Infographic of: The Human Relations School and the Hawthorne Studies
Management: Classical and Behavioural Foundations
The Human Relations School and the Hawthorne Studies
Elton Mayo, Fritz Jules Roethlisberger (1927-1939)
Work performance is shaped by social relationships, attention, and informal group norms, not only physical conditions or pay.
The Human Relations School arose from investigations at Western Electric's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois, and from dissatisfaction with narrowly mechanical accounts of work. Early Hawthorne illumination experiments began in 1924, while the better-known relay assembly test-room studies ran from 1927 to 1932. Managers and researchers were trying to understand how physical conditions, hours, rest periods, wages, and supervision affected industrial output. The school took shape in the 1930s as scholars interpreted these studies as evidence that work was also a social experience.
Its central claim is that employees are not simply individuals responding to money and task design. They belong to groups, seek recognition, interpret management actions, and develop relationships with supervisors and colleagues. When workers feel consulted, respected, and part of a cooperative group, their morale and willingness to work tend to improve. Informal group norms also regulate output: colleagues can support organizational goals, but they can also discourage workers from producing more than the group considers acceptable.
Elton Mayo, a Harvard professor, gave the emerging approach its influential interpretation in The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization in 1933. He stressed workers' social attitudes, communication, and the importance of sympathetic supervision. Fritz Jules Roethlisberger, working with William J. Dickson, provided the fullest contemporary account in Management and the Worker in 1939. Their work described interviews, supervisory relations, and informal organization, helping turn scattered observations into a recognizable management approach.
The relay assembly test room became the classic case. A small group of workers increased output while researchers altered rest pauses, hours, incentives, and other arrangements. Later readers associated this history with the “Hawthorne effect,” the idea that people alter behaviour because they know they are being studied. However, the original research included several different studies, including illumination tests, an interview programme, and a bank-wiring observation room. It did not produce one simple, uncontested finding that attention alone raises productivity.
Later scholarship substantially qualified the traditional story. Richard H. Franke and James D. Kaul's 1978 statistical reanalysis emphasized pay changes, rest periods, and worker selection as explanations for relay-room output. Steven R. G. Jones's 1992 archival analysis also challenged claims for a general Hawthorne effect. Critics note that the groups were small and selected, observation conditions were unusual, and Mayo's interpretations sometimes gave insufficient weight to economic incentives and power relations. These criticisms do not eliminate the importance of informal groups, but they reject simplistic lessons drawn from Hawthorne.
The school still matters because it established that managing work requires attention to social organization as well as technical design. Contemporary employee-engagement programmes, team-based work, supervisory training, and organizational-behaviour research continue to examine trust, communication, participation, and peer norms. Its durable lesson is not that attention automatically increases output, but that workers interpret managerial arrangements through their relationships and shared workplace experience.
The core theory
1. Beyond Economic Incentives
Early scientific management treated workers chiefly as individuals responding to task design and financial rewards. Human relations begins by insisting that employees also seek belonging, recognition, and respectful treatment.
2. Attention and Observation
Hawthorne researchers observed workers under altered lighting, breaks, hours, and supervision in test settings. They interpreted changing responses partly through workers' awareness of attention and their relationship with observers.
3. Informal Group Norms
Workers form informal groups with shared expectations about acceptable effort and conduct. These norms matter because peers can reward cooperation or discourage output that threatens group interests.
4. Supportive Supervision
Supervisors influence performance through listening, communication, and treatment, not merely commands. The school therefore treats morale and trust as practical conditions of coordinated work.
5. Employee-Centred Management
Organizations perform better when formal arrangements recognize workers' social needs and group life. This conclusion shifted management toward participation, supportive supervision, and employee-centred personnel practices.
The argument in four steps
- Workers bring social needs and relationships into the workplace.
- Workplace changes alter attention, communication, and supervisors' dealings with workers.
- Groups develop informal norms that regulate effort and responses to management.
- Therefore productivity depends on supportive supervision and group relationships as well as material incentives.
How it works
- Management changes conditions or invites participation, making workers feel noticed and involved.
- Supportive supervision and peer acceptance motivate cooperation, while restrictive norms restrain individual effort.
- Output follows the balance between social satisfaction, group norms, and organizational arrangements.
Who contributed what
- Elton Mayo (1933): The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization interpreted Hawthorne observations through social attitudes and supervision.
- Fritz Jules Roethlisberger (1939): Management and the Worker documented interviews and informal organization, supplying the school's detailed empirical account.
Compared with rival views
- Unlike Taylor's scientific management, it emphasizes social needs and informal groups over task design and pay.
- Unlike economic-man assumptions, it treats morale and peer relationships as influences on work effort.
Further reading
- Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (1939)
- Richard Gillespie, Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (1991)
- Richard H. Franke and James D. Kaul, The Hawthorne Experiments: First Statistical Interpretation (1978)