Performance Management in Organizations
Human performance and success in the workplace is another area of application that has been a long-standing interest of mine. Much of my work here has been devoted to exploring ways in which basic psychological principles can be utilized to improve the productivity and efficiency of work behavior. I became involved in this work in the late 70s in the early stages of a movement known as Organizational Behavior Management (OBM). Together with my late colleague, Chris Anderson, we built one of the first graduate programs in this field in the early 1980s, attracting a strong and competitive applicant pool. In addition, we were able to cultivate a novel source of funding through small grants from organizations that were willing to host on-site graduate students and their OBM-related dissertation projects. This funding also helped support our concurrent lab-based research and proved to be an innovative funding model at a time when federal money for basic research was difficult to obtain.
Unfortunately, in 1990, departmental politics resulted in the discontinuation of our OBM graduate program, a decision I did not support. It is hard enough to do good OBM research in the field, but it is even more challenging to do so without graduate student support and involvement. Despite this set back, I have tried to maintain and interest and presence in this field.
Under the sublinks in this category, you will find my white papers, monographs, and talks, as well as a list of my published works in this area.