A New OBM Master’s Program: Designing Organizational Behavior Systems
William B. Abernathy Southeastern Louisiana University Aubrey Daniels International

I will be offering a new OBM program in the fall of 2007 at Southeastern Louisiana University.  It is my view that fundamental organizational contingencies must be reengineered to support and sustain traditional performance management.  Some of these fundamental contingencies include: pay practices, performance evaluations, annual pay increases, promotions, job design, and job assignment.  As long as these critical contingencies are poorly conceived, rely on subjective criteria, and are consequated with delayed, aversive control, performance management and employee performance improvements will be difficult to both initiate and sustain.

Further, I have come to realize that traditional performance management has often focused on the interactions between the supervisor and the worker to the exclusion of other critical performance constraints.  I classify performance constraints as: opportunity constraints, capability constraints, and context constraints.  If an employee does not have the opportunity or capability to perform then improving prompting, feedback, and/or immediate social reinforcement will have little or no impact.

Opportunity constraints prevent employees from performing due to problems with work input or insufficient available time.  Capability constraints prevent employees from performing due to a lack of competence, resources, or work processes.  Context constraints are primarily related to conventional performance management issues. (see chart below)

Click chart to see more detail

I recommend that a performance improvement analysis begin with a review of opportunity.  If the opportunity to perform is available, then the analysis moves to capability.  If the capability is there, the analysis finally moves to context.  Context is the category in which performance management falls, although interactions among employees on the same team and in different departments must also be considered.  I estimate that there are around sixteen key skill sets outside of conventional performance management an OBM practitioner must learn for a comprehensive approach to performance improvement.  Fortunately, most of these skill sets are well established and readily available from industrial/organizational psychology and industrial engineering.

The new OBM program will include a four course sequence: 1) learning and conditioning, 2) performance measurement, 3) performance pay, and 4) performance management and improvement.  Beginning with the second course, measurement, students will be assigned to an organization to apply the skills in each course.  I will be the instructor for the courses and will supervise the field experiences.

In addition to these courses, students are required to complete core graduate courses including research design, industrial/organizational psychology, social psychology, and physiological psychology.  The core enables students to continue toward a Ph.D. rather than becoming employed as a behavior systems analyst.

Southeastern Louisiana University (SLU) is located in Hammond, Louisiana, which is approximately 45 minutes from New Orleans and Baton Rouge.  It is near Lake Ponchatrain on what is termed the “North Shore.”  It is also about an hour from the Mississippi Gulf Coast beaches.  SLU is one of Louisiana’s state schools with an enrollment of around 17,000 students.  The tuition and cost of living is very affordable.  The psychology department requires a 950 minimum GRE score and 18 hours of undergraduate psychology to be considered for admission.

I will be moderating a panel on OBM training and will present my views on OBM training and the new program at ABA in San Diego this May. We also hope to have a booth that a couple of students will manage.  I can be reached at either bill.abernathy@selu.edu or babernathy@aubreydaniels.com if you have further questions.

Dr. Abernathy is a leading authority on performance measurement and performance pay and has addressed hundreds of trade and professional associations. He has worked with large and small organizations in banking, insurance, manufacturing, distribution, retail, healthcare, and others. Dr. Abernathy is the author of two books: The Sin of Wages (1996) and Managing without Supervising (2000), and has published numerous articles. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management and is a member of the American Compensation Association, the Association for Behavior Analysis, and the International Society for Performance Improvement. He received his doctorate in organizational psychology from Ohio State University.