Human Relations Movement

 In 1924, a significant series of study which was called as the Hawthorne experiments, named after Western Electric Company’s Hawthorne plant in Chicago were conducted. Originally conceived as a test of some aspects of Taylor’s principles, the researchers were trying to find out the optimal level of illumination required for the workers to produce telephone equipment. Instead of finding the Taylor’s assumed “one-best-way,” the researchers found that productivity increased after each change in lighting (the intensity of light) no matter how bright or dim they made it. Eventually, they concluded that the workers were responding to the attention they were getting as part of the special research study and this phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect.

Prior to such finding, the approach that dominated towards making people work was a classical approach (i.e., bureaucratic or machine) theory. The classical approach viewed employees as a part of the job and the aim was to manage human activity to achieve maximum efficiency. Moreover, these classical views of Organization assumed a top-down management point of view, emphasizing the authority structure of the Organization. So, the task was to design the job according to scientific guidelines and then provide an incentive (usually piecework) to get workers to comply with the will of the management.

But it was found that the management was no longer the controlling force for the Hawthorne researchers (also called neoclassical theorists). Rather, they argued that management can govern only with consent of the workers and that workers actually influence management decisions by controlling the impression that management had of a proper day’s work. Environmental forces such as management directives, human capabilities, the state of technology, and economic considerations are the influencing factors of employees’ performance. Likewise, human motivation, perceptions, and job attitudes are influential as well and are ignored at management’s level.

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