To learn more about JCPenney’s PowerLine, go to www.jcpenney.com.
SUSAN GOLDMAN/BLOOMBERG NEWS/LANDOV
JCPenney has created a PowerLine team to follow up with absent employees.
what supervisors at UPS do. The more time that elapses after the behavior occurs, the less effective the reinforcer.
The
• principle of reinforcement size states that the larger the amount of reinforcer delivered after the desired behavior, the more effect the reinforcer will have on the frequency of the desired behavior. The amount, or size, of the reinforcer is relative.
A reinforcer that may be significant to one person may be insignificant to another person. Thus, the size of the reinforcer must be determined in relation both to the behavior and the individual. ARAMARK, a supplier of food services to college campuses, gives T-shirts to workers with perfect attendance for a month and a $50 gift certificate to those with perfect attendance for a semester.
The
• principle of reinforcement deprivation states that the more an individual is deprived of the reinforcer, the greater effect it will have on the future occurrence of the desired behavior. However, if an individual recently has had enough of a reinforcer and is satisfied, the reinforcer will have less effect.
Organizational Rewards
Material rewards—salary, bonuses, fringe benefits, and the like—are obvious. Most leaders also offer a wide range of other rewards to reinforce the behaviors they want. For example, the Dallas Independent School System recently spent more than
$12 million on substitute teachers. The average teacher was absent 10 days during the school year. The district launched its Staff and Teacher Attendance Reward program as a financial incentive for teachers to show up for class. According to Marita Hawkins, the district’s benefits director, if a teacher had only one absence during the school year, the district matched 100 percent of the teacher’s contribution to a retirement account, up to $1,000 a year. Teachers out two days got a 75 percent match, up to $700. Those with three to five absences earned 50 percent match, up to $500 a year. Hawkins hopes to save the district more than $2 million with this reward system.13
At Toyota’s Camry assembly plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, management rewards employees for kaizens. A kaizen is a suggestion that results in safety, cost, or quality improvements.14 The awards are distributed equally among all members of a team. The awards aren’t cash payments; rather, they are gift certificates redeemable at local retail stores. Toyota learned that an award that could be shared by the employ- ees’ families was valued more than extra money in the paycheck. These awards instill pride and encourage other teams to scramble for new ideas in the hope that they, too, will receive them. In addition, self-administered rewards are important. For example, self-satisfaction for accomplishing a particularly difficult assignment can be an impor- tant personal reinforcer. Table 5.1 contains an extensive list of organizational rewards.
Remember, however, that such rewards will act as reinforcers only if the individuals receiving them find them desirable or pleasing.
Negative Reinforcement
Negative reinforcement (see Figure 5.3) occurs when an unpleasant event that precedes the employee behavior is removed when the desired behavior occurs. Negative reinforcement increases the likelihood that the desired behavior will occur. Negative reinforcement is sometimes confused with punishment because both use unpleasant events that influ- ence behavior. Negative reinforcement is used to increase the frequency of a desired behavior. In contrast, punishment is used to decrease the frequency of an undesired behavior. On NBC’s TV show The Biggest Loser, the station agreed to pay $250,000 to the individual who lost the biggest percentage of his or her body weight. In the primetime reality show, unless a contestant lost 15 pounds in two months, the show would air unflattering photos of them on TV. Cynthia Nacson-Schechter explained that she knew all about the dangers of being overweight and yet these dangers and the money weren’t enough to scare her into losing weight. What she feared most was
the possibility that her ex-boyfriend would see her in a bikini on national TV. She lost weight and then some. It was the fear of being on national TV in a bikini that acted as a negative reinforcer for her to lose weight.
Leaders and team members frequently use negative reinforcement when an employee hasn’t done something that is necessary or desired. For example, air-traffic controllers want the ability to activate a blinking light and a loud buzzer in the cock- pits of planes that come too close to each other. Air-traffic controllers wouldn’t shut these devices off until the planes moved farther apart. This type of procedure is called escape learning because the pilots quickly learn to move their planes away from each other to escape the light and buzzer. Escape learning refers to an unpleasant event that occurs until an employee performs a behavior or terminates it. In most instances, use of negative reinforcements generates enough behavior to escape or avoid punishment.
Doing “just enough to get by” is typical.
Extinction
Extinction is the removal of all reinforcing events. Whereas reinforcement increases the frequency of a desirable behavior, extinction decreases the frequency of an undesir- able behavior (see Figure 5.3). Leaders use extinction to reduce undesirable employee behaviors that prevent achievement of organizational goals. The extinction procedure consists of three steps:
1. identifying the behavior to be reduced or eliminated, 2. identifying the reinforcer that maintains the behavior, and 3. stopping the reinforcer.
