Elton Mayo and the Hawthorne experiments

Professor Robin Stuart-Kotze

The first break from Frederick Taylor's Scientific Management was made as a result of a series of research studies done in the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company over the period 1927-1932.

Elton Mayo, an Australian anthropologist from Harvard, headed a team which conducted follow-up studies done by industrial engineers at the Hawthorne Plant of the Western Electric Company on the effects of illumination on productivity. Mayo and his team expanded the study to include a number of other physical variables.

The Relay Assembly Room

Mayo's team selected, as their experimental group, six female workers from the Relay Assembly Department, placed them in a separate room with the same type of production facilities as in the main department, and proceeded to vary their working conditions. As Joe Kelly says:

"Even under moonlight conditions, workers could maintain their norm. To clinch this point scientifically, the researchers set up two groups, a control group working under constant illumination and an experimental one working under decreasing illumination. The result? Both increased output".

The table below shows some of the other changes made by the experimenters.

The experimenters also changed the menu of lunches served during the first two weeks of period 7.

The startling outcome of this study was that, whatever the experimenters did, production steadily increased. Mayo and his team were forced to conclude (after a great deal of puzzlement) that the increase in production was the result, not of the experimental changes in incentives and working conditions, but of the changed social situation of the workers. Stuart Chase, in his book Men at Work published in 1941, remarks of the Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments that:

"By asking their help and co-operation, the investigators had made the girls feel important. Their whole attitude had changed from that of separate cogs in a machine to that of a congenial group trying to help the company solve a problem. They had found a stability, a place where they belonged, and work whose purpose they could clearly see. And so they worked faster and better than they ever had in their lives."

The Employee Survey

A second stage of the Hawthorne studies involved the interviewing of over 21,000 employees over a three year period. The following is a simplified summary of the conclusions drawn from these interviews:

• Complaints do not always mean what they say. They are a symptom of some personal disturbance. The real cause for dissatisfaction may be something quite different and much deeper than the voiced complaint.
• All actions in an organisation are given social meaning. Employees perceive events from their own standpoint, and make interpretations about their meanings. The perceived meaning of an action and its intended meaning may differ sharply.
• The behaviour of an individual on the job is a composite of his or her individual personality, values and attitudes, and the values and attitudes expressed by people working around him or her. The perceptual reference point is based on past experience as well as the present situation.
• The position or status of employees is an important determinant in how they perceive their working environment and the events that surround them.
• There is an informal organisation within any formal organisation. This is made up of the relationships which form between individuals at work, and represents a strong base for perceptions about the organisation, the job, leadership etc. The informal work group acts as a powerful controlling force over the behaviour of its members.

The Bank Wiring Room

A third stage of the research looked at the behaviour of fourteen men working in what was known as the Bank Wiring Room. What the researchers found was once more novel and surprising. They discovered that the workers limited their output to a certain level decided upon by the group as a whole; that individual workers did not exceed this group-imposed output standard; that the company's financial incentive program which offered bonuses for group production above certain levels had no effect on performance; that, in essence, the group formed a pact of solidarity, and that they decided on what represented a fair day's work for a fair day's pay, and maintained production at that level. As David Ashton remarked in his article Elton Mayo and the empirical study of social groups in the book Management Thinkers (edited by Tillett, Kempner and Wills):

"Here was a coherent, informal, social group, with its natural leaders, complete in attitudes to work, management, and level of production - i.e. with its own full group culture. The clash between the aims of the company and the aims of the group became obvious, as did the ineffectiveness of purely financial incentive to maximise production. For one reason or another, the group had established its rates of work. The chief function of the informal organisation was to resist all changes to its standards; it was, therefore, necessarily at variance with the company's aims."

Hawthorne and after

No single study as had the effect on subsequent management thought and practice that the Hawthorne research has. It represents a cataclysmic break from the traditional theory (of Taylor and Urwick.) For the first time, man's social and individual nature was seen as important to the functioning or organisations. Hawthorne drove a strong nail into the coffin of rational, economic man. All of a sudden it was discovered that people worked for something other than just money. Man's emotional and social side were seen as major determinants of organisational behaviour.

The Hawthorne research stimulated a human relations fever. The assumption was that happy people made an effective organisation - the contented cow approach. As Malcolm McNair later remarked:

"... the very avidity with which people prone to fashionable thinking in business have seized on the fad of human relations itself suggests the presence of a considerable guilt complex in the minds of businessmen in regard to their dealings with people."

So was it all true?

Some while after this article appeared here, Prof. Robin Stuart-Kotze received a letter from Chuck Wrege, historian at the American Academy of Management. Here is an extract:

"... Elton Mayo's letter to E. Brech in 1943 (stated that) he did not go to Hawthorne until the test room began petering out, so he says. This was March 28, 1928, almost a year after the test room had been started. The test room was initiated by Homer Hibarger of Hawthorne who did the so-called 'moonlight' test. ... Hibarger based his ideas for the test room in conversations with Charles E. Snow of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who did the illumination tests from 1924 to 1927.

Joe Kelly implies the 'moonlight' tests were done in the test room but it was in the cloakroom of the 5th floor at Hawthorne and with different operators in the summer of 1926. The experiment with two groups with decreasing and constant illumination was planned in 1924 and not as a result of the 'moonlight' test. It used operators winding receiver coils for stick type desk telephones. Unfortunately, the coil winding machine speeds could be altered by the operators (before work began each day) so we really do not know if the output of the two groups could be compared. The same coil winding machines were moved to the Kearny, NJ plant in the 1930's and operators demonstrated the altering process to me in the 1960's. I am afraid that the Mayo story, like almost all Mayo stories, is just a lot of bunk.

The (historical material about the Hawthorne experiments) ... came from Charles E. Snow ... and from the files of Thomas A Edison who was the honorary chairman of the committee conducting the experiments from 1924 to 1927. Yes, there are endless erroneous statements about past events in management history. It has kept me busy for 40 years correcting them."