Instructional Design and Management Research Lab

Welcome to the Instructional Design and Management Research Lab. This website contains information on our lab members, past and future research directions, publications of our members, professional presentations, and links of interest.

The lab is dedicated to both instructional design techniques and organizational behavior management techniques. In regards to instructional design, this lab focuses behavior-based training and teaching methods, with an explicit recognition that training or teaching means changing the behavior of the learner. An important part of this methodology involves the best ways of presenting prompts, instructions, and examples (antecedents to behavior) to ensure efficient and effective learning outcomes. This also involves how to analyze and judge observed behavior in an instructional context. In addition, these techniques specify how trainers/teachers/instructors should react to behavioral observations (consequences for behavior). The underlying key concept is how the relationship between these three variables (antecedents, behavior, consequences) impact learning over time.

In regards to organizational behavior management, this lab focuses on how to use evidence-based methods to maintain employee performance on a daily basis outside of a training context. No matter how well-designed training is, gains in performance will not be maintained if they are not supported by on-the-job workplace relationships. As such, even though a good training program is an important and critical part of an organization, it is not sufficient by itself to generate valued organizational outcomes. Quite often, improving on-the-job performance translates to altering the interactions between employees and supervisors. This can be accomplished by enhancing feedback delivery, building incentive and reward systems, clarifying work expectations, analyzing how organizational departments are aligned, developing new measurement and assessment tools, and teaching leadership behaviors. Unlike many approaches to the performance of employees, this lab focuses on situational determinants of behavior (i.e., how to engineer motivating work environments), rather than the dispositional characteristics of the workers (i.e., personality assessments, selection and placement).

Laboratory Director

Douglas A. Johnson is a Learning Leader for Eastman Chemical Company, where he leads global initiatives related to leadership development, performance improvement, employee training, instructional design, and performance management to guide learning, employee motivation, and safety outcomes. He previously spent 13 years working as a faculty member at Western Michigan University. He is certified as a Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt and a doctoral-level Board Certified Behavior Analyst (BCBA-D). He is the founder of Operant-Tech Consulting and an international consultant. He is an expert in instructional design, training design/development, computer-based instruction, performance management, behavioral systems analysis, fluency training, incentives, feedback, and employee motivation. He has over two decades of experience in providing instructional design consultation for training with companies such as Fifth Third Bank, Heinz, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company, and more.

In addition to his work responsibilities, Doug also works as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management and was named as one of the most cited authors in a quantitative review of that journal (Sleiman et al., 2020) across its 40+ years of publication. The Organizational Behavior Management Network has given his research several awards, including the Scholarly Impact Award and the Innovative Research Award. Doug has presented over 40 presentations and workshops and has been an invited speaker, nationally and internationally, on topics related to workplace behavior and performance management.

His graduates have gone on to work at universities and corporate institutions, including Fortune 500 companies. He is well-versed in radical behaviorism, instructional design, evidence-based training, and organizational behavior management. He has several peer-reviewed publications on organizational topics such as laboratory and field investigations of feedback, multiculturalism and diversity, performance diagnostic tools, multimedia instruction, and motivation.

E-mail: behavioranalyst@gmail.com
See Dr. Johnson's curriculum vitae (updated March 2024)