The Hawthorn Experiment

George Elton Mayo:

The Hawthorne Experiment

George Elton Mayo:

The Hawthorne Experiment

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore the management theory of George Elton Mayo and how it applies to the current status of management in business today. This will include the examination of the behavioral aspect of management by studying Elton Mayo's Hawthorne Experiment and its conclusions.

Introduction

George Elton Mayo was born the second child of an Adelaide, South Australian colonial family on December 26, 1880. It was expected of Mayo that he would follow in his grandfather's footsteps by studying medicine, but turned to writing when he failed at university studies. Elton Mayo was a self-taught public speaker appointed as a philosophy and logic teacher at the university in Queensland. It was at this university that he met and married Dorothea McConnel (Thoemmes Press 2007).

Mayo immigrated to the United States under a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller fund. Here, he worked with the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce of the University of Pennsylvania. His research studied worker productivity in various textile firms due to rest breaks. The foremen of these firms opposed rest breaks; therefore, they returned workers to past practices while Mayo was gone. Productivity declined, thus proving the effectiveness of rest breaks. Mayo realized that worker's problems had to be dealt with in what he called "the psychology of the total situation" (Wren 1994, p. 240).

After his research at the University of Pennsylvania, Mayo went to the Harvard Business School to continue his study of how changes in working conditions impact physical and psychological welfare of employees. Here, Western Electric Company's controller of manufacturing approached Mayo regarding research findings on employee productivity due to rest periods. Mayo concluded that the behavior of employees seemed to be affected by their attitude toward the work that they were performing. Because of Mayo's conclusion, the management of Western Electric Company implemented an interviewing program to learn the workers thoughts and feelings about their work. They wanted Mayo to head this program. He suggested that they could do it on their own by following a few rules. The rules included:

"give your full attention to the interviewee, and make it evident that you are doing so; listen and do not talk; never argue or give advice; listen for what the interviewee wants to say, does not want to say, and cannot say without help; as you listen plot tentatively, and for subsequent correction, the pattern of experience that is being presented before you; to test your grasp of the pattern summarize cautiously and clearly what has been said without twisting it; and finally, treat what has been said in confidence" (Thoemmes Press 2007).

The Hawthorne Experiment, what George Elton Mayo is most noted for, will be discussed in more detail in the following section.

The Hawthorne Experiment

The Hawthorne Experiment was a combination of studies to see what factors affected worker productivity. This experiment took place from 1927 to 1932 at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago (Work Force 2007). The Hawthorne Experiment consisted of three separate stages.

Stage One

In stage one, Mayo's team picked six female workers from the Relay Assembly Department. These women were placed in a separate room from all of the other employees. Mayo's team provided them with the same type of production facilities as in the main department, but they varied their working conditions. Such conditions that were varied included rest breaks, work hours, temperature, and lighting (see Appendix A for more varied working conditions). Mayo always made sure that the women were made aware of these changes in advance.

Elton Mayo and his team were startled with the outcome of this study. They found that no matter what the experimenters did, production steadily increased. They concluded that the increase in production was the result of the changed social situation of the workers instead of the experimental changes in incentives and working conditions (Stuart-Kotze 2007). Stuart Chase made the following remark on the Relay Assembly Test Room Experiment in his book Men at Work:

"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" (Stuart-Kotze 2007).

Stage Two

Stage two of the Hawthorne Experiment was an interviewing stage. Over 21,000 employees were interviewed over a period of three years (Stuart-Kotze 2007). The following conclusions were drawn from this stage:

* 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 organization 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 behavior 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 of status of employees is an important determinant in how they perceive their working environment and the events that surround them.

* There is an informal organization within any formal organization. This is made up of the relationships, which form between individuals at work, and represents a strong base for perceptions about the organization, the job, leadership,