Human Performance Technology

Human performance technology (HPT) may be defined as a systematic and principled practice for improving the productivity of organizations and individuals through coordinated interventions that show measured results. An HPT strategy often includes a range of interventions brought to bear on various causes of a performance problem. HPT is intended to apply to organizational performance in any context. It has been applied widely in workplace, health care, government, and military sectors, and it is seeing increased application in education. Its reach extends globally, both within global corporations and increasingly to local practice on each of the continents. This entry first discusses the [Page 348]development of HPT, HPT models, and core principles of HPT. It then discusses how HPT is used for performance analysis, interventions, and evaluating the effectiveness of interventions, including in the area of educational technology.

The analytical framework of HPT has its origins in behavioral psychology and general systems theory with additional contributions from other sources. HPT views any workplace as a system that is a subsystem of one or more larger systems and is a super system for others, down to the level of the individual workers and their work (task). A wide variety of HPT models has evolved, for a variety of different purposes One of the earliest and most widely recognized HPT models is Thomas Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model (BEM). The model characterizes a system as composed of six interrelated elements:

Gilbert groups these six elements into the environmental (workplace and work) and individual (worker) levels, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1 Gilbert’s Behavior Engineering Model (BEM)

Gilbert observes that the application of this framework to analysis of performance problems is most likely to discover potential causes in most of the cells, if not all. However, he argues that the majority of impediments to performance usually occur at the environmental (workplace and work) level. Yet, managers most commonly attribute the causes of poor performance to the personal (worker) level, by complaining that their workers aren’t trained and may lack the aptitude or the motivation to perform. By contrast, careful analysis at the work (task), worker, and workplace levels commonly shows that the biggest barriers to performance include issues such as insufficient information needed to perform or information not provided on a timely basis; feedback that is critical but not timely or specific to the desired behaviors, rather than careful and timely instruction on how to perform; inadequate tools to perform; and competing incentives that work against performance. Gilbert argues that analysis should identify the gaps in performance between the best workers and the average workers, then diagnose the multiple barriers, in all six cells, of failure to perform. Then it is possible to compare the cost and benefit of an intervention to remove each barrier and to prioritize interventions from highest to lowest cost-benefit.

More recent HPT models have extended and enhanced this basic analytical framework in important ways. For example, Roger Kaufman has extended the model to super systems up to the society level, to demonstrate how to align strategic goals with societal needs and to align organizational elements with strategic goals. Geary Rummler (Rummler & Brache, 1990) provides an advanced framework to ensure organizational coherence from the worker to the enterprise level in large, complex organizations.

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