Should We Teach the ABC's?

Abstract

A great deal of discussion has taken place about the field of Organizational Behavior Management and whether it should broaden its content beyond the field of applied behavior analysis to include fields such social psychology, positive psychology, and more traditional I/O psychology. The current discussions stem from different views of OBM and our struggles in promoting greater use of behavioral technology. The authors discuss their views as practitioners from the field of OBM and suggest that our intervention model needs to be changed to focus more on creating behavioral systems and less on training. Further, the challenge of promoting behavioral interventions is viewed as a function of limited data and a lack of long-term success stories, rather than a function of current content or how we talk about our technology.

Key Words:

• Organizational behavior management
• behavioral engineering
• social psychology
• technology transfer