Motivating
by
Charles Lamson
Behavioral science pioneers such as Elton Mayo (of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration), Douglas McGregor, Chris Argyris, George Homans, Frederick Herzberg, and Abraham Maslow have made such important contributions that their work continues to shape our understanding of human behavior. It is for this reason that I have included these important researchers in our discussion of what motivates people.
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The Hawthorne Studies
Elton Mayo In 1924, efficiency experts at the Hawthorne, Illinois, plant of the Western Electric Company designed a research program to study the effects of illumination on productivity. In the initial phases of the study, efficiency experts assumed that more light would result in higher output. Two groups of employees were selected: an experimental, or test, group that worked under varying degrees of light and a control group that worked under normal illumination conditions in the plant. As lighting power was increased, the output of the test group went up as anticipated. Unexpectedly, however, the output of the control group went up also---without any increase in light. When illumination was decreased to the level of moonlight with one test group, output increased even further. The illumination test ended in April 1927, when the researchers concluded that something other than illumination was affecting productivity. Determined to explain these and other surprising test results, the efficiency experts decided to expand their research at Hawthorne. They felt that, in addition to technical and physical changes, some of the behavioral considerations should be explored. The next phase of experiments started later in 1927 with a group of women who assembled telephone relays. For more than 1.5 years during this experiment, the researchers improved the working conditions of the women by implementing such innovations as scheduled rest periods, company lunches, and shorter workweeks. Work output increased. Baffled by the result, the researchers then decided to take everything away from the women, returning the working conditions to the exact way they had been at the beginning of the experiment. This radical change was expected to have a negative psychological impact on the women and to reduce their output. Indeed, their output increased to a new all-time high. Why?  The answers were found not in the production aspects of the experiment (changes in plant and physical working conditions) but in the human aspects. Because of the attention given them by experimenters, the women felt that they were an important part of the company. They no longer viewed themselves as isolated individuals, working together only in the sense that they were physically close to each other. Instead, they had become participating members of a congenial, cohesive work group. The relationship that developed elicited feelings of affiliation, competence, and achievement. These needs, which had long gone unsatisfied at the workplace, were now being fulfilled. The women worked harder and more effectively than previously. Pay was also an important factor. The women, paid on a piecework basis, were able to keep the pay benefits of increased productivity. Elton Mayo, first for 2 days in 1928, then for 4 days in 1929, identified an interesting phenomenon. With guidance from Mayo, the researchers extended their research by interviewing more than 20,000 employees from every department in the company. Interviews were designed to help researchers find out what the workers thought about their jobs, their working conditions, their supervisors, their company, and anything that bothered them, and how those feelings might be related to their productivity. After several interview sessions, the researcher found that a structured question-and-answer-type interview was useless for eliciting the information they wanted. Instead, the workers wanted to talk freely about what they thought was important. So the predetermined questions were discarded, and the interviewer allowed the workers to say what they wanted to say. The interviews proved valuable in a number of ways. First, they were therapeutic; the workers got an opportunity to express themselves. Many felt this was the best thing the company had ever done. The result was a wholesale change in attitude. Because many of their suggestions were being implemented, the workers began to feel that management viewed them as important, both as individuals and as a group; they were now participating in the operation and future of the company and not just performing unchallenging, unappreciated tasks.  Second, the implications of the Hawthorne studies signaled the need for management to study and understand relationships among people. In these studies, as well as in the many that followed, the most significant factor affecting organizational productivity was found to be the interpersonal relationships that are developed on the job, not just pay and working conditions. The researcher found that when informal groups identified with management, as they did at Hawthorne through the interview program, productivity rose. The increased productivity seemed to reflect the workers' feelings of competence---a sense of mastery over the job and work environment. The researchers also discovered that when the group felt that their own goals were in opposition to those of management, as often happened in situations where workers were closely supervised and had no significant control over the job or environment, productivity remained at low levels or was even lowered. These findings were important because they helped answer many of the questions that had puzzled management about why some groups seemed to be high producers while others hovered at a minimal level of output. The findings also encouraged management to involve workers in planning, organizing, and controlling their own work in an effort to secure their positive cooperation. Mayo saw the development of informal groups as an indictment of a society that treated human beings as insensitive machines who were concerned only with economic self-interest. As a result, workers had been expected to look at work merely as an impersonal exchange of money for labor. Work in American industry, according to Mayo meant humiliation---the performance of routine, tedious, and oversimplified tasks in an environment over which one had no control. This environment denied satisfaction of esteem and self-actualization needs on the job. Instead, only physiological and safety needs were satisfied. The lack of avenues for satisfying other needs led to tension, anxiety, and frustration. Mayo called such feelings of helplessness anomie. This condition was characterized by workers' feeling unimportant, confused, and unattached---victims of their own environment. Although anomie was a creation of the total society, Mayo felt its application was found in industrial settings where management held certain negative assumptions about the nature of people. According to Mayo, too many managers assumed that society consisted of a horde of unorganized individuals whose only concern was self-preservation or self-interest. It was assumed that people were primarily dominated by physiological and safety needs, wanting to make as much money as they could for as little work as possible. Thus, management organized work on the basic assumption that workers, on the whole, were a contemptible lot. Mayo called this assumption the Rabble Hypothesis. He deplored the authoritarian, task-oriented management practices that it created.
*SOURCE: MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR: LEADING HUMAN RESOURCES, 8TH ED., 2001, PAUL HERSEY, KENNETH H. BLANCHARD, DEWEY E. JOHNSON, PGS. 57-59*
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