JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR MANAGEMENT
2018, VOL. 38, NO. 1, 90–95

BOOK REVIEW

Abernathy, W. B. (2014). The liberated workplace: Transitioning to walden three.
Atlanta, GA: Performance Management Publications.
behavioral systems analysis, incentive programs, job enrichment, measurement system,
walden two
William Abernathy’s ﬁnal book represents an attempt to distill a lifetime of endeavors
into a guide explaining why and how an organization should create a self-functioning
workplace. Having written several books and articles on the topic, it is diﬃcult to ﬁnd
another scholar as qualiﬁed as Abernathy to discuss how to design and adopt a system
driven by behavioral principles and values—that is, to minimize aversive control and tocreate conditions that encourage high rates of productive behavior and innovation. It isdiﬃcult to read this book without being reminded of the tragic loss for the ﬁeld due tohis death one year following this book’s publication. Much like his previous works,
Abernathy does an excellent job of highlighting the expected problems when employees
are disconnected from the ﬁnancial health of the business. With the ﬂourish of anexperienced consultant, he strongly advocates the need to align individual measureswith the desired organizational outcomes so that the employee behaviors that are
rewarded will consistently be the same behaviors that bring greater proﬁtability. Whendone correctly, Abernathy argues that this mimics the contingencies faced by selfemployed entrepreneurs. As such, employees will be motivated to innovate and discover
new ways of solving business problems. It is suggested that this will result in a liberated
workplace where employees determine their own success and, by extension, the successof the company. The current review is intended to provide a critical evaluation of
Abernathy’s success in communicating his vision, noting both the strengths and weaknesses in his descriptions as well as how they might apply to a new system in need ofbetter measurement. Ultimately, Abernathy details the transition process in an approachable way, but may have fallen short in some of the assumptions he appears to makeabout his readers. An overview of the book’s basic structure and keys aspects may help
illustrate the author’s aspirations.
Section 1 of the book introduces the reader to the science behind Abernathy’s uniqueapproach, Section 2 illustrates what this approach would look like in its ﬁnal form, andSection 3 details the transition process toward a liberated workplace. Abernathy begins
by introducing the behavioral principles that comprise the framework of his system.
Although there are times when the book seems like it is aimed at a naïve audience, it also
seems to presume familiarity with technical language in quite a few places. For example,
terms like “aversive” and “reinforcement” are used long before being deﬁned properly.
Certain terms (e.g., elicited, emitted, molecular approach) are never deﬁned. Whendeﬁnitions are ﬁnally oﬀered, they tend to explain behavioral concepts too quickly forthe uninitiated. Abernathy’s approach means the book would probably be best suited fora context with some expert guidance to help with the introductory concepts, such as arelated course or workshop, rather than as a standalone book. Within such a context, thisbook can be an excellent resource because Abernathy does oﬀer many important andmeaningful insights to share.

