By now you know that if behaviors are occurring, there must be some reinforcement for them somewhere in the environment. No reinforcement equals no behavior. And you have known for a long time that the behavior that occurs is not always the behavior that you want. I have spent the last two chapters writing about how to increase and even maximize behavior. I will spend this chapter writing about how to reduce or even stop behavior.
I described the consequences that stop or reduce behavior briefly in Chapter 4. They are referred to as punishment and penalty. As with all four consequences, when applied appropriately, they do work. Obviously, you would like to be able to stop behavior that you don’t want. Unfortunately, consequences always affect behavior, so just as you can inadvertently reinforce behavior that you don’t want, you also can inadvertently punish and extinguish behavior that you do want. If you and others in your organization are unaware of the effect of consequences on behavior, it is possible that you are stopping behavior that you want people to do. To understand more fully what is happening in your company, let’s discuss the effects of punishment and penalty in detail.
What do you do when people do things that are unsafe, unhealthy, unfair, unethical, or illegal? If possible, you act to stop these kinds of actions immediately because of the high level of potential damage they represent.
Punishment and penalty are active consequences that follow behavior and decrease its frequency in the future. As described in Chapter 4, punishment occurs when a behavior produces something the performer does not want. When a behavior results in the the loss of something that the performer values (time, money, freedom) that is called a penalty.
Although it is necessary to use punishment and penalty from time to time, they should be used sparingly. Both are difficult to use. Although they may decrease or stop behavior, they do not predict what behavior will replace the one you have stopped. Punishment and penalty should always be used in conjunction with positive reinforcement for the desired alternative behavior.
Warning: Stopping problem behavior does not mean that a positive or productive behavior will take its place.
Much of the punishment that occurs in business is not planned—it’s inadvertent. Everybody is familiar with the manager who “fusses at” the person who brings bad news, and can’t understand why, after a while, no one will reveal problems.
Take the case of a fiberglass plant that was having a difficult time producing a particular product. The line had not met standard for almost two years and was running at a significant loss. The engineers had been unsuccessful in correcting the problem.
Finally, management decided to try a different approach. They got the employees from each shift together and asked for their input. On the first shift, when someone would make a suggestion, the engineer who was writing down the suggestions would ask follow-up questions to make sure that he knew exactly what the person was talking about.
On the second shift, everything was the same, but in this case the plant superintendent, an acknowledged expert in fiberglass manufacturing, was in attendance. Within the first 10 minutes, he jumped up three different times to show people why what they had suggested wouldn’t work.
The first group produced over 50 suggestions. The second group produced only 6. The difference? In the second shift the superintendent punished people for their ideas. He didn’t intend to; he just wanted to use this opportunity to teach the group something. Instead, every employee who offered an idea was made to feel stupid in front of his or her peers. The idea-giving behavior was stopped cold.
Some of the same characteristics that make positive reinforcement effective also make punishment effective. Just as with positive reinforcement, what is punishing to one may not be punishing to others. Believe it or not, getting chewed out may be punishing to one person and positively reinforcing to another. The only way you can really tell is by what happens to the behavior after the chewing out.
In the same vein, delayed punishment is no more effective than delayed reinforcement. One of the things that reduces the effectiveness of the criminal justice system is the long delay between the commission of a crime and the start of the sentence. In organizations that have progressive discipline systems, the fact that someone progresses through the system tells you that the consequences are not punishing. But the amount of time that it takes to mete out the punishment is probably more important.
Look at your system to see what the average interval is from the infraction of the rules to the punishing consequence. Immediate consequences are the most effective, and any lengthy interval diminishes the effectiveness considerably. As with reinforcement, catching someone in the act is more effective than delayed action.
Because punishment only stops behavior, it does not add value to a business (or a family). The only reason we would want a person to stop an unproductive behavior is to replace it with a productive one. Punishment doesn’t tell people what you want them to do; it only tells them what not to do. It is quite possible that you could stop one undesirable behavior and have another equally undesirable behavior take its place.
For this reason, you should never punish one behavior without knowing what you want in its place and reinforcing the desirable behavior soon as it occurs.
One of the problems with the use of punishment and penalty to stop behaviors is that when they stop, if an alternate behavior is not reinforced, the old behavior will recover. Technically, recovery refers to the fact that punished behavior will return to nonpunished levels when the punishment or penalty is stopped.
The effect of getting a speeding ticket may last only until the trooper is out of sight. Why do most criminals go to jail many times over their lifetimes? Prison obviously did not stop the criminal activity permanently. When behaviors incompatible with criminal activity are not reinforced, you can expect that the old behavior will recover soon after the person finds himself or herself in an environment where there is no immediate threat of punishment or penalty. Punishment and penalty never solve a problem. At best, they stop behavior long enough for you to find a way to reinforce behavior that is productive.
There is another way behavior is stopped, and it is the most common way organizations unintentionally demotivate people. Extinction is what happens when a behavior occurs with no reinforcement. In other words, extinction means withholding or not delivering reinforcement for previously reinforced behavior.
Someone tells what she thinks is a funny joke. After the joke, the teller starts laughing hysterically. Then she suddenly realizes that no one else is laughing. Immediately, the joke teller stops laughing as well. If the same joke is told a couple more times with the same response, the individual will no doubt eliminate it from her repertoire.
