Schedules of Monetary Reinforcement in Organizational Behavior Management: Latham and Huber (1992) Revisited

In an article recently published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, Latham and Huber (1992) reviewed a series of eight articles published from 1972 through 1982 that examined the effects of scheduling incentive pay in various ways. They used the results of these studies to support the contention that "the operant principles developed through basic research can be utilized in applied settings to design reinforcement schedules that evoke desired behavior from individual employees or employee groups" (p. 146). The present paper provides further analysis of the eight studies reviewed by Latham and Huber. In contrast to those authors, we contend that the results are quite ambiguous and relate superficially, if at all, to the results of basic research.