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Abernathy eases into these insights with well-articulated lessons, such as cultural andhistorical obstacles to better managerial practices, ﬂaws with traditional pay and measurement, and the shortcomings of overreliance on punitive control, and much of thiscan be understood regardless of the reader’s background with behavior analysis. The ﬁrst
section of the book is written in third person and is backed up with multiple quotations
as well as citations to drive home the message. It reads as though Abernathy is trying toshare the lessons he learned through his many years as well as the experiences of hiscolleagues and predecessors. This foundational section serves as a “buy-in” for the reader
to convince them of the beneﬁts of his system. Passages of the ﬁrst section have
Abernathy summarizing some of the points from his earlier works, such as The Sins ofWages (Abernathy, 1996). This section does a nice job expanding on how conventional
wage-and-salary systems create many common organizational problems.
With coverage of each of his “seven sins of wages,” the reader can see how the current
norm for operating a business, despite a long history of success, has many detrimental
aspects when viewed through the lens of behavior analytic principles. The ﬁrst sin is thecommon practice of employees being paid a ﬁxed rate. This creates an unfair andcombative relationship between employer and employees because when the organization
does well, the employees are not rewarded for the individual performances that ultimately contributed to the current successes. When the organization does poorly, either
the organization must operate at a loss by shouldering the burden of set wages or reduce
costs through alternative means such as layoﬀs. This creates a status quo in which
workers are disadvantaged by the company retaining increased revenue for themselves
during times of proﬁt and the company being disadvantaged by standardized wages
during times of ﬁnancial woe.
This fosters another sin in which employees are being paid for their time alone, where
they earn the same amount regardless of diﬀerences in their current contributions(second sin). As such, eﬃciency is unintentionally discouraged at an individual level
since faster performance would lead to reduced hours and income for that employee.
This leads to management being more concerned with time put in by workers instead of
the results of their performance. Eﬃciency is also discouraged at a group level because
both excellent and mediocre performance result in essentially the same pay, thereby
creating the third sin of a situation in which high performers are likely to adjust theireﬀorts to be in alignment with average performers.
These factors create the sin of entitlement thinking, in which employees come tobelieve they are owed standard income despite variable contributions (fourth sin).
Employees view management as mere dispensers of money and see organizational proﬁts
as money being withheld from the workers, whereas management views employee wages
as a drain on resources. This adversarial relation is not the only source of friction, as
illustrated by another sin relating to how promotions are decided (ﬁfth sin). Promotions
are often seen as the only means by which income can be substantially increased and thisbreeds conﬂict as employees compete for the same limited positions. Success in thiscompetition will largely depend on the biased perception from management. This
perception is considered Abernathy’s sixth sin because measurement is largely basedon the time in which employees spend clocked in. Time alone does little to diﬀerentiate
employee success, which leads to simple likeability becoming an inappropriate determinant of promotion success.
The ﬁnal sin also results from an absence of objective assessment, in that supervisors
lack a basis for accurately rewarding employees for engaging in desirable behaviors.
Instead, they must drive performance through aversive means such as threats anddismissal, thus creating a risk-averse workforce that is avoidant of management and92

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further worsening the acrimonious relation. Through the collective illustration of thesesins, Abernathy argues that a more eﬃcient system would pay people for the outcomes
they produce, rather than pay them for the time they spend producing the outcomes—
thus reducing the need for biased appraisals and aversive control. These important
points also help for buy-in for the reader since these are common struggles that will
likely sound familiar to most readers.
After establishing the need for a new approach through the description of typicalbusiness sins, Abernathy then introduces his four-phase behavioral system and the steps
entailed with each phase. Level I of his system involves implementing a performancemeasurement system that encompasses all areas of the organization. This includes theintroduction of performance scorecards, which are speciﬁc to each position.
Performance scorecards are a key element and represent an invaluable measurement
approach in that they require designers to pinpoint the most essential contributions ofeach job. Each represented measure has several embedded levels of achievement toencourage improved performance of all employees, not just the initial high performers.
Every organizational position has its own particularly designed scorecards with the key
measures associated with that position and its outcomes. Each of these measures has twocomponents: (a) the base at which the employee is operating at, and (b) an associatedgoal. Results are measured each reporting period in which each individual measure isscored, aggregated into a composite score that ranges from 0–100, and payoﬀs distributed accordingly. The construction of these scorecards puts the focus on the outcomesthe employee needs to accomplish rather than a particular manner in which theemployee needs to behave. This discretion grants the employee many opportunities toinnovate while still providing a clear direction. It also has a weighted distribution feature
to allow the organization to shift the value of performances as the needs and priorities ofthe business change. In addition to scorecards, Abernathy also focuses on positive
leadership and facilitation by management as part of this level. An important part of
the transition process is the training and coaching of managers to focus on new strategies
involving reinforcement as well as the abandonment of old practices grounded inaversive control. Abernathy’s explanation of how results should be measured within
this system is commendable. The aim of this level is to have the company produce
objectives for itself, done through top management, and should be determined in termsof impact on their speciﬁc strategy. By starting the measurement process at the organizational rather than job level, key strategic results are deﬁned for the organization thatguide upper management in developing subordinate measures to positively impact thesystem. Once these key results are pinpointed, the next level can be implemented.
Level II of Abernathy’s behavioral system introduces proﬁt-indexed performance pay(PIPP) to start the transition to a stakeholder pay system. At this stage, PIPP allows
employees to earn a base pay, but they are oﬀered a bonus determined by current
company proﬁts combined with individual performance on their scorecard. Thisapproach enables pay to be contingent on performance rather than time. Despite
common assumptions of low employee participation, Abernathy uses personal consulting experiences to demonstrate why so many actually volunteer to transition to this typeof pay. PIPP ensures that as company proﬁts increase, employee proﬁts do as well. It also
removes risk for the organization in that the organization does not need to pay out
bonuses during time periods when it cannot aﬀord to do so. In essence, an alliance isforged in which the employees and the company equally share in risks and rewards.
Once the employees have a stake in the organization, further steps can be taken to enrich
the means in which the organization works together to succeed.

