Some pioneering work that began as an attempt to discover ways to increase
production efficiency led to the founding of the human relations movement in industry and
to the development of motivational skills and tools for managers. In 1927 researchers
were involved in determining the optimum amount of lighting, temperature, and humidity
(5)(with lighting being considered the most important) for the assembly of electronic
components at Western Electric. The researchers found that lighting had no consistent
effect on production. In fact, production sometimes increased when lighting was reduced
to the level of ordinary moonlight! The important part of this experiment began when two
Harvard researchers, Elton Mayo and Fritz Roethlisberger, were brought in to investigate
(10)these unexpected results further. They found that workers were responding not to the level
of lighting but to the fact that they were being observed by the experimenters.
This phenomenon came to be known as the Hawthorne effect since the experiments
were conducted at the Western Electric Hawthorne plant. This was the first documented
and widely published evidence of the psychological effects on doing work, and it led to the
(15)first serious effort aimed at examining psychological and social factors in the workplace.
Further experiments were continued for five years. Generally, the researchers concluded
from their experiments that economic motivation (pay) was not the sole source of
productivity and, in some cases, not even the most important source. Through interviews
and test results, the researchers focused on the effects of work attitudes, supervision, and
(20)the peer group and other social forces, on productivity.
Their findings laid the groundwork for modern motivation theory, and the study of
human factors on the job, which continues to this day in such common practices as
selection and training, establishing favorable work conditions, counseling, and personnel
operations. The contributions of this experiment shifted the focus of human motivation
(25)from economics to a multifaceted approach including psychological and social forces.