The Matching Law and Organizational Behavior Management Revisited

Two recent articles published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior Management suggest that the matching law may be relevant to the analysis of organization behavior. The present paper provides further discussion of the possible importance of the matching law for understanding and improving behavior in organizations. After considering the kinds of quantitative analyses associated with the matching law and examining how broadly these analyses hold, their application to organizational behavior is examined. Although organizational behavior is not fundamentally different from other operant behavior, the matching law does not appear to provide a particularly useful conceptual framework for explaining everyday behavior in the workplace, or how it will change in response to a proposed intervention.