Hawthorne Experiments: Evolution of Management Thought

Evolution of Management Thought
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Hawthorne is an electric plant designed from the Western Electric Company that was established in 1920’s by Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo. Experiments were done on Hawthorne plant employees and the experiments made emphasis on social and psychological aspects of their behavior in the company. Vannevar Bush, a MIT professor in 1924 started series of experiments at the company. Bush wanted to find out the effect of certain changes in the work environment on the productivity of employees. In this paper we explain the experiments and the lessons learnt from the Hawthorne experiments (Warne & Busse, 2017).
The illumination study was the first study. When researcher switched on the lights, productivity increased. This however, was not the expectation of the researchers. But Bush together with his team decided that the attention that was paid to them caused the changes in output (Warne & Busse, 2017) .
Moving on, Elton Mayo and his team in 1927 went to Hawthorne Works to undertake the second set of experiments. The Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments was the first Round. In this experiment, a group of six women were isolated with an established production rate. The women’s production of telephone relay totaled to 2400 a week (Warne & Busse, 2017).
In the five years that followed, the researchers tried out twenty-three different changes to the environment of work to observe any occurrences. Productivity increased more and more and by the end of the first phase of experiments, it was noted that productivity was not affected by the changes in the physical environment (Warne & Busse, 2017).
In 1931, the Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment was established by Mayo. They sought to find if incentives led to the increase of production at work. When the incentives were announced by the researchers, production remained the same.
From these experiments, many lessons are learnt. Some of the lessons that I learn personally are as explained. The importances of Hawthorne’s experiments are important as they present the first instances when human researchers investigated about the human factors that affect employees at work. Although, they did not start that way, but instead started doing experiments as they built on Fredrick Taylor’s ideas of scientific management. A according to the experiments, although they started out believing that there was “one best way” of doing things. In addition, they went into the experiments believing that if employees were offered financial incentives for increased production, they would used the best way as mentioned before. However, they found out that it was more complex than thought.
Secondly, we learn that work is a social function. Whilst most of the scholars before the Hawthorne experiments saw work more as economic functions, the experiments opined that personal satisfaction, friendship, social norms and culture were topics worth studying. The people we work with appear to be of more importance and affects how well or hard people work and is more important like environmental factors like lighting.
Third, working in grou...