The Hawthorne Experiments: The Human Relation School

The Human Relation School is an organizational theory based on the research work of Elton Mayo and his colleagues from Harvard Business School. His work was focused on how social and psychological factors could contribute to improve performance and productivity or worker at the Western Electric Company. The Principles of Scientific Management applied by organizations that time gradually shifted to a new paradigm. Integrating methods of psychology, anthropology, sociology, a new academic industry developed, devoted entirely to the performance and wellbeing of the worker (Link, 2011). The widely accepted result of the Hawthorne Experiment then slowly changes the work environment.

In the 1924, Elton Mayo with Fritz Reothlisberger led a study of

However, Jeffrey Muldoon (Muldoon, 2006) stressed in his article “The Hawthorne Legacy” that The Hawthorne studies (1924-1932) are the most famous of all management research but also the most criticized. According to Richard Herbert Franke and James Kaul (Kaul, 1978) , aside from 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, 1979). An article “The Hawthorne Experiments: First Statistical Interpretation” was published on 1978 that provides review of the data and analytical procedure applied in the study. The authors also cited several published documents stating the tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment (Cherry, n.d.) – Hawthorne

. . If a human being is being experimented upon, he is likely to know it. Therefore, his attitudes toward the experiment and toward the experimenters become very important factors in determining his responses to the situation"(cf. also Dickson and Roethlisberger, 1966, and Bishop and Hall, 1971). This concept of influence upon an experiment through the experiment itself was found either erroneous or misleading by Cook and Campbell (1976), Katz and Kahn(1966),Parsons(1974),and Rubeck (1975). Sommer's (1968) conclusion, that the "errors" called placebo or Hawthorne effect need themselves to be evaluated and understood, is most pertinent.” (Kaul,