Extinction is a useful technique for reducing and eventually eliminating behaviors that disrupt normal workflow. For example, a team reinforces the disruptive behavior
TABLE 5.1 Rewards Used by Organizations
MATERIAL REWARDS
SUPPLEMENTAL BENEFITS
STATUS SYMBOLS
Pay Company automobiles Corner offices
Pay raises Health insurance plans Offices with windows
Stock options Pension contributions Carpeting
Profit sharing Vacation and sick leave Drapes
Deferred compensation Recreation facilities Paintings
Bonuses/bonus plans Child-care support Watches
Incentive plans Club privileges Rings
Expense accounts Parental leave Private restrooms
SOCIAL/INTERPERSONAL REWARDS
REWARDS FROM THE TASK
SELF-ADMINISTERED REWARDS
Praise Sense of achievement Self-congratulation
Developmental feedback Jobs with more responsibility Self-recognition Smiles, pats on the back, and
other nonverbal signals
Job autonomy/self-direction Performing important tasks
Self-praise
Self-development through expanded knowledge/skills Greater sense of self-worth Requests for suggestions
Invitations to coffee or lunch Wall plaques
of a member by laughing at it. When the team stops laughing (the reinforcer), the disruptive behavior will diminish and ultimately stop.
Extinction can be regarded as a failure to reinforce a behavior positively. In this sense, the extinction of behaviors may be accidental. If leaders fail to reinforce desir- able behaviors, they may be using extinction without recognizing it. As a result, the frequency of desirable behaviors may inadvertently decrease.
Some leaders think that doing nothing has no effect on performance. When lead- ers do nothing following a behavior, they change the contingencies of reinforcement.
If employees are taking the initiative to go beyond what is required, those behaviors will stop if they are not reinforced. If employees are taking shortcuts in areas of safety and quality and nothing is said, then extinction will cause the undesirable behaviors to continue.
Punishment
Punishment (see Figure 5.3) refers to an unpleasant event occurring following a behavior and decreasing that behavior’s frequency. Remember when you tried to use a PC for the first time? You may have inadvertently deleted a document you had been working on for hours (punishment). If that happened, now you probably hit the “Save” option regularly. As in positive reinforcement, a punishment may include a specific anteced- ent that cues the employee that a consequence (punisher) will follow a specific behav- ior. A positive contingency of reinforcement encourages the frequency of a desired behavior. In contrast, punishment decreases the frequency of an undesired behavior.
To qualify as a punisher, an event must decrease the undesirable behavior. Just because an event is thought of as unpleasant, it isn’t necessarily a punisher. The event must actually reduce or stop the undesired behavior before it can be defined as a punisher.
Organizations typically use several types of unpleasant events to punish employ- ees. Material consequences for failure to perform adequately include a cut in pay, a disciplinary suspension without pay, a demotion, or a transfer to a dead-end job. The final punishment is the firing of an employee for failure to perform. In general, orga- nizations reserve the use of unpleasant material events, such as demotions, reassign- ments, dismissals, and the like, for cases of serious behavior problems.
Interpersonal punishers are used extensively. They include a leader’s oral rep- rimand of an employee for unacceptable behavior and nonverbal punishers such as frowns, grunts, and aggressive body language. Certain tasks themselves can be unpleasant. The fatigue that follows hard physical labor can be considered a punisher, as can harsh or dirty working conditions. However, care must be exercised in labeling a punisher. In some fields and to some employees, harsh or dirty working conditions may be considered as just something that goes with the job.
Three of the principles of positive reinforcement discussed earlier have equiva- lents in punishment. For maximum effectiveness:
a punisher should be directly linked to the undesirable behavior (principle of
•
contingent punishment);
the punishment should be administered immediately (principle of immediate
•
punishment); and,
in general, the greater the size of the punisher, the stronger the effect on the
•
undesirable behavior (principle of punishment size).
Negative Effects of Punishment
A criticism for using punishment is the chance that it will have negative effects, especially over long or sustained periods of time.15 Punishment stops an undesirable employee behavior. However, the potential negative consequences may be greater than the original undesirable behavior. Figure 5.4 illustrates some potential negative effects of punishment, as discussed next.
Punishment may cause undesirable emotional reactions. An employee who has been reprimanded for staying on break too long may react with anger toward the leader and the organization. Such reactions may lead to behavior detrimental to the organization. Sabotage, for example, may be a result of a punishment-oriented management system. Chapter 8 discusses aggressive behavior in the workforce more completely.
