Abstract

The Hawthorne Studies on social influences in the workplace have weathered

decades of scholarly attack. Hawthorne critics have generally misunderstood
or misrepresented the modest ideological and methodological presumptions of
this pioneering research, which was intended to generate, not verify,
hypotheses. This paper explores the different experiments carried out by Elton
Mayo and its results.

Key words. Hawthorne, Elton Mayo, Human relations, Western electric

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Introduction
The massive Hawthorne experiment of some 50 years ago serve as the
paradigmatic foundation of the social science of work. The insight gleaned
from these experiments provide a basis for most current studies in human
relations as well as for sub areas such as participation, organizational
development, leadership, motivation and even organisational design. But
aside from the visual inspection and anecdotal comment, the complex of
data obtained during the eight years of the Hawthorne experiments has
never been subjected to thorough-going scientific analysis (Franke and Kaul
2002).
There can be few scientific disciplines or fields of research in which a single
set of studies or a single researcher and writer has exercised so great an
influence as was exercised for a quarter of a century by Mayo and the
Hawthorne studies. Although, this influence has declined in the last ten
years as a result of widespread failure of later studies to reveal any reliable
relation between the social satisfaction of industrial workers and their work
performance, reputable textbooks still refer almost reverentially to the
Hawthorne studies as a classic in the history of social science in industry.
However, there have been broad criticisms of Mayo’s approach and
assumptions, many of them cogent. They include charges of pro-
management bias, clinical bias, and scientific naiveté. But no one has
applied systematically and in detail the method of critical doubt to the claim
that there is scientific worth in the original reports of the Hawthorne
investigators (Carey, 2012).

Background

The Hawthorne studies comprise a long series of investigations into the

importance for work behaviour and attitudes of a variety of physical,
economic, and social variables. The principal investigations were carried out
between 1927 and 1932, where after, economic depression caused their
suspension. The Hawthorne studies were conducted in order to find out the

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role of human resource in increasing the production of an organization. The
component studies may be distinguished as five stages;

Stage 1: The Relay Assembly Test Room Study. (New incentive system and
new supervision).
Stage 2: The Second Relay Assembly Group Study. (New incentive system
only).
Stage 3: The Mica Splitting Test Room Study. (New supervision only).
Stage 4: The Interviewing Program
Stage 5: The Bank Wiring Observation Room Study.

Stage 1 to 3, constitute a series of partially controlled studies which were

initially intended to explore the effects on work behaviour , especially
variations in rest pauses and in hours of work, but also in payment system,
temperature, humidity, etc. however, after the study had been in progress
for at least twelve months, the investigators came to the entirely
unanticipated conclusion that social satisfaction arising out of human
association in work were more important determinants of work behaviour in
general and output in particular than were any of the physical and economic
aspects of the work situation to which their attention had been originally
been limited. This conclusion came as the great éclaircissement… an
illumination quite different from what they have expected from the
illumination studies. It is the central and distinctive finding from which the
fame and influence of the Hawthorne studies derive. This “éclaircissement”
about the predominant importance satisfaction at work occurred during
stage 1 of the studies. In consequence, all the later studies are in important
ways subordinate to stage 1. It was the origin from which the subsequent
phases sprang. It was also their main focal point. It gave the subsequent
studies their significance in relation to the whole enquiry.
Stage 2 and 3 were designed to check on (and were taken to supplement and
confirm) the stage one conclusion that the observed increase was as a result
of a change in the social institution and not primarily because of wage
incentive, reduced fatigue or similar factors. stage 4 was an interviewing

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program undertaken to explore worker’s attitude. stage 5 was a study of
informal group organisation in the work situation. The two latter studies (4
and 5) resulted directly from conclusion based on stage 1 to 3 about the
superior influence of social needs. Observations made in both were
interpreted in the light of such prior conclusion. Hence, it is clear that, as
maintained by Urwick, stage 1 was the key study, with stages 2 and 3
adding more or less substantial support to it (Carey, 2012).
In contrast to the previous criticism of the Hawthorne research which has
tended to come from the ideological left because of the presumed managerial
bias in the concern with productivity, Franke and Kaul’s critique,
condemning the Hawthorne research for its concern with human relations
and humanitarian activity in the workplace, and calling for a return to
stronger emphasis on discipline and other aspect of managerial control.

HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENT

This experiment was conducted between 1924-1932 , it was carried out at

Western Electric Company, Chicago, USA, this experiment was investigated
by Elton Mayo, White Head and Roethlisberger. The Hawthorne experiment
were first conducted in November, 1924 at Western Electric Company’s
Hawthorne plant in Chicago. The initial tests were sponsored by The
National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy of Sciences. In
1927, a research team from Harvard Business School was invited to join the
studies after the illumination test drew unanticipated results. A team of
researchers led by George Elton Mayo from the Harvard Business School
carried out the studies
(General Electric originally contributed funding, but they withdrew after the
first trial was completed) 1924-1927

Illumination Studies

Funded by General Electric

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Conducted by The National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academy
of Sciences with engineers from MIT

Measured Light Intensity vs. Worker Output

Result:

Higher worker productivity and satisfaction at all light levels

Worker productivity was stopped with the light levels reached moonlight
intensity.

Conclusions:

 Light intensity has no conclusive effect on output

Productivity has a psychological component

Concept of Hawthorne Effect as created

The next experiments beginning in 1927 focused on the relay assembly

department, where the electromagnetic switches that made telephone
connections possible were produced. The manufacture of relays required the
repetitive assembly of pins, springs, insulators, coils, and screws. Western
Electric produced over 7 million relays annually. As the speed of individual
workers determined overall production levels, the effects of factors like rest
periods and work hours in this department were of particular interest to the
company.

Relay Assembly Test Experiments

1927-1929

1927-1930 Experiments were conducted by Elton Mayo

1927-1931 Manipulated factors of production to measure effect on output:

Pay Incentives (Each Girls pay was based on the other 5 in the group)

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Length of Work Day & Work Week (5pm, 4:30 pm, 4pm)

Use of Rest Periods (Two 5 minutes’ break)

Company Sponsored Meals (Morning Coffee & soup along with sandwich)

Results:

Higher output and greater employee satisfaction

Conclusions:

Positive effects even with negative influences – workers output will increase
as a response to attention

Strong social bonds were created within the test group. Workers are
influenced by need for recognition, security and sense of belonging

Relay Assembly Room #2

1928-1929
Measured effect on output with compensation rates

Special observation room

1st Session- Relay Assemblers changed from departmental

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incentive to small group incentive

2nd Session - Adjusted back to large group incentive

Results

Small group incentives resulted in highest sustained level of production –

Output dropped in 2nd session

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Conclusion:
Pay relevant to output but not the only factor

Mica Splitting Test Group

1928-1931

Measured output with changes to work conditions only:

Special Observation Room

Length of Work Day

Use of Rest Periods

Workers stayed on established Piece-rate compensation • Result:

Productivity increased by 15% over standard output base

Conclusions:

Productivity is affected by non-pay considerations

Social dynamics are a basis of worker performance

Mass Interview Program

Conducted 20,000 interviews.

Objective was to explore information, which could be used to improve

supervisory training.

Initially used the method of Direct Questioning and changed to Non

Directive.

Results

Giving an opportunity to talk and express grievances would increase the

morale.

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Complaints were symptoms of deep-rooted disturbances.

Workers are governed by experience obtained from both inside and outside
the company.

The workers were satisfied or dissatisfied depending upon how they

regarded their social status in the company.

Social groups created big impact on work.

Production was restricted by workers regardless all financial incentives

offered as group pressure are on individual workers.

Bank Wiring Observation Group

1931-1932

1931-1933 Limited changes to work conditions

Segregated work area

 No Management Visits

Supervision would remain the same

Observer would record data only – no interaction with workers

Small group pay incentive

Result:

No appreciable changes in output

Conclusions:

Pre-existing performance norms

Group dictated production standards –

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Work Group protection from management changes.

