Tactics to Ensure Durability of Behavior Change Following the Removal of an Intervention Specialist: A Review of Temporal Generality Within Organizational Behavior Management

ABSTRACT

The endurance of behavior change over time, including the time period after a behavior specialist has ceased to offer direct services, is an important consideration for both organizational behavior management and behavior analysis in general. This article considers a dozen strategies labelled temporal generality tactics that may foster the maintenance and institutionalization of intervention efforts in organizational settings. The use of such tactics was examined by conducting a comprehensive review of articles published between 1977 and 2014 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management. The results of this review suggest that although follow-up measures are frequently collected, explicit and proactive strategies to systematically increase the success of long-term behavior change are rarely used or researched.

KEYWORDS:

• Follow-up data
• generalization
• institutionalization
• maintenance
• temporal generality