FATHER OF HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT - GEORGE ELTON MAYO

INTRODUCTION 

Elton Mayo was born in Adelaide, South Australia on 26 December 1880 and died in Guildford, Surrey on 1 September 1949. He was the second child of a respected colonial family. Elton was expected to follow his grandfather into medicine, but failed at university studies and was sent to Britain. Here he turned to writing, wrote on Australian politics for the Pall Mall Gazette and started teaching. He then returned to Australia to work in an Adelaide publishing business where his views on management caused him to be unpopular. He went back to study, and became the most brilliant student of the philosopher Sir William Mitchell. 

         

ELTON MAYO- FATHER OF HRM

Professor George Elton Mayo (1880-1949) has secured fame as the leader in a series of experiments which became one of the great turning-points in management thinking. At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, he discovered that job satisfaction increased through employee participation in decisions rather than through short-term incentives. 

Professor George Elton Mayo has secured fame as the leader in a series of experiments which became one of the great turning-points in management thinking. At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, he discovered that job satisfaction increased through employee participation in decisions rather than through short-term incentives. 

HOW IT ALL STARTED 

Mayo is known as the founder of the Human Relations Movement, and is known for his research including the Hawthorne Studies (The “Hawthorne effect” refers to improvements in worker productivity or quality that results from the mere fact that workers are being studied or observed. This observation came from studies carried out at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant during the late 1920s. The experiments validated the idea that people are motivated by additional factors rather than by purely economic factors.) and his book The Human Problems of an Industrialized Civilization.(1933)

The research he conducted under the Hawthorne Studies of the 1930s showed the importance of groups in affecting the behavior of individuals at work. 

Mayo’s employees, Roethlisberger and Dickson, conducted the practical experiments. This enabled him to make certain deductions about how managers should behave. 

He carried out a number of investigations to look at ways of improving productivity, for example changing lighting conditions in the workplace. What he found however was that work satisfaction depended to a large extent on the informal social pattern of the work group. Where norms of cooperation and higher output were established because of a feeling of importance, physical conditions or financial incentives had little motivational value. People will form work groups and this can be used by management to benefit the organization. 

GETTING FAMOUS 

Mayo went on to his most famous experiments – those at the Hawthorne Works of the General Electric Company in Chicago between 1924 and 1927. He undertook further experimentation to find out what effect fatigue and monotony had on job productivity and how to control them through varying rest breaks, work hours, temperature and humidity. 

Modern human resources gained a permanent role within organizations during the human relations movement initiated during the late 1920s. This movement acknowledged that social and psychological factors could better explain worker productivity and output. The Hawthorne Studies conducted at the Western Electric Company in the late 1920s initiated the human relations movement. 

HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENTS 

The Hawthorne plant of Western Electric was located in Chicago. It had some 29,000 employees and manufactured telephones and telephone equipment, principally for AT & T. The company had a reputation for advanced personnel policies and had welcomed a research study by the National Research Council into the relationship between work-place lighting and individual efficiency. 

The study began in 1924 by isolating two groups of workers in order to experiment with the impact of various incentives on their productivity. Improvements to levels of lighting produced increases in productivity, but so too did reversion to standard lighting and even below-standard lighting in both groups. The initial assumption therefore was that increased output stemmed from variation alone. 

ELTON MAYO AND HAWTHORNE EXPERIMENTS

Other incentives - including payment incentives and rest pauses - were manipulated at regular intervals, and although output levels varied, the trend was inexorably upwards. Whatever experimentation was applied, output went up. Although it had been fairly conclusively determined that lighting had little or nothing to do with output levels, the Assistant Works Manager (George Pennock) agreed that something peculiar was going on and that experimentation should continue. 

CONCLUSION OF HIS EXPERIMENTS 

He concluded that people’s work performance is dependent on both social issues and job content. He suggested a tension between workers’ ‘logic of sentiment’ and managers’ ‘logic of cost and efficiency’ which could lead to conflict within organizations. 

For industry to benefit from the experiments at Hawthorne, Mayo first concluded that supervisors needed training in understanding the personal problems of workers, and also in listening and interviewing techniques. He held that the new supervisor should be less aloof, more people-oriented, more concerned, and skilled in handling personal and social situations. 

It was only later, after a period of reflection, that Mayo was able to conclude that: 

• job satisfaction increased as workers were given more freedom to determine the conditions of their working environment and to set their own standards of output;
• intensified interaction and cooperation created a high level of group cohesion;
• job satisfaction and output depended more on cooperation and a feeling of worth than on physical working conditions.

In Mayo's view, workers had been unable to find satisfactory outlets for expressing personal problems and dissatisfaction in their work life. The problem, as Mayo perceived it, was that managers thought the answers to industrial problems resided in technical efficiency, when actually the answer was a human and social one. 

MAYO'S CONTRIBUTIONS

Mayo's contribution lies in recognizing from the Hawthorne experiments that the formality of strict rules and procedures spawns’ informal approaches and groups with their base in human emotions, sentiments, problems and interactions. The manager, therefore, should strive for an equilibrium between the technical organization and the human one and hence should develop skills in handling human relations and situations. These include diagnostic skills in understanding human behavior and interpersonal skills in counselling, motivating, leading and communicating. 

       

ELTON MAYO

Mayo's conclusions influenced others who later became regarded as management gurus themselves: 

His ideas on the emergence of 'informal' organisations were read by Argyris and others as they developed theories about how organisations learned and developed. 

The discrediting of the 'rabble hypothesis' theory - based on the assumption that individuals only pursue self-interest - led directly to the work of McGregor (Theory X and Theory Y) with its wider implications for leadership and organisation. 

The conclusions drawn by Mayo from the Hawthorne studies established the beginnings of the importance of management style as a major contributor to industrial productivity, of interpersonal skills as being as important as monetary incentives or target-setting, and of a more humanistic approach as a means of satisfying the organisation's economic needs and human social skills. 

Although there is some disagreement among academics in terms of what conclusions should be drawn from the Hawthorne Experiments, what is agreed upon is that Mayo’s study and subsequent findings effectively laid the foundation for understanding industrial behavior and human relations in the workplace. Indeed, it can be said that Mayo’s experiment has left a long-lasting legacy for the field of management to build upon for many years to come.