The Hawthorne experiments and their context

The series of experiments were conducted on employees at the Hawthorne
works of the Western Electric Company, at Cicero, Illinois, (Chicago), USA.
This huge plant mainly assembled telephone equipment on site. At
Hawthorne, where 29,000 mostly immigrant workers were employed,
researchers created a series of six different experimental settings. The key
research was conducted between November 1924 and February 1933, an era
in which a rising series of union organising drives met strong, long and even
violent opposition from employers. Those most involved in this research
were George Elton Mayo, who joined the project in 1928, Fritz Jules
Roethlisberger (1898-1974), Thomas North Whitehead (1891-1969) (Harvard
Business School professors) and William J. Dickson (1904-1989), Chief of
Employee Relations at Hawthorne. Originally, the experiments aimed to
identify the impact of lighting, work pauses, work duration, payment,
rations and temperature on work output. So, it was surprising that none of
the above-named variables could explain variations in workers’ performance.
In their stead, a so-described Hawthorne Effect was much later explicated
and held responsible; it then circulated in textbooks and other publications
as relating to a special managerial icon whereby workers appreciated
attention - enough to stir performance - even whilst their working conditions
deteriorated. In time, it became one of the most famous clichés in
management writing (Witzel and Warner 2015).

Those researchers involved in the experiments did not explicitly refer to the
observed phenomenon as ‘the’ Hawthorne. Roethlisberger and Dickson
(1939), Roethlisberger (1941), Whitehead 1938). Indeed, the literal term
appears to have been first used in French’s (1953) research methodology
textbook. Nevertheless, scholars since then, for example, Blalock and
Blalock (1968), Runkel and McGrath (1972), Kantowitz and Roediger (1978),

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Babbie (1995), recapitulate the story of the Hawthorne Effect, as the two
examples below explicate.

Each time an experimental variable was introduced—whether it

improved work conditions or made them worse—the group would
express its collective high spirits and involvement in the experimental
task by increasing production. (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955: 36)

No matter what level the lighting was set at, productivity increased!
There was a steady increase in workers’ output following any change
in lighting. In other studies, Mayo systematically varies the length and
timing of work breaks. Longer breaks, shorter breaks, more or fewer
breaks, all resulted in a steady increase in worker output. (Riggio,
2003: 9)

The first, longest and most cited (in secondary data articles) were three
‘Illumination Experiments’, conducted from November 1924 to October 1927
and subsidized by the National Research Council. Snow (1927) from the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), directly responsible for
reporting the findings of the lighting research, found no relation between
illumination intensity and efficiency of production. Instead, researchers
claimed that something else, an unexpected experimental ‘effect’, the above
later explicated Hawthorne Effect, caused the rise of performance. The
performance measure operationalizing the output of production was the
number of telephone relays that workers (here: women only) assembled in
certain units of time. The corresponding data were long thought to be
destroyed, then traced and finally located on microfilm at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee by Levitt and List (2011). Their analysis, through
statistical data processing, found no evidence for this type of effect. On the
contrary, at the end of the data-analysis, only ‘a good story’ remained in the
basket, a finding which Franke and Kaul (1978) and Jones (1992) had
already published well before the microfilm was disinterred. We are aware
that Wrege (1986) is said to have found this data before and based his

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comprehensive – and critical – analysis of the ‘Illumination Experiments’
thereon. Even though the aforementioned analysis of Franke and Kaul might
be partly erroneous, their overall judgement seems appropriate.

From April 1927 to February 1933, research continued in the first ‘Relay
Assembly Test Room’, where five women were selected as operators to
assemble telephone relays under the surveillance of researchers. They
manipulated work-pauses and the duration of work in an uncontrolled and
scientifically unsound manner. Adherence to quality criteria of rigorous
research was also jeopardized through dismissing and replacing operators
(partly due to their obstreperous temper; through the absence of a control-
group and the arbitrary manipulation of variables. In 1929, Mayo stated in a
letter that one operator was dismissed because she had ‘gone Bolshevik’
(Mulherin 1980: 54; Bramel and Friend 1981: 871). Researchers in the
second relay assembly test room (August 1928 to March 1929) investigated
the impact of payment on performance. Findings indicated a large-size effect
in this instance (Kompier, 2006). However, the scholars involved, especially
Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) denied that conclusion and attributed
the measured payment-output-relation to their assumption that the
operators just wanted to challenge a piecework-record of the operators
observed in the first relay assembly test room.