Punishment frequently leads only to short-term suppression of the undesirable behavior, rather than to its elimination. The suppression of an undesirable behavior over a long period of time usually requires continued and, perhaps, increasingly severe punishment. Another problem is that control of the undesirable behavior becomes contingent on the leader’s presence. When the leader isn’t around, the undesirable employee behavior is likely to recur.
In addition, the punished individual may try to avoid or escape the situation.
From an organizational viewpoint, this reaction may be unacceptable if an employee avoids a particular, essential task. High absenteeism is a form of avoidance that may occur when punishment is used frequently. Quitting may be the employee’s final form of escape. Organizations that depend on punishment are likely to have high rates of employee turnover. Some turnover is desirable, but excessive turnover is damaging to an organization. Todd Diener, president of Chili’s at Brinker International based in Dallas, Texas, says that recruitment and training costs average more than $600 per employee at Chili’s restaurants.
Punishment suppresses employee initiative and flexibility. Reacting to punishment, many an employee has said: “I’m going to do just what I’m told and nothing more.”
Recurrence of undesirable employee behavior
Undesirable emotional
reaction
Aggressive, disruptive
behavior
Apathetic, noncreative performance
Fear of manager
High turnover and absenteeism Short-term
decrease in frequency of
undesirable employee
behavior Antecedent
Punishment by manager Undesirable
employee behavior
But leads to long-term
Which tends to reinforce FIGU RE 5.4 Potential Negative Effects of Punishment
Such an attitude is undesirable because organizations depend on the personal initiative and creativity that employees bring to their jobs. Overusing punishment produces apathetic employees who are not an asset to an organization. Sustained punishment can also lead to lower self-esteem. Lower self-esteem, in turn, under- mines the employee’s self-confidence, which is necessary for performing most jobs (see Chapter 3).
Punishment produces a conditioned fear of management. That is, employees develop a general fear of punishment-oriented leaders. Such leaders become an envi- ronmental cue, indicating to employees the probability that an aversive event will occur. So if operations require frequent, normal, and positive interaction between employees and a leader, such a situation can quickly become intolerable. Responses to fear, such as “hiding” or reluctance to communicate with a leader, may well hinder employee performance.
A leader may rely on punishment because it can produce fast results in the short run. In essence, the leader is reinforced for using punishment because the approach produces an immediate change in an employee’s behavior. Thus, the leader may ignore punishment’s long-term detrimental effects, which can be cumulative. A few incidents of punishment may not produce negative effects. The long-term, sustained use of punishment most often results in negative outcomes for the organization.
Individuals have also learned how to “game” the situation to avoid the punisher as the following Ethics Competency feature illustrates.16
Samuel Waksal, former CEO of the biotech firm ImClone, was serving time in a federal prison for insider trading. He was released nine months early. Why? He was rewarded for participating in a prison rehab program for substance abus- ers. The rehab program is a 500-hour program focusing on behavioral and cognitive treatments, during which time participants are housed in a dorm-like unit set apart from the general prison population. The problem was that he was not a substance abuser. Waksal told the probation offi- cer and judge that he was a “social drinker” and that he had never been treated for alcohol addic- tion. In prison, he learned from his fellow inmates that in 1994, Congress passed a law offering up to 12 months off a sentence for nonviolent offenders if they complete a counseling program for alcohol addiction. In 1994, only 3,755 inmates were in the program, but in 2008, there were more than 18,000 prisoners in the program, with a waiting list of more than 7,000.
The rehab program is so attractive to pris- oners that it is now a big business. For a fee of
up to $5,000, lawyers advise their clients how to get into the program and how to maximize their chances of getting a reduction in their sentence. For example, one lawyer advised his clients to show up drunk on the day of their sentencing so they get interviewed right away about their substance abuse problem. They also arrange for doctors to testify, for a consulting fee, that they purportedly treated the individual for alcohol abuse. Drug-dealer-turned celebrity chef Jeff Henderson wrote in his book, Cooked, that even though he never used drugs and hadn’t been around them since he stopped selling them, he was admitted to the program.
While the Bureau of Prisons has rigid eligibil- ity requirements designed to keep out fakers, there are no rigid standards on what constitutes substance abuse.
Despite its problems, the program has had some societal benefits. Male inmates who have participated in the program are 16 percent less likely to commit another crime and 15 percent less likely to relapse into future drug abuse.