Integrating Organizational Behavior Management with Industrial and Organizational Psychology

C. Merle Johnson, Terry Beehr, C. Merle Johnson, Terry A. Beehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135739393
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book examines the intersection of Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) and Industrial and Organizational Psychology (I/O Psychology). It argues that, whilst OBM and I/O Psychology have developed simultaneously, they have done so with minimal integration. I/O Psychology, a somewhat older field, has evolved to become widely accepted, both influencing management and social sciences and being affected by them. It can be viewed as a research-oriented subject that is closely aligned with human resources functions. With regards to the intersection of I/O Psychology with OBM, some practices are more closely related than others; and of those that are related, some are relatively consistent with OBM practices, while others are very inconsistent. Most I/O Psychology interventions focus on many people simultaneously, seeking to ensure that one intervention affects multiple employees as a cost-efficient way to improve organizations, while OBM is usually better than I/O Psychology at improving the behaviors of individuals and smaller groups or workers.

This book provides a framework for understanding differences and similarities between I/O Psychology and OBM, and as such is an innovative compendium for students, scholars, applied psychologists, and human resource specialists. It was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management.

Industrial and Organizational Psychology Encounters Organizational Behavior Management: Would You Care to Dance?

C. Merle Johnson and Terry A. Beehr
Central Michigan University

With a former graduate student, we published a review 25 years ago concerning organizational behavior management (OBM) in the private sector when OBM was a new field (O’Hara, Johnson, & Beehr, 1985). Ten years ago we collaborated again to show how OBM had progressed (Beehr, Jex, & Ghosh, 2001; Johnson, Redmon, & Mawhinney, 2001). As an OBM researcher and an Industrial and Organizational Psychology (I/O Psychology) researcher, we continue to observe the evolution of this field and are fortunate to be able to participate in its development.

Simultaneously I/O Psychology, a somewhat older field, has evolved to become ever more widely accepted, influencing management and social sciences, and being influenced by them. I/O Psychology can be viewed as a research-oriented field in which the findings determine and evaluate many practices related broadly to the human side of organizations. The topics of these findings vary a great deal. They include for example: recommendations for selecting people based on matching their traits with job demands; trying to measure those trait and job environment constructs; motivating employees by making external rewards like pay contingent on performance, or by designing jobs to make internal rewards like pride contingent on performance; finding ways to estimate performance when no clear and objective way to observe it is apparent; figuring out and training leaders how to get subordinates to comply with organizationally preferred behaviors, getting members of workgroups to work well together; finding ways to make employees satisfied as well as productive, and reducing psychological stress in the workplace.

Regarding the intersection of I/O Psychology with OBM, some practices of I/O Psychology are more closely related to OBM practices than others. Of those that are related, some practices are relatively consistent with OBM, whilst others are very inconsistent. Furthermore, on average, most I/O Psychology interventions focus on many people at once—often seeking to make one intervention that will make large numbers of people happier and more productive on average—as a cost-efficient way to improve organizations. OBM is usually better than I/O Psychology at improving the behavior of individuals and smaller groups or workers. A final point about I/O Psychology is that some parts of it have a heavy investment in, and belief in, the value of statistics and psychological measurement, some of which are complex; OBM tends to emphasize repeated measures of behavior over time and situations and uses simpler statistics for their direct observations of behavior.

Previous comparisons between the fields were published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM; Bucklin, Alvero, Dickinson, Austin, & Jackson, 2000; Geller, 2003). These classic reviews provided a framework for understanding differences and similarities between I/O Psychology and OBM, and we encourage readers who are not already familiar with these articles to examine them.

We will avoid labeling the contributors to this special issue as being either OBM or I/O professionals, but we subjectively judge that about half of the authors have a mostly I/O orientation and explain OBM-relevant issues from their perceptions. The other half have mostly an OBM orientation and explain I/O-relevant issues from their perspective. We judge that each knows something about the other field, but the depth of this cross-knowledge varies. This makes provocative reading for someone interested in the relationship between OBM and I/O Psychology.

In the opening chapter Ganster, Kiersch, Marsh, and Bowen provide a stimulating depiction of the interplay between pay-for-performance and work stress. They acknowledge that productivity is enhanced with variable pay systems that are contingent upon productivity, but wonder whether such pay systems increase work stress and potential health problems. Well-controlled research on this relationship is wanting. Long-term pay-for-performance companies such as Lincoln Electric (Handlin, 1992) would be the type of organizational system in which researchers could study physical health-care costs, preferably with comparable controls.

Komaki, Minnich, Grotto, Weinshank, and Kern present data from a managerial training program conducted in both a private and public organizational setting, a program incorporating continued work on the well-developed Operant Model of Effective Supervision. Their in-basket assessment demonstrates that seasoned managers can learn to monitor employee performance and then apply effective consequences to maintain the employee’s newly acquired behaviors. These field studies demonstrate better managerial efficacy than the more commonly used strategies involving only antecedent stimuli such as giving directions and orders.