In the same way, a new employee arrives on the scene believing that his best work is what is required, and he is more than willing to oblige. After a few months on the job “going the extra mile,” the employee realizes that nobody notices. Like the joker in the preceding example, this person soon eliminates extra effort from his repertoire.
If you want a behavior or performance to continue, you must make sure that it is being reinforced. Because failing to reinforce previously reinforced productive performance is extinction, it’s easy to see why performance and motivation drop off in even the best employees. The dropoff is an indication that employees are simply not getting the reinforcement they need to continue doing a good job. This is why the extinction of discretionary effort is almost assured in work environments where management is not making a conscious attempt to positively reinforce.
But there are behaviors that we want to eliminate, and at those times, the intentional use of extinction can be very helpful. We are all familiar with the saying, “Just ignore it, and it’ll go away.” This is basically how extinction works. However, as you might imagine, if it were that easy, we wouldn’t have to deal with it in this book. To bring out the best in people, you need a much more complete understanding of extinction.
Let’s look at an example to which everybody can relate. Mom and Dad are having trouble getting Johnny to sleep alone. When they put him to bed, he starts crying. His parents ignore him for a while, but after he cries for a few minutes, they go get him and bring him into their bed and he stops crying. They admonish him all the while that he must learn to sleep in his own bed, but he continues to sleep in theirs. A helpful relative suggests that it will not hurt the little boy if he is allowed to cry and assures the parents that if they leave him in his bed, he will stop crying after only a few nights.
What actually does happen is known to almost everybody. It goes like this:
You probably know that the next night he will cry louder and longer. Let’s assume that the parents don’t go to him but rather they stick it out. If crying louder doesn’t bring the parents, the child may begin to flail about in his crib, crying all the while. If the parents don’t go in, he will eventually stop crying. After he is quiet for a few minutes, he may start crying again, but this time if his parents don’t come in to get him, he will stop sooner than the night before.
This may go on for a few nights, but each night the crying will get shorter, and in a relatively short time, the behavior will stop—if the parents can stick with their plan for ignoring the crying. While this is not a business example, when you understand the different aspects of extinction in this problem, you will understand how to fix some of your motivational problems at work.
The first thing that happens when a well-developed behavior is ignored is an increase in that behavior. In other words, the behavior that is being extinguished actually will occur more often. We witness this in our everyday affairs. If we push the button for an elevator and it is slow to arrive, we then push the button several times in succession, although this has no effect on the elevator.
If we lose something, we probably look in the same places over and over. In an election, when a candidate begins to slip in the polls, she tries harder, makes more appearances, and criticizes the opponent more vehemently. If someone is a chronic complainer and you ignore the complaints, he actually may complain about more things, and with more agitation. This is a predictable and naturally occurring phenomenon. You can see it at every level of society.
At work, when you hear such things as, “We’ve got to get back to basics” or “We’ve got to try harder,” you are hearing extinction burst. This means that behaviors that were productive have not received reinforcement and have undergone extinction. Doing the same things harder will rarely solve problems. If what was being done all along could have solved the problem, it would have already been solved. Doing the same thing harder is often an indication that the behavior is undergoing extinction.
Following the extinction burst, you will usually see negative emotional behavior. The child flails about in his crib, the candidate gets more venomous, and the individual kicks the elevator door when it doesn’t arrive in a timely way. If you are not prepared to handle the emotional behavior, you’d better not try to use extinction. It is not uncommon to see strikes settled during the emotional behavior phase, which, of course, increases the probability of violence in future strikes. Negative emotional behavior is further evidence that extinction is occurring.
After the emotional behavior has run its course, the behavior will continue to occur at various irregular intervals until it stops altogether. Sometimes the behavior will be replaced by a similar behavior. It is during this period of erratic behavior that you must be careful not to reinforce new, undesired behavior. The amount of time it takes for the behavior to finally stop is affected by a number of variables, but in general the more reinforcement the person has received for the behavior in the past, the more time is required for extinction.
When the old behavior has stopped for a period of time, it is not unusual for it to occur again, seemingly out of nowhere. This has led many to believe that people don’t really change. You see someone try to eliminate a habit, quit for a while, but eventually go back to the old ways.
The resurgence of the old habit is an indication that the behavior(s) that replaced it is(are) not getting enough reinforcement to stick. We see this in many people who try to quit smoking or drinking or who are trying to lose weight. They will have some initial success only to revert to the old habit.
The key to making extinction work to eliminate an unwanted behavior is to introduce positive reinforcement for a productive alternative behavior. For example, at work, there may be a person who constantly interrupts meetings with hostile, sarcastic comments. The group could put these comments on extinction by ignoring them. Then the group should positively reinforce constructive comments and questions.
When you want to extinguish behavior, you need to be prepared for the four previously mentioned aspects of extinction. If you don’t think that you will be able to handle them all, you need to choose another consequence.
Problems in the workplace are often created not by what we do, but by what we fail to do.
Bringing out the best in people is not only about getting more of what you want but also about getting less of what you don’t want. All four consequences I have presented have appropriate applications at work, but as with any skill, the use of behavioral consequences to manage people takes time to learn. There are right ways to use them, and there are attempts that fall short. I am going to present some very specific applications for all four consequences in the remainder of this book.