From October 1928 to September 1930, researchers analysed the so-called

‘Mica Splitting Test Room’ data, detecting the effects of rest-pauses and extra
hours on performance. Again, Roethlisberger and Dickson (1939) drew
arguably erroneous conclusions and identified an apparently steady rise of
performance, said to be accounted for by high workers’ morale. From
September 1928 to January 1931, a large-scale interview program (over
21,000 workers interrogated) took place. By that time, the researchers were
inclined towards psychology-related prerogatives of interpretation (such as
focusing on the role of managerial attention) for performance effects.
Consequently, the research interest behind the interview programme
became finding out how to perfect surveillance of the organization’s

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authority among its work-force. Whilst scholarly attention was drawn to the
emergence of an ‘informal’ type of organizational setting, which also
included friendship among workers, the interviewed workers actually
considered pay to be paramount (Kompier 2006).

The final part of the Hawthorne studies was conducted in the ‘Bank Wiring
Room’ where male operators were observed in order to investigate a form of
tacit consent among workers not to work too slowly or too fast. Although
Williams (1920) had already studied workers’ interactions and group-
forming processes from a non-academic viewpoint, the Hawthorne team’s
study of how this silent agreement functioned as a social norm marks the
possible beginning of academic interest in informal workplace organization
(Kaufman 2014). However, when compared to Williams’ What’s on the
Worker’s Mind, contemporaries appreciated the outstanding scientific rigour
of the Hawthorne studies (Elliot 1934; Thompson 1940) and corresponding
statistical substantiation (Betram 1939). This is insofar ironical as the
violation of quality criteria of sound research was the major flaw of the
experiments. Muldoon (2012) explains that contemporaries viewed
Hawthorne to be the better investigation, although some were aware of its
shortcomings. Additionally, Mayo had the tag of a prestigious affiliation and
it is likely that this aided the success of his arguments.

Key Dates of Hawthorne Narrative.

Mayo’s role and the Hawthorne Works’ suitability

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We agree with Gillespie’s (1991) view that Mayo disguised what may be
regarded as an ‘unsubstantiated’ theory of Human Relations as a statistical
axiomatic truth. In this way, he proposed the initial shift from the dominant
Taylorist ‘paradigm’ to a new Human Relations one (Hassard 2012). Mayo
thus appeared as a ‘White Knight’, saving managers and above all, workers,
from the so-called ‘inhumane’ chains of Taylorism, despite the fact that
Mayo and colleagues did not create a completely new way of thinking (see
Gilson 1940). Furthermore, the often criticized technocratic engineer Taylor
(1911) had already identified the existence of informal workplace rules (see
Boddewyn 1961; Locke 1982), advocated attention to social aspects in
organizations (see Duncan 1970) and contributed to the promotion of
motivational theories (see Urwick 1954; Wren 2005), all prior to the
emergence of the HRS. In a talk to the Taylor Society in 1923, Mayo is
reported as stating he was doing ‘a Taylor of the mind‘ (Hanlon 2016:7). In
fact, members of the ‘Taylor Society’ (see e.g. Tead 1918; Gilbreth 1914)
have - way before Mayo’s interest in replacing the Scientific Management
(SM) paradigm with ‘his’ Human Relations school of thought – contributed to
emphasising the compatibility of ‘hard’ Taylorism with a ‘softer’
psychological stance. It is exactly this compatibility that Mayo wanted to
remove as an obstacle out of his way, therefore effectively promoting his
‘either-or’ effort of over-appreciating the psychological control, whilst
deliberately choking the value of rather technocratic time-and-motion
studies.

