Performance Management:
Do the Means Justify the Ends? cont.

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

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Why Most Managers Can’t Be Effective Behavior Analysts. There are five reasons why the typical manager or supervisor cannot function effectively as a behavior analyst.

1. Lack of Knowledge and Skills. Behavior analysis is more than a collection of techniques. It is a change in perspective. This perspective and its associated techniques are very difficult to acquire in workshops that range from one to five days.
2. Management by Perception. Managers are influenced and counter-controlled by employees. It is therefore difficult for them to apply the objectivity and consistency required by behavior analysis.
3. Adversarial Relations. The conventional management role includes evaluating employee performance, determining work assignments, pay raises and promotions, and sometimes enforcing suspensions and terminations. Given these functions, it is difficult for the manager to serve in the facilitator role.
4. Competing Immediate Consequences. Aversive control is familiar, quick, and feels good to the manager. The manager’s personal history includes many instances of aversive control from parents, schools, government agencies, and previous jobs. Threats and punishments require little planning or data tracking effort and the effects on behavior are often immediate. Employee errors are aversive to managers who are more energized to ‘manage’ when things go wrong then when things go right.
5. Extinction. The consequences for effective facilitation are often limited or nonexistent for the manager. The manager is not reinforced by senior management for employee performance facilitation. This problem is analogous to universities that ignore the quality of teaching while reinforcing publishing and grant writing.

Over the past twenty years, I have found managers as behavior analysts often ineffective and unreliable. Further, even when managers do try to apply behavior analysis there are many situational and organizational contingencies that make it difficult to sustain this approach to employee performance management.

RECOMMENDATION 1): REPLACE MANAGERS AS BEHAVIOR ANALYSTS WITH PERFORMANCE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGISTS.

The Performance System Technologist (PST). As a consultant for Ed Feeney, I consulted with one organization at a time. I worked with managers and workers to remove obstacles to optimal performance. I was assigned specific target results to improve. For example, at the restaurant chain I was asked to develop and implement improvement plans for wine and liquor sales, prime rib carving utilization, work forecasting and scheduling, work distribution, customer service, and others.
Though applied behavior analysis was useful in some of these applications, often industrial engineering and basic business logic were necessary. I had no background in either of the two latter disciplines and had to learn them through trial and error and a “crash” reading program.

RECOMMENDATION 2): EXPAND PST TRAINING TO INCLUDE CONCEPTS AND TECHNIQUES FROM INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING AND BUSINESS.

Performance System Reengineering. It is difficult, if not impossible, to sustain new manager behaviors or employee performance improvement initiatives in organizational environments that fail to reinforce or support them. In the past fifteen years, my consulting firm has produced modest, sustainable performance improvements (Abernathy, 2000) through implementing organization-wide performance measurement and performance pay systems. Though managers were given training, little effort was made by most managers to analyze and improve employee performances. Instead, improvements most often came from the direct pay-for-performance contingency provided to workers.

We find improvement initiatives, whether developed internally or externally, difficult to sustain in organizations with conventional performance systems where there is an absence of objective performance measurement, frequent performance feedback, or a direct contingency between pay and performance. In this environment, the proposed Performance System Technologist will find it tough to obtain manager and worker support for new initiatives or to sustain initiatives once implemented.

RECOMMENDATION 3): IMPLEMENT AN ORGANIZATION-WIDE PERFORMANCE MEASUREMENT, FEEDBACK, AND PERFORMANCE PAY SYSTEM TO ENABLE THE PERFORMANCE SYSTEM TECHNOLOGIST.

Summary. In the migration from the laboratory to applied settings, behavior analysts tended to retain the experimenter-subject or therapist-client service delivery model. When this proved impractical in organizational settings, the model was retained by attempting to train managers as ‘therapists.’ This model has often failed to deliver significant and sustainable organizational improvements due to the inability of managers to implement effective performance improvement initiatives.

It is recommended that a new role, the Performance System Technologist, replace the manager training model. The PST would be responsible for pinpointing performance improvement opportunities and assisting managers in the design, implementation, and evaluation of performance improvement initiatives. It is further suggested that PST training be expanded to include techniques from the disciplines of business and industrial engineering.

Finally, whether managers or internal or external consultants implement performance improvement initiatives, their effectiveness and sustainability will be undermined by an organizational performance system that fails to support the initiatives. Therefore, it is recommended that an organization-wide performance measurement, feedback, and performance pay system be implemented to encourage and sustain performance improvement initiatives.

References

Aubrey C. Daniels and Theodore A. Rosen (1983). Performance Management: Improving Quality and Productivity through Positive Reinforcement. Tucker, GA Performance Management Publications.

Abernathy, W.B. (2000). “An Analysis of the Results and Structure of Twelve Organizations’ Performance Scorecard and Incentive Pay Systems,” in, Ed. Linda Hayes, Organizational Change. (pp. 240-272). Reno, NV: Context Press

Dr. Abernathy is founder and CEO of Abernathy and Associates. Learn more about Abernathy and Associates at: http://www.abernathyassociates.com/

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