Collaborating with other disciplines
Collaborating with other disciplines
Collaborating with other disciplines
Your textbook points to many similarities and many differences between OBM and OD (SEE ATTACHMENT). The text also highlights potential areas for collaboration. Throughout your future careers in Applied Behavior Analysis, you will often have to collaborate with others from other disciplines. This will require an understanding of other fields as well as the skills to determine where you can collaborate and create the most effective treatment environment for clients.
For this week’s Discussion you will compare and contrast OBM and OD as well as extend some of the points from this week’s Reading to your future practice:
In a minimum of 400 words answer below. Please see text attached.
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- Identify and explain two key ways in which Organizational Behavior Management and Organizational Development are different.
- Describe one of the areas you feel OBM can contribute the most to in the field of OD and why.
- Discuss what is meant by “humble behaviorism,” as referenced in your textbook from Nuernger (1991).
- Discuss how the ideas of reciprocation and “humble behaviorism,” will impact collaboration with other disciplines in your future career in behavior analysis.
FromRedmonW.K.2001.HandbookofOrganizationalPerformance1stEdition..docx
Organizational Behavior Management and Organization Development: Potential Paths to Reciprocation
James L. Eubanks
The origins of applied behavioral science can be traced back more than fifty years. While Skinner was pioneering efforts in the experimental analysis of behavior, and the grand theorists, Tolman, Hull, and Guthrie were battling for supremacy in the behavioral science arena, Kurt Lewin and Rensis Likert, prominent social psychologists of the era, began emphasizing the importance of connecting research and theory with practice. Their work strongly influenced the field of organizational behavior (OB), and spawned the field we will consider in detail in the present chapter: organization development (OD).
Neither OB nor OD share many of the features commonly identified with organizational behavior management (OBM): direct and frequent recording of behavior, targeting outcomes that workers can influence, and focusing on performance consequences. Indeed, current OD texts (e.g., Burke, 1982; French and Bell, 1990; Cummings and Worley, 1993) pay very little attention, if any, to Skinner’s work and neglect to acknowledge OBM altogether. The OB field, on the other hand, has had fruitful interaction with behavior analysis (Komaki, 1986a). Virtually all OB texts (e.g., Luthans, 1992) include OBM as part of the OB field, although it is more often referred to as organizational behavior modification, or O.B. Mod.
The purpose of this chapter is to explore the potential for reciprocation between OD and OBM. The field of OD has matured considerably during the past two decades, with calls for systematic evaluation and research designed to determine what works and to begin assembling a theoretical basis for the field (Dunn and Swierczek, 1977; Eubanks and Marshall, 1990; Eubanks, Marshall, and O’Driscoll, 1990; Eubanks et al., 1990; Golembiewski, Proehl, and Sink, 1982; Nicholas, 1982; O’Driscoll and Eubanks, 1992, 1993, 1994). Clients have also become more sophisticated and are requiring OD practitioners to show performance gains in exchange for the considerable effort and cost involved in systemwide interventions (Beer and Walton, 1987, 1990). The OD field is briefly described in the following section as a basis for contrasting it with OBM.
DEFINITION AND COMPARISON OF OD WITH OBM
Numerous definitions of OD exist. According to one of the more comprehensive descriptions of the field, OD is:
a top-management-supported, long-range effort to improve an organization’s problem solving and renewal processes, particularly through a more effective and collaborative diagnosis and management of organization culture—with special emphasis on formal work team, temporary team, and inter-group culture—with the assistance of a consultant-facilitator and the use of the theory and technology of applied behavioral science, including action research. (French and Bell, 1990, p. 17)
This definition encompasses a number of dimensions that require elaboration. Table 14.1 lists these dimensions and provides a basis for comparing and contrasting OD and OBM. These dimensions will be used later as a basis for evaluating possible areas of interaction and reciprocation among the two fields.
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