Before Mayo’s Harvard appointment in 1926, he had joined the Wharton

School, at the University of Pennsylvania, where he conducted an empirical
research project in Organizational Psychology, apparently funded by the
personal resources of the US millionaire, John D. Rockefeller Jr. (Bruce
2013). This figure has been described as an ostensibly passionate ‘life-long
proponent of IR and, in particular, collective employee voice’ (Bruce 2008:
328). This is paradox as he had to cope with labour-unrest-driven problems,
way before the series of the Hawthorne experiments started. We here refer to
the Ludlow Massacre at the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company (1914) and the

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major strikes at the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey (1915 to 1916),
where much of his family fortune was invested in.

Mayo interpreted a decline of performance as to be caused neither by low

wages nor by poor working conditions but rather by some kind of
‘indisposedness’ of the workers’ mind, which, in his view, called for a
‘managerial’ cure. His apparent disregard of the importance of payment was
replaced by the need for managers to have ‘psychological control’ over
workers. For Bruce (2013), this was Mayo’s main motivation and later
influenced the work of Frederick Herzberg (1923-2000) which emphasised
intrinsic over extrinsic rewards (see Herzberg 1987). Mayo, under Rockefeller
Jr’s influence also followed a strategy of instrumentalising and exploiting
employee concerns and investigating this as an appropriate means to
channel and substitute workers’ demands for unionism (Rees 2010).

Beyond the nature of Mayo’s specific contribution, the Hawthorne works

also provided an extraordinarily convenient organizational setting for this
series of experiments. As far back as 1912, company representatives had
suggested forming a research department within the enterprise to
investigate the organisation’s human needs (Adams and Butler 1999).
Nominally, the Hawthorne production site was quite avant-garde in the
sense of considering the human and social side of the business, in other
words, it appeared to be everything but an ordinary, representative
organization. From its opening in 1907, the Hawthorne works stood out for
demonstrating a ‘progressive’ welfare capitalism, which offered health-care,
accommodation, clubs and a relatively high wage (Brandes 1976). As
Hassard (2012) states:

‘The Works became virtually a city in its own right − containing a

hospital, power plant, fire brigade and evening school (the ‘Hawthorne
University’), as well as a gymnasium, running track, baseball team,
greenhouse, brass band, magazine and an annual pageant, which ran
until 1980. Many events were run by the Hawthorne Club, which

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 organized dances, concerts, sports, parties and the annual picnic.’
(2012: 1438)

Workers experienced a ‘family-feeling’, as their neighbours at the same time

were their ‘co-workers’ (Wachholz 2005). The plant became the social centre
of the workers’ life (Whyte 1977); the company ‘promoted, paternalistically,
an informal cradle to the grave covenant between employer and employee’
(Adams and Butler 1999: 98). This clannish community of workers was
welded together by the Eastland disaster, a maritime calamity in the course
of the annual employee excursion in 1915, claiming 844 victims, most of
them immigrant women and children. The Hawthorne works, which had
already been ‘progressive’, if paternalistic before the tragedy, turned even
more towards a distinct ‘people orientation’, for example, through declaring
a firm’s mourning day, excusing most workers from work to let them attend
the many funerals, raising money for funeral expenses, providing medical
help for survivors and so on (see Hassard 2012).

Whilst in the times of the Great Depression, welfare capitalism effectively

ended (see e.g. Cohen 1991), it subsisted in the Western Electric Company
(see Hassard 2012). In this respect, it might be that the immigrant
Hawthorne workers were to some extent perhaps walled-off from what the
‘typical American worker’ experienced socially and culturally. Thus, we
argue that this combination of welfare capitalist characteristics,
paternalistic company ethos, people-orientation and the strong group-
cohesion among workers provided the ideal ‘hotbed’ where Mayo could leave
a psychologically-oriented imprint on research into people-management and
industrial relations.

CONCLUSION

The Hawthorne studies have had a remarkable impact on management in

organizations and how workers react to various situations. The research
carried out at the Western Electrics Hawthorne plant during the 1920’s and
early 1930’s helped to initiate a whole new approach to human behaviour

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studies. The final result was “the organization of teamwork-that is, of
sustained cooperation leads to success”.

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