Behavioral Allocation on the Performance Scorecard

Only a small number of studies in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management (JOBM) have examined the effect that Performance Scorecards have on employee performance. The Performance Scorecard is a multicomponent intervention that targets several performance measures simultaneously using goal setting, feedback, and incentives. The limited research in this area tends to target groups of individuals and very few studies have provided an analysis of the individual components or interventions present in the Performance Scorecard (Plowman, 2006). One such component is the priority weighting of target behaviors. Therefore, the current study investigated the effect that priority weight manipulation on a Performance Scorecard had on behavioral allocation across target behaviors. Three participants took part in this study. Utilizing an alternating treatments design with baseline, each participant was exposed to equal weighting and prioritized weighting across four target behaviors. Results of the study showed an overall increase in performance across most behaviors when the scorecards were introduced. Contrary to previous findings, however, individuals did not consistently allocate responding based on the changing weights. This may indicate that it isn't necessary to use weights to prioritize behaviors on the scorecard, but given some methodological limitations of the study, more research is needed.