany that has guided my thinking every since. My realization was, “Why was Mr. Jones yelling in the first place?” The problem was not biological, and the immediate consequences from both staff and patients were almost always aversive.

A maxim that all behavior analysts should apply in their analyses is “Follow the money”. Mr. Jones’ behavior kept him in the hospital. But why would he want to remain in the hospital? Further consideration led me to observe that the V.A. hospital provided patients a free nine hole golf course, a movie theater, room and board, and, for some, free drugs. In exchange, patients had no responsibilities and could act pretty much anyway they felt like. Further, Mr. Jones’ family received rather generous disability benefits from the V.A, which would terminate if he were discharged. Finally, the likelihood that after release Mr. Jones would ever find a job or satisfactory social life was a near zero probability. I concluded that given these consequences, Mr. Jones would be ‘crazy’ to stop yelling! I pondered whether I should seek to reengineer the Veterans Administration behavior system. Fifteen seconds later I had decided this was way out of my league.

Behavior modification and its organizational analog – behavior management – were born in the laboratory where an ‘experimenter’ worked with a ‘subject’. Early extra-laboratory applications were mostly in therapeutic environments such as hospitals and special education. The ‘experimenter-subject’ became the ‘therapist-client’ relationship. The client either exhibited a problem behavior or failed to exhibit a desirable behavior. The therapist treated the problem with a behavioral ‘intervention’ that often involved rearranging behavioral antecedents and consequences. This approach yielded many reproducible results and later proved its worth in the treatment of autism, to name one notable example.

‘Performance Management’ (the application of behavior modification in organizations) is, however, rarely a simple one-on-one therapist-client arrangement. The ‘client’ is usually hundreds or even thousands of employees. It is simply impractical to effectively apply the therapeutic model unless an organization is willing to hire dozens of consultants for extended engagements (surprisingly, a few organizations have done this). The practical alternative has been to train managers and supervisors to serve as ‘facilitators’ for their direct reports. The training is typically some variant of the ABC model described by Aubrey Daniels (1983).

Managers as Behavior Analysts. As a consultant with Edward J. Feeney & Associates, I spent two years training and coaching a large restaurant chain’s managers in performance management. Though there were many examples of manager misunderstandings and misapplications, two examples illustrate the problems created by relying on managers to serve as behavior analysts and performance facilitators.

The headquarters of the restaurant chain was near San Francisco. It was decided I would design and pilot the various behavioral interventions in Cleveland, Ohio. When I arrived at the restaurant I found the employees marching around outside carrying strike signs. With some trepidation I entered the back of the restaurant to find a large yellow sign titled, “The Keep Your Job Contest!” The manager greeted me and explained that through the grapevine he had heard I was to assist them in designing incentive plans. To get a jump on things, he had designed “The Keep Your Job Contest.” The sales of each server were ranked each week. Any employee who remained in the bottom three rankings for two weeks in a row was fired. Needless to say, this introduction to incentive pay for the employees meant I had a lot to overcome!

Over a period of months, I persuaded the manager that positive reinforcement might be more effective than negative reinforcement. One day I arrived at the restaurant to find the manager quite excited. The day before he had gone to the bank and purchased a bag of silver dollars. At the end of each shift, every employee was given a silver dollar and an ‘atta boy’ from the manager. Clearly, I had not successfully conveyed the concept of contingent reinforcement to the manager.

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