Hawthorne
Assignment
Contribution of Hawthorne study in management in 21st centaury
Submitted by: Rashik Islam
ID : 2011-1-10-433
Course name: Management
Course title: MGT 101
Section: 7
East West University
Department of Business Administration
27th November 2012
Introduction
“Any company controlling many thousand workers, tends to lack any satisfactory criterion of the actual value of its methods of dealing with people” - Elton Mayo, Professor of Industrial Management, Harvard Business School, 1933
In the 1920s Elton Mayo, a professor of Industrial Management at Harvard Business School, and his protégé Fritz J. Roethlisberger led a landmark study of worker behavior at Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T. Unprecedented in scale and scope, the nine-year study took place at the massive Hawthorne Works plant outside of Chicago and generated a mountain of documents, from hourly performance charts to interviews with thousands of employees. Harvard Business School’s role in the experiments represented a milestone in the dawn of the human relations movement and a shift in the study of management from a scientific to a multi-disciplinary approach. Baker Library’s exhaustive archival record of the experiments reveals the art and science of this seminal behavioral study, and the questions and theories it generated about the relationship of productivity to the needs and motivations of the industrial worker.
In the studies, initially, Mayo had tried to find the relationship between the work setting- mainly the lighting - in a telephone components manufacturer and the productivities of the workers. However, as the lighting was decreased, production did not decrease as expected, instead, it increased. This suggested that productivity was not positively related to improvement in physical environment. Then, interviews were conducted, several findings were summarized. As a whole, Hawthorne studies highlight the existence of
Contribution of Hawthorne study in management in 21st centaury
Submitted by: Rashik Islam
ID : 2011-1-10-433
Course name: Management
Course title: MGT 101
Section: 7
East West University
Department of Business Administration
27th November 2012
Introduction
“Any company controlling many thousand workers, tends to lack any satisfactory criterion of the actual value of its methods of dealing with people” - Elton Mayo, Professor of Industrial Management, Harvard Business School, 1933
In the 1920s Elton Mayo, a professor of Industrial Management at Harvard Business School, and his protégé Fritz J. Roethlisberger led a landmark study of worker behavior at Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T. Unprecedented in scale and scope, the nine-year study took place at the massive Hawthorne Works plant outside of Chicago and generated a mountain of documents, from hourly performance charts to interviews with thousands of employees. Harvard Business School’s role in the experiments represented a milestone in the dawn of the human relations movement and a shift in the study of management from a scientific to a multi-disciplinary approach. Baker Library’s exhaustive archival record of the experiments reveals the art and science of this seminal behavioral study, and the questions and theories it generated about the relationship of productivity to the needs and motivations of the industrial worker.
In the studies, initially, Mayo had tried to find the relationship between the work setting- mainly the lighting - in a telephone components manufacturer and the productivities of the workers. However, as the lighting was decreased, production did not decrease as expected, instead, it increased. This suggested that productivity was not positively related to improvement in physical environment. Then, interviews were conducted, several findings were summarized. As a whole, Hawthorne studies highlight the existence of
References: - http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Gov-Inc/Hawthorne- Experiments.html#b#ixzz2DLnFczct (Data access 22nd November, 3.30AM) - http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/hawthorne/09.html#nine (Data access 22nd November, 4.00AM) - http://www.nwlink.com/~donclark/hrd/history/hawthorne.html (Data access 22nd November, 5.00AM) - Franke, R. H. & Kaul, J. D. (1978). The Hawthorne experiments: First statistical interpretation. American Sociological Review, 1978, 43, 623-643. (Data access 21st november) - Gillespie, Richard. Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. (Data access 21st november) - http://www.12manage.com/methods_mayo_hawthorne_effect.html (Data access 22nd November, 5.50AM)