Similar to the drastic changes in industrial production methods brought about by the industrial revolution, revolutionary changes have taken place in business and project management in America between 1920 and 1940. These changes redefined the role of each worker in a business organization and the relationship between the management and the workers. Up until then, the workers in a business organization were forced to work by their management and they had no voice in the decision-making process. Gradually, behavioral management theory, in which the workers are given more prominence in a business organization, began to replace the then popular classical management theory just as organizational structure types experimenting shifts from functional to matrix .

Elton Mayo and Behavioral Management Theory

Elton Mayo , a chief proponent of behavioral management theory, explains that workers tend to work harder if they are mentally satisfied. He added that materialistic incentives are less important than inner satisfaction in determining the productivity of workers. This was similar to Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology .

Elton Mayo was an Australian psychologist and he, in collaboration with other eminent thinkers, tried to identify factors that satisfied the workers mentally and motivated them to work harder. They believed that economic incentives and environmental factors might play a role in increasing the productivity of workers. They were later invited to experiment their views at one of the workplaces of the Western Electric Company. The experiment was a failure and they couldn’t prove what they had hoped to be true.

The Hawthorne Studies

The experiment on human motivation was to be conducted at the Hawthorne plant. There were two parts to the Hawthorne studies . The first part was to find out how lighting at a workplace affected productivity of workers.  No concrete conclusion could be drawn from the experiment because the workers’ productivity continued to increase with every variation in the lighting.  More light, more work.  Less light, still more work.  The results did not vary proportionately with the level of lighting and the results made no sense… at the time.

The second part of the experiment was on a group of women.  In this part of the Hawthorne studies, two separate scenarios were studied. In one study, the women were permitted to make their own decisions on taking rest. In the other study, the women who were experimented on were given a pay raise while other women were denied a hike in their pay. The results of the experiments showed that the productivity of all the workers increased irrespective of the pay incentive.

The Hawthorne Effect

Though the experiment failed to produce the expected results, Elton Mayo and his team could draw some very important conclusions from it. Their findings later became the cornerstone for revolutionary management theories. Firstly, they found out that materialistic incentives are not as productive as mental satisfaction.  To be mentally satisfied, the workers should have the feeling that they belong to some group or organization.  Their second finding was that if the workers are allowed to take their own decisions, they worked harder and their productivity increased.  Finally, it became evident that recognition and appreciation by superiors dramatically increased the productivity of workers.  This increased productivity as a result of appreciating the effort of employees by the management is called the Hawthorne Effect .

The Hawthorne effect establishes the fact that an employee is not a piece of machinery.  Many motivational theories are based on this finding.  In short, the Hawthorne studies paved the way for modern changes in the management policies.  The studies also revealed the fact that the results of an experiment can be influenced by the people who conduct the experiment by actively involvement with the subjects of the experiment.

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