Elton Mayo

From New World Encyclopedia

George Elton Mayo (born December 26, 1880 – died September 7, 1949) was an Australian-born American psychologist and sociologist, the founder of the Human Relations Movement. He is famous for the Hawthorne Studies, which pioneered the research in industrial sociology.

Life

Elton Mayo was born in Adelaide, Australia, in a respected colonial family of George Gibbes Mayo and Henrietta Mary Donaldson. After graduating from the Collegiate School of St Peter, a high school in Adelaide, Elton tried to enroll into the medical school, but failed the university exams. Consequently he was sent to England, where he turned to writing. He worked for the Pall Mall Gazette and taught at the Working Men’s College in London.

After his return to Australia he enrolled in the University of Adelaide, where he became one the best students of philosophy, studying under Sir William Mitchell. After his graduation in 1912, he was appointed a foundation lecturer in philosophy and education at the newly established University of Queensland. In 1913 he married Dorothea McConnel, with whom he had two daughters.

During World War I he served on different government bodies, advising on the organization of work in the war, and wrote and lectured on industrial and political psychology and psychoanalysis. He became a professor at the University of Queensland in 1919, teaching philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, economics, education and psychology. He also treated patients suffering from war traumas, and engaged in the management consulting.

In 1922 he took a tour around the United States to speak on various social psychological topics, addressing particularly the problems of worker-management interaction. In 1923 he resigned from the University of Queensland and transferred to the University of Pennsylvania. There he studied the value of work breaks on worker productivity in various textile firms. He attracted much attention from his colleague psychologists for his advocacy of the importance of the organizational sociology and psychology.

In 1926 Mayo was offered a research professorship in the recently established Harvard Business School. He initiated his famous Hawthorne Studies in 1928, and conducted them over the next five years. Mayo wrote his first book in 1933 called The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization.

In the late 1930s Mayo became increasingly interested in clinical psychology and anthropology, and taught on the techniques of interviewing. When World War II broke out, he started the research on teamwork and absenteeism in aircraft companies in southern California.

After the war Mayo decided to retire, and he withdrew to England, the place where his wife and daughters lived. He join a group at the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, which engaged in helping British industry recover in the post-war period. He also continued to lecture and give speeches. His health however suffered the enormous effort he was investing in all these activities, and Mayo suffered a stroke in 1947. He died on September 7, 1949 in Polesden Lacey, England.

Work

Mayo published his first book in 1933, under the name The Social Problems of an Industrialized Civilization. He started with the thesis that there was a problem in the modern civilization, rooted deeply in human relations in the workplace. He said:

"our understanding of human problems of civilization should be at least equal to our understanding of its material problems. In the absence of such understanding, the whole industrial structure is liable to destruction or decay. A world-wide revolution of the Russian type would completely destroy civilization" (quoted in Trahair, 1984: 163).

Mayo claimed that industrialization did solve the problem of production and initiated economical growth, but it has not improved the social status of the worker. There was a serious tension between workers and employers, the one that, Mayo believed, could not be solved by socialism or syndicalism. He proposed instead to use the psychological insights to tackle the problem. His Hawthorne Studies were designed for that purpose.

The Hawthorne Studies were conducted from 1927 to 1932 at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago. Mayo supervised the studies which were actually led by his assistants Roethlisberger and Dickinson. The goal was to examine the productivity and working conditions in the factory. Mayo carried out a number of experiments to look at ways of improving productivity, for example changing lighting conditions in the workplace. The studies have shown that such variables as rest breaks, work hours, temperature and humidity influence the work productivity. But what is more important, he realized, was that work satisfaction depended to a large extent on the informal social pattern of the workgroups. Where norms of cooperation and higher output were established because of a feeling of importance, physical conditions, or financial incentives, to motivate workers had little impact. People will form workgroups that had their own inner dynamics of social relationships.

Gradually Mayo came to realize that people's work performance is dependent on both social issues and job content, while motivation plays significant role in the whole process. He suggested that a tension between workers' 'logic of sentiment' and managers' 'logic of cost and efficiency' leads to conflict within organizations, and thus compromise needs to be found between the two.

Based on the study and his other work Mayo's believed that:

  • Individual workers cannot be treated in isolation, but must be seen as members of a group.
  • Monetary incentives and good working condition are less important to the individual than the need to belong to a group.
  • Informal or unofficial groups formed at work have a strong influence on the behavior of those workers in a group.
  • Managers must be aware of these 'social needs' and cater for them to ensure that employees collaborate with the official organization rather than work against it.

Hawthorne Effect

One important result from the Hawthorne Studies was the Hawthorne Effect. It is the name given to the increase in productivity by workers who perceive that they are being studied. Mayo and his research assistants have noticed that in many instances the work productivity has increased even when the lighting levels were decreased, or when salaries were lowered. After examining and eliminating all variables, Mayo has concluded that the only explanation left was that the attention Mayo and his assistants were paying to the workers has made workers work better. When workers know that they are being observed, they tend to work better and invest more effort in their job. The Hawthorne Effect became an useful insight for any management.

Legacy

Mayo's work contributed to management theory and to the development of fields such as industrial sociology and organizational psychology. He was able to provide concrete evidence of the significance of human relationships in the workplace, which enriched the existing theories of management. This started the revolution in management, with supervisors being re-trained in different forms of group dynamics to become more employee-centered.

Over the years the Hawthorne Effect was successfully used by managers to increase productivity in short time. Mayo’s studies have also inspired different social theorists, such as Keith Davis, Chris Argyris, or Fred Herzberg, in creating their own theories of organizations.

Mayo's work in the Hawthorne Experiments was later modified by Douglas McGregor as it did not originally show how work practices and organizational structure should be modified in order to improve worker satisfaction and productivity. McGregor suggested that the links between organizational design, motivation and productivity were more complex than first thought by Mayo.

Publications

  • Mayo, Elton. 1947. The political problem of industrial civilization. Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University
  • Mayo, Elton. 2001 (original published in 1933). The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization: Early Sociology of Management and Organizations. Routledge. ISBN 0415279887
  • Mayo, Elton. 2007 (original published in 1945). The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization. Routledge. ISBN 0415436842

References
ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

  • Gabor, Andrea. 1999. The capitalist philosophers: the geniuses of modern business—their lives, times, and ideas. New York: Times Business. ISBN 0812928202
  • George Elton Mayo. Retrieved on May 8, 2007 from <http://www.slashdoc.com/documents/78453>
  • Gillespie. Richard. 2003. Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521456436
  • Hoopes, James. 2003. False prophets: The gurus who created modern management and why their ideas are bad for business today. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Pub. ISBN 0738207985
  • Lucas, Willie. Elton Mayo. University of St. Francis. Retrieved on May 6, 2007 from <http://www.stfrancis.edu/ba/ghkickul/stuwebs/bbios/biograph/mayo.htm>
  • Kyle, Bruce, 2006. Henry S. Dennison, Elton Mayo, and Human Relations historiography. Management & Organizational History, 1, 177-199
  • O’Conor, Tom. Human Relations Movement (circa 1929-1951). North Carolina Wesleyan Colege. Retrieved on May 8, 2007 from <http://faculty.ncwc.edu/TOConnor/417/417lect05.htm>
  • Smith, J. H. 1998. The Enduring Legacy of Elton Mayo. Human Relations. 51(3), 221
  • Trahair, Richard C. 1984. Elton Mayo: The Humanist Temper. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 0887380069
  • Wood, John. 2004. George Elton Mayo: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management. Routledge. ISBN 0415323908

External links

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