Using Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) Principles to Boost College of Business Students’ Helping Behaviors

Helping behavior is an important component of organizational citizenship behaviors that has been found to enhance performance among employees and students. However, despite its established benefits, business schools often prioritize technical skills over these prosocial, soft-skill competencies, which may hinder the development of well-rounded organizational leaders. The field of Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), with its empirically validated approaches to behavior modification offers promising opportunities to address these shortcomings in business education. In this paper, we propose a framework for applying ABA principles to enhance helping behavior among business school students. Although tailored to a business school, these recommendations can easily be modified to fit other non-business school learning environments.