DeNisi documents the evolution of performance appraisal and how performance management is a broader and more useful approach. Interesting theoretical and organizational questions arise in his chapter, and he succinctly explains why performance management is so useful for enhancing employee development and organizational effectiveness. The chapter by Gravina and Siers follows; their integrative approach illustrates how to blend OBM with I/O Psychology. They elucidate many of the points DeNisi presents, and they advocate that each field would benefit from drawing from the other–a position we share as guest editors for this book.

Mawhinney presents a scholarly history of job satisfaction, starting with a contribution by Thorndike from the first volume of Journal of Applied Psychology in 1917. He notes the developments from classic tomes, differences and similarities in the two fields (including their historical roots), and argues well that measures such as job satisfaction could provide social validity for OBM projects, as well as encouraging organizational social responsibility. I/O Psychology has increasingly embraced theory, whilst OBM has been less theory driven; Mawhinney presents the controversial issue regarding whether OBM should promote an integrated collection of its work as a theory, which raises the issue of what a theory is.

In their chapter, Crowell, Hantula, and McArthur blend personnel psychology and OBM in a service organization. Their excellent work echoes Mawhinney’s position and our own viewpoint: OBM provides viable objective direct measures of employee behavior and accomplishments over time and situations, and these data can be used as criterion validity measures for I/O Psychology practices. In a complementary fashion, I/O Psychology provides measures of employee perceptions, and these provide useful social validity data for behavior analysis and OBM practices. They admonish both fields in a constructive manner, and their synergistic approach provides a blueprint for maximizing organizational effectiveness.

Luthans, Youssef, and Rawski continue to innovate with the concepts and practices of Psychological Capital and reinforcing feedback. They present results relevant to problem solving, mastery orientation, and innovation from a large sample of working adults. The theoretical differences between the OBM and I/O Psychology fields can become blurred, but in a good way, when this type of integrated research is conducted. Their integration furthers both research and managerial practices that foster positive change in organizations, and it is promising as one model for possible future OBM-I/O work.

Employee engagement is a relatively new topic in I/O Psychology that, like many other variables, arose from and is promoted in consulting work. Ludwig and Frazier provide a nice analysis of it from an OBM perspective. Engagement is related to both management practices and important outcomes, but it may be too ambiguous a concept for usefulness in OBM. One could argue that it needs to be objectively and behaviorally defined, but the behaviors that would represent it may already be known in both OBM and I/O Psychology. It is probably well-represented in OBM by an environment with wide availability of positive reinforcement and in I/O Psychology by a blend of variables such as organizational citizenship behaviors, work involvement, and organizational commitment. Overall, psychological constructs such as engagement are often measured in I/O Psychology (usually through surveys) without providing a clear direction for practical improvement; OBM can be used, however, to provide ready and operational action.

We want to thank all of the authors for their excellent contributions to this edited book. The interactions we had with all of them were pleasurable, intellectually stimulating, and we hope, useful to both fields. We gained more from their work than they likely know. They performed well, and we greatly appreciate their contributions to this project. We wish to thank Tim Ludwig for suggesting this project as a special issue of the Journal Organizational Behavior Management at the OBM Network meeting of the Association for Behavior Analysis: International conference in Phoenix in 2009. He has been extremely supportive, and we are indebted to him for his encouragement, help, and generosity these past three years. Finally, as Co-Editors we are donating all royalties from this project to the Chris Anderson Research Grant Applications for graduate students in the OBM Network (CMJ) and the Industrial/Organizational Psychology Association (IOPA) for graduate students in Industrial and Organizational Psychology at Central Michigan University (TAB).

References

Beehr, T. A., Jex, S. M., & Ghosh, P. (2001). The management of occupational stress. In C. M. Johnson, W. K. Redmon, & T. C. Mawhinney (Eds.), Handbook of organizational performance: Behavior analysis and management, (pp. 228-254). New York: Haworth.

Bucklin, B. R., Alvero, A. M., Dickinson, A. M., Austin, J., & Jackson, A. K. (2000). Industrial-Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior Management. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 20(2), 27-75.

Geller, E. S. (2003). Organizational Behavior Management and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 22(2), 111-130.

Handlin, H. C. (1992). The company built upon the golden rule: Lincoln Electric. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 12, 151-162.

Johnson, C. M., Redmon, W. K, & Mawhinney, T. C. (Eds.)(2001). Handbook of organizational performance: Behavior analysis and management. New York: Haworth Press.

O'Hara, K., Johnson, C. M., & Beehr, T. A. (1985). Organizational behavior management in the private sector: A review of empirical research and recommendations for further investigation. Academy of Management Review, 40, 848-864.

