Association for Behavior Analysis International

In the workplace, it is important that leaders can address performance concerns with staff. However, this begins with identifying processes and behaviors that yield desirable outcomes, which is known as pinpointing. Pinpointing is essential to the performance management process, as it provides guidance and direction on what is being targeted. This study evaluated the effects of individual (3 participants) versus group (3 participants) video-based BST on teaching supervisors to pinpoint. First, participants were given fictional scenarios of performance problems to practice identifying pinpoints. After participants met mastery criteria, they went two weeks without meeting with the experimenter and then completed two novel scenarios. Following this, generalization was assessed by asking participants to pinpoint a performance problem at their current place of employment. The results from this study suggest both training methods were effective at teaching participants to identify pinpoints, with group training taking almost half the training time as individual training. Additionally, training was effective at helping participants maintain the skill to identify pinpoints and promoting generalization for participants to identify pinpoints in their current work environment.

Organizational Behavior Management (OBM) interventions are often judged by both immediate effects and the long-term impact on the targeted performance, as well as the likelihood that the organization and/or its constituents will adopt the intervention (Sigurdsson & Austin, 2006). In recent literature, tools such as the Performance Diagnostic Checklist- Human Services (PDC-HS; Carr et al., 2013; Carr et al., 2016) have become popular in ABA service delivery settings with demonstrated predictive validity and reliability in empirical literature (Wilder et al., 2020). One further way to evaluate the PDC-HS is to examine its role in producing durable change. Thus, the purpose of the present experiment is to examine the predictive ability of a common OBM functional assessment tool, and how addressing supervisor behavior might contribute to maintenance and/or institutionalization. Eight registered behavior technicians (RBTs) across 4 supervisors were split into two multiple baseline designs across participants. One group of participants was exposed to a PDC-HS derived intervention alone, while the other group received the intervention in addition to their supervisors receiving a PDC-HS derived intervention to promote supervisor implementation and sustained behavior change. A mixed repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilized to examine the differences between these groups and an untreated control group. Overall, both PDC-HS derived interventions produced measurable behavior change without researcher led support. Ultimately, institutionalization of these interventions was inconsistent, suggesting that maintaining interventions may require support at multiple levels. Limitations and future directions will be discussed.