Behavioral change within organizations: Can Intervention Mapping contribute to the development of effective interventions?

The Intervention Mapping protocol (IM) offers four areas of concern that are absent in most intervention methods but can contribute to planning and implementing an effective organizational intervention. First, IM views a health problem and its solution as concrete individual behavior, and believes that intervention goals should be used to ensure that individuals display lasting health-promoting behavior. Second, the protocol not only uses empirically founded theories to describe a health problem, but also selects empirically supported methods of behavioral change. Third, according to IM, the predominantly context-independent change methods cannot be applied directly; instead they must be translated into tailored change applications that match the target group. Finally, IM recognizes that the concrete behavioral changes of individuals from the primary risk group must be supported by individuals from the environment, such as supervisors. To provide adequate support, the individuals must also be targets of behavioral change. These four points of additional focus are discussed and supported by the results of a number of evaluation studies. We conclude with a critical view on how IM can be applied in organizations, as this requires both knowledge of healthy behavior (and related theories) and how organizational processes influence individual behavior.