Human relations concepts and applications

Behavioral Management

Human Relations

List and describe the characteristics of behavioral management

Behavioral management, which is at times referred to as 'behavior modification' has the main goal of guiding and motivating individuals towards modifying or rather changing their actions or relations with respect to particular settings. Behavioral management can be employed by a wide number of professionals, employers and even parents in order to initiate rules against certain habits or alter habits that are not desirable. This approach has been observed to work not only on human beings, also on animals. Generally behavioral management can be described as a process eliminating behavior of undesirable nature while encouraging behavior which is considered to be appropriate thereby promoting order in a particular setting and creating an environment that is healthy for the operations there in.

Characteristics of behavioral management

Behavioral management is applied through various techniques, which may be categorized as either positive or negative, and it is important that those employing this approach have the positive behavioral management techniques. These positive techniques lead to the characteristics of behavioral management, which are: Guidelines, Accountability, Modeling, and Positive reinforcement (Peterson and Tenenbaum, 1986).

One of the most crucial characteristic is guidelines, the persons concerned, such as students or employees, must be made to understand the kind of behavior that they should adopt or is expected of them in that setting (Gardner, 1971). This is achieved by creating and posting the relevant rules to the employees or students. Such rules should be clearly understood and their meanings very easy to decipher to avoid any misunderstandings among the targeted group. There should be frequent reference to these rules in form of discussions and relating them to real life situations faced on a day-to-day basis. It is also very important for the persons concerned (students or employees) to be in a position of explaining the rules together with the related consequences when any is not adhered to.

After creating awareness with regard to desirable and undesirable behavior, then reward or punishment becomes the next important feature and this is covered by the accountability feature. It is crucial that before rewarding or punishing, a clear understanding of what is right or wrong is developed. For instance, when a rule is broken, the individual concerned should be able to identify the rule that has broken and the related consequences. This is achieved through discussion between the wrongdoer and the educator through which better choices can be developed. Similarly, before rewarding any good behavior there should be an understanding of why the reward was given thus encouraging that particular behavior.

It has been observed that many individuals learn behaviors that they see others doing, this is especially true for children, and this is normally referred to as observational learning, this is the feature that is presented by modeling. In order to achieve this, seniors either at the work place, at home or at any other setting who intend to influence the behavior of their juniors need to model the behaviors they consider to be appropriate. However, it has been observed that individuals easily imitate their peers than their seniors (Peterson and Tenenbaum, 1986). Such tools as animated scenario videos can also be used in modeling.