Performance-Based Rewards and Work Stress

DANIEL C. GANSTER, CHRISTA E. KIERSCH, RACHEL E. MARSH, and ANGELA BOWEN
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

Even though reward systems play a central role in the management of organizations, their impact on stress and the well-being of workers is not well understood. We review the literature linking performance-based reward systems to various indicators of employee stress and well-being. Well-controlled experiments in field settings suggest that certain types of performance-based reward systems, such as piece rate pay, cause increases in psychological and physiological stress. Such findings are mirrored in nonexperimental studies as well, but the causal mechanisms for such effects are not well understood. We argue that reward systems generally deserve much more attention in the work stress literature, and identify several mediating and moderating variables worthy of study.

Workplace stress is believed to be a major contributor to both mental and physical health problems. According to surveys of workers across many occupations, work demands comprise the most stressful experiences in the lives of about 25% of workers and are implicated in a wide range of health complaints such as cardiovascular disease, depression, and musculoskeletal disorders (NIOSH, 1999). The last several decades have witnessed the development of a mature research literature investigating the causes and consequences of work stress that incorporates many different disciplines. In addition to thousands of journal articles, several handbooks (e.g., Quick & Tetrick, 2011) and annual series (Perrewé & Ganster, 2010) are devoted to summarizing and integrating this large body of research. Many specific aspects of the workplace have been studied as potential causes of mental and physical health problems. In this article, we will examine the evidence concerning one important work characteristic—performance-based rewards—that, although they play a central role in performance management systems, have received far less attention than many other potential stressors regarding their role in work stress.

We focus on performance-contingent pay because it is a major approach to compensation in most countries around the world. Performance-contingent pay is a type of variable pay system, and variable pay systems range from those that include a stable base level of pay that is supplemented with performance-based pay (e.g., bonuses, commissions, profit sharing) to those that base the worker’s entire compensation on their performance (e.g., sales commissions and piece rate pay plans). Variable pay plans can also vary in the extent to which they are based on company-wide performance indicators, on team performance, or individual performance. There is ample theoretical justification for the use of performance-based pay schemes in the organizational literature in terms of their expected effects on job performance. Expectancy theory and equity theory, as well as the operant model, all provide explanations for why performance-based pay should create incentives for higher performance (Lawler, 1990). The theoretical counter-point has mainly come from intrinsic motivation theorists (Deci, 1975). Their argument rests on the assumption that individuals attribute a locus of causality to their own behaviors, which can range from internal to external. From this perspective, performance-linked rewards will lead to the formation of an extrinsic locus of causality, and the subsequent extrinsic motivation detracts from one’s intrinsic motivation to engage in the activity. Eventually, this reduction in intrinsic motivation is hypothesized to lead to reduced performance on the task. In later years this theoretical perspective was broadened to incorporate well-being outcomes as well as task motivation (Ryan & Deci, 2000). A meta-analysis of the relationship between financial incentives and work performance, however, reveals a significant and robust relationship (Jenkins, Mitra, Gupta, & Shaw, 1998). Jenkins et al. (1998) found an average corrected effect size of .34 between performance-based pay and quantitative measures of performance, but a nonsignificant one for performance quality. The quantitative performance relationship was weakest in laboratory experiments (.24), followed by field experiments (.48), and strongest in experimental simulations (.56). These relationships did not differ across tasks classified as intrinsic versus extrinsic.

Reward plans as actually implemented in work organizations are complex, and their impact on different indicators of performance can vary widely depending on how they are designed and administered. But there is sufficiently compelling theoretical and empirical rationale for their use to make them ubiquitous in almost every industrialized country. Even in some European countries, in which some forms of performance-based pay plans are seen as controversial, they are still commonly employed. For example, in a sample of 90 large German firms, 63 reported using a performance-related pay plan, and about half of these had only recently introduced or extended such plans (Kurdelbusch, 2002). Thus, performance-based rewards are commonplace throughout work organizations worldwide. If they constitute a significant source of stress that adversely affects the well-being of workers, this would have large implications for designing healthy workplaces. In comparison to the body of empirical research investigating performance and productivity-related outcomes of performance-based reward plans, empirical studies of employee health and well-being outcomes are relatively scarce.

Why Might Performance-Based Rewards Be Stressful?

According to the transactional model of stress (Folkman & Lazarus, 1990), the level of stress experienced by an individual is determined by how that person cognitively appraises the events encountered. Upon exposure to some working condition or event, individuals’ primary appraisals assess whet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Citation Information
• 1. Industrial and Organizational Psychology Encounters Organizational Behavior Management: Would You Care to Dance?
• 2. Performance-Based Rewards and Work Stress
• 3. Promoting Critical Operant-Based Leadership While Decreasing Ubiquitous Directives and Exhortations
• 4. Managing Performance to Change Behavior
• 5. Square Pegs and Round Holes: Ruminations on the Relationship Between Performance Appraisal and Performance Management
• 6. Job Satisfaction: I/O Psychology and Organizational Behavior Management Perspectives
• 7. From Job Analysis to Performance Management: A Synergistic Rapprochement to Organizational Effectiveness
• 8. A Tale of Two Paradigms: The Impact of Psychological Capital and Reinforcing Feedback on Problem Solving and Innovation
• 9. Employee Engagement and Organizational Behavior Management
• Index