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With Level III he introduces the idea of job enrichment and focuses on facilitators
providing consistent opportunities, ﬂexibility, and engagement to employees. The ﬁrst
step is to institute an organization-wide hiring freeze, which allows the remaining
employees to maximize their PIPP through cross-utilization and lateral-career paths.
The new approach to compensation means that a hiring freeze represents a larger
earning potential for current employees through additional work tasks, rather thanhiring additional employees to take on those tasks. Attrition provides the opportunity
to both reduce labor costs while also giving employees a greater variety of ways tocontribute and make money. The second step involves positively reinforcing the manager for facilitating job enrichment tactics by adding a team productivity measure to the
manager’s scorecard.
The fourth and ﬁnal level in his approach includes the introduction of complete selfmanagement for both individual employees and work teams. There is also a reduction insupervisor expense because the goal is to have managers overlook a larger number of
employees. This increase in the manager’s span of control helps eliminate the standardpractice of using promotions as a reward. Abernathy explains that an issue with using
promotions to reward exceptional performance is that success in a subordinate role does
not necessarily predict success in a managerial role or account for employees who might
not wish to leave their current position. With Level IV, there is a decrease in the use ofaversive control with a corresponding increase of reinforcement strategies for employee
performance. Part of the reason for this is that as the number of managers decrease, theability to micromanage also decreases along with the need to use aversive techniques toget employees to work.
Following the descriptive overview of his system, there is a stylistic shift beginningwith the second section of the book. The ﬁctional character Sid Murray (named inhonor of Murray Sidman) is introduced and the narrative approach becomes similar
to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two (Skinner, 1948).Much like Skinner’s classic utopian
text, the protagonist visits a small, but successful, community/organization (First
National Bank ﬁlling in for the role of Walden Two) and learns how to use a teamof planners to design a collective environment to better productivity and satisfactionof all members. Sid is the CEO of a struggling button manufacturing company who ishoping that the practices of this bank can solve his growing business crisis. A
performance system manager named Jim Roberts acts as Sid’s guide for this radicallydiﬀerent approach to business—much in the way that T. E. Frazier guided readers
through Walden Two’s community—thus allowing the audience to join in thisjourney toward a liberated workplace. Abernathy clearly draws upon experiences at
the real-world Virginia National Bank and Union National Bank (Abernathy, Duﬀy,& O’Brien, 1982) to describe the book’s ﬁctional First National Bank. This beneﬁts
the book by creating a fully realized account of an alternative way of doing business.
The writing style is inviting as it features many obstacles familiar to many managers
and suggests solutions that may have not seemed feasible previously. Each individualthat Sid visits explains their speciﬁc day-to-day tasks to help the reader get a more
personal feel as to how the new management system operates.
In its third and ﬁnal section, the book extends beyond its Walden Two homage as
the ﬁctional narrative continues with Sid’s attempt to recreate the bank’s successwithin his button manufacturing company. Unfortunately, in the latter parts of thebook the ﬁctional narrative begins to wear thin and can detract from some of themore important points. The buy-in process at Sid’s company has a tendency to be
glossed over in a simpliﬁed manner, with any protest by ﬁctional characters being
fully resolved by a couple of pithy lines of dialogue. There are many instances of94

BOOK REVIEW

complex ideas such as performance scorecards, PIPP, and proﬁt multipliers being
explained only through the lens of Sid’s ﬁctional company. The book would havebeen better served if it had alternated between Sid’s voice regarding the speciﬁcs of
his company and Abernathy’s own voice elaborating upon these lessons for othertypes of companies. The narrow range of examples also presented results in manypotential limitations not being addressed. For example, how would a company handle
cross-training when the tasks require advanced degrees or a particular level of
specialization (e.g., surgeons, professors)? How should a designer handle jobs wheretime does seem to be one of the more appropriate measures of performance since
there is little variance in productivity or quality (e.g., bus driver, toll booth operator)?
These and other questions are conspicuously absent during the ﬁctional narrative.
The overuse of this style results in many bold claims being made with no evidence toback them up other than the assurances of ﬁctional characters. The absence of
citations in the latter two sections makes many of the claims appear unsubstantiatedand does a disservice to the assertions. This is important because Abernathy’s points
are important and moving toward his liberated workplace is a worthwhile but
challenging process.
An example of this challenge was experienced by one of the authors of this review
when attempting to apply Abernathy’s system to a start-up autism treatment clinic. The
initial attempts to implement performance scorecards at the clinic raised many concerns
among the staﬀ that were not resolved as easily as Sid’s experiences would suggest. The
collection of performance measures proved to be very time consuming and cumbersome
for an enterprise without automated data collection. However, even though this clinic
did not progress beyond Level I of Abernathy’s system, there were many lasting beneﬁts.
The system helped with breaking down the diﬀerent components of the clinic, creatingscorecards, assigning priorities, and developing feedback. The need for an in-depth
understanding on how the entire business works as a system became immediately
clear. Shifting organizational priorities through the weighting of scorecards for multiple
positions proved quite useful. Finally, the performance scorecards provided an opportunity for open discussion regarding the clinic’s operational decisions. This brief experience demonstrated that Abernathy’s approach does appear to be beneﬁcial, but it may
not be as easy as his ﬁctional characters would suggest.
Recently, Abernathy (2014) published a journal article in which he hoped that hehad given the concepts and tools needed for practitioners. Although imperfect, The
Liberated Workplace provides a practical roadmap for creating a business thatwould have ﬁt well within the ideals of Skinner’s Walden Two. This is an excellent
demonstration of how to use behavioral systems to engineer employee satisfaction
and retention. This book can help those seeking empirical support by giving them aframework to build experiments upon. In the end, Abernathy crafted a vision of
utopian workplaces that Frazier himself would have been proud of.
References
Abernathy, W. B. (1996). The sins of wages: Where the conventional pay system has led us and how.
Atlanta, GA: Performance Management Publications.
Abernathy, W. B. (2014). Beyond the Skinner box: The design and management of organization-wide
performance systems. Journal of Organizational Behavior Management, 34(4), 235–254. doi:10.1080/
01608061.2014.973631

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Abernathy, W. B., Duﬀy, E. M., & O’Brien, R. M. (1982). Multi-branch, multi-systems programs inbanking: An organization-wide intervention. In R. M. O’Brien, A. M. Dickinson, & M. P. Roscow(Eds.), Industrial behavior modiﬁcation: A management handbook (pp. 370–382). Elmsford, NY:
Pergamon Press.
Skinner, B. F. (1948). Walden two. Englewood Cliﬀs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.

Taylor M. Longacre
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA
3700 Wood Hall
Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5439, USA
taylor.m.longacre@wmich.edu
Lauren M. Eagle and Douglas A. Johnson
Department of Psychology
Western Michigan University
Kalamazoo, Michigan, USA
Michael G. Palmer
Department of Psychology
Central Michigan University
Mount Pleasant, Michigan, USA© 2017 Taylor & Francis
https://doi.org/10.1080/01608061.2017.1340920