Principles of the Human Relations Movement

In today’s successful organisations, the most important focus is managing individual employee satisfaction and motivation, apart from complying with formal rules and operating procedures, to maintain high qualityproductivity. Unlike the classical perspectives of management such as Scientific Management and Bureaucracy, “the importance of informal social factors in the work place such as co-worker relationships and group norms that influence employee motivation and performance is highlighted” (Macky & Johnson, 2003, p.82) under the ‘Human Relations Movement’. This essay will discuss how the Human Relations Movement has been adapted and carried out successfully in New Zealand by the restaurant chain, Starbucks Coffee. By focusing on the principles of maintaining a socialised natural group working environment and two-way communication between employees and managers, this essay will demonstrate how they became the most powerful and well-known coffee franchise restaurant in New Zealand market.

To start with, the Human Relations Movement firstly emphasises the importance of the working environment for employees as a socialised natural group in which social aspects for both employees and managers take precedence over functional organisational structures. Elton Mayo, who was called “the founder of both the Human Relations Movement and of industrial sociology” (Pugh & Hickson, 1989, P.152), had the basic idea that “workers had strong social needs which they tried to satisfy through membership of informal social groups at work place” (Nicholson, 1998, p.215). Opposing the classical perspectives of management principles of the Scientific Management and Bureaucracy, Mayo claimed that scientifically clarified rules, strict work procedure and incentive money payments were not the only stimulus to inspire workers and that they were “less factors in determining output than were group standards, sentiments and security” (Robbins, Millett & Waters-Marsh, 2004, p.815-816) after he