Explaining intervention success and failure: What works, when, and why?

Abstract

This chapter outlines lessons learnt from the development, implementation, and evaluation of an organizational intervention provided to a sample of corrections employees. Like many organizational intervention studies, we only conducted an evaluation of the intervention’s targeted distal outcomes, without directly measuring aspects of the intervention’s context and process. As a result, we were unable to formally assess alternate explanations for our non-significant results. Based on our own experience, and a review of intervention research, we propose a comprehensive framework for evaluating organizational interventions that considers the intervention’s context, process, mediating proximal effects, and targeted distal outcomes.