What Happened at Hawthorne?

This chapter directs attention to circumstances in the Hawthorne experiments hitherto unreported or disregarded. A variable that had remained in obscurity emerges: the consequences of responding. The variable consisted of information feedback coupled with financial reward. A special method was developed for collecting data on output rate in test room—another difference between it and regular department. Each completed relay was dropped down a chute next to operator who assembled it. The Hawthorne operators assembled relays because they had been paid for doing so, and payment had functioned as what B. F. Skinner has called a generalized type of secondary (conditioned) reinforcement, making subsequent relay assembling behavior more likely. Mayo implied that the relay assemblers worked faster and faster because they found themselves in a “new industrial milieu, a milieu in which their own self-determination and their social well-being ranked first and the work was incidental.” The Hawthorne effect in experimental research is the unwanted effect of experimental operations themselves.

Art · Hawthorne effect · History · Management Theory and Practice · Psychology · Social Psychology