Organizational Behavior – Introduction

In this course we will have the opportunity to study various aspects of human
behavior as related to work. At the end of the course you will have a better
understanding of processes of communication, decision-making, leadership,
motivation, conflict and working in groups. As such, we are dealing with the
psychology of behavior in relation to organizations.

Our theme for the first day is that the kind of people we are – how we think,
what motivates us, how we interact with others – is tied to the nature of the social
organizations to which we are connected. And since social institutions evolve, our
psychology also evolves. The things that concern us today, the way we think and
interact with others, wasn’t always the way it is today. People were motivated for
different reasons, leadership was based on different principles, and conflict had
different sources.

The purpose of this discussion is to help us understand that human nature and
our social relationships have been, and will be in the future, something other than
what they are today. There is nothing “natural” or “normal” about our psychology. For
example as the industrial revolution started to transform society, factory work, and
especially the assembly line, was structured so that workers had a minimum of
discretion in their work and autonomy on the job. It was generally assumed that it was
human nature to be lazy and to try to get as much as possible for as little work as
possible. Factories were structured in a way that was consistent with this principle,
leadership was oriented to administering rewards and punishments, and the employee
was allowed little control over their work and given a minimum of responsibility. It was
assumed that employees were working only for a wage. In such a context, people
actually were lazy and greedy and tried to avoid responsibility. During the 1930’s it was
discovered that if you give people responsibility and control over their work that they
will assume it. If you offer employees the opportunity to enjoy work for motives other
than money, they will find other sources of satisfaction.

Our experience of our work is directly related to the physical, economic and
social characteristics of work. We can understand this point by looking at how the
organization of work has changed historically. Imagine…how would your psychology be
different if you lived a nomadic tribal life with no social classes, no imposed leadership,
very few objects to carry with you, few relationships except family and ritualised
contact with other social groups, and minimal differentiation of labour between men
and women? You wouldn’t be concerned with keeping up with your neighbour, you
wouldn’t be worried about your standard of living, you wouldn’t desire the latest
laptop, you wouldn’t follow a leader because of their leadership qualities or skills. In a
situation such as this, with very little differentiation of social roles, your psychology is
also relatively undifferentiated.

With the differentiation of social structure we see a concomitant differentiation

of emotions, motives, or “states”. We see this very clearly in the rise of urbanism and
the differentiation of persons within society. Urbanization started with population

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pressure and the need to settle down in one place and raise crops for food. With more
people came more complex relationships among people and more social roles. It also
coincided with an increased production of articles of personal consumption. Mirrors,
for example, became a major object of trade. This leads us to conclude that greater
self-awareness is related to social complexity. The complexity of your view of yourself
is related to the complexity of the social context in which you grow up. The increased
diversity and heterogeneity of the social world that was a consequence of urbanization
led to an increased realization of difference and therefore increased realization of self.
There was a process of development of self-awareness and this process has continued,
and we are continuing to evolve in a direction of greater self-reflexivity.

Human Development

"Without work all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles
and dies." Albert Camus

Most of us have the goal of finding interesting, creative work. We’d like work to
be more than a paycheck, more than simply a way to satisfy our material needs. It
should be a means of fulfillment, of satisfaction, an activity of discovery, a place for
development. We owe it to ourselves, at the very least, because work takes up a good
eight hours a day - a major portion of our lives.

Unfortunately, for many people work is drudgery. They can’t wait to get home,
they can’t wait for the weekend. We see a great deal of ambivalence towards our jobs.
People often become cynical and feel that they’re just “putting in their time.” For
many people work is a necessary evil, a way to obtain food, shelter, material goods,
money to spend for pleasure - in short, for the important things in life. Even if this
doesn’t apply to you, it will certainly apply to many of the people you will be
managing.

What do we mean by “development?” In the most general sense, we mean

“change in a positive direction.” And for anything to change, it has to interact with
something else. Therefore we can say that development signifies interacting with our
contexts in ever-increasingly complex ways.

When you were an infant, lying on your back, your world was pretty
circumscribed to what came immediately close to you. You saw, you heard, you moved
and interacted with your surroundings in the ways you could. You were not “limited”
because given your developmental state you were doing everything within your
possibilities. Your body simplified the world for you and allowed you to interact with it
and begin to make discriminations. The stimuli you created/received from the world
fed back to increase your complexity. Once you started to walk, your relationship with
the world changed in radical ways. Now you could move around, following mom or
dad from room to room, climb up on the sofa, open kitchen cupboards, get things off
the shelves. The kind of feedback you received from the world changed significantly,
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and you changed in complexity as a result of that. As you grew up, an increase in
personal complexity is seen in your ability to move into increasingly complex sets of
environments. The process is not complete, nor does it have to ever be. At present you
are still in a buffered, simplified “adult” world. If you establish the appropriate
couplings to this world, you will be able to make the transition to the world of
independent adult work. Gradually. In the socially and technologically advanced world
in which we live, our offspring need a considerable amount of time and buffered
contexts to be prepared for independence. Call it experience, if you will.

This focus on development as being the outcome of how we are coupled or

connected to our contexts leads us to suggest that development requires that we
produce or create something; that we change our environment. When we produce
something (e.g. a new door for the house, a report, a painting, a clean kitchen, an
ordered office desk, a spear) it is a reflection of ourselves as well as the situation we
were in and the materials used. The product or modified situation can then change us
through feedback.

The use of new tools changes our way of operating on, or actively engaging the
world. It provides a different sort of feedback which changes our posture and
sensitivities. Bodies are shaped to fit the tools, and new information is thus created.
Here we are talking of either the hammer or the pen. The tool is the brain's way of
communicating with itself. A tool is used to change our way of operating on the world.
It provides feedback which increases our complexity.

This is how we humanize both ourselves and the world (a humanizing praxis).
We are always working both for ourselves and for humankind.

1. Our own development depends on increasing our forms of coupling to the

surround. The child with the spoon. Development requires that we
