We propose a rule format that guarantees associativity of binary operators with respect to all notions of behavioral equivalence that are defined in terms of (im)possibility of transitions, e.g., the notions below strong bisimilarity in van Glabbeek's spectrum. The initial format is a subset of the De Simone format. We show that all trivial generalizations of our format are bound for failure. We further extend the format in a few directions and illustrate its application to several formalisms in the literature. A subset of the format is studied to obtain associativity with respect to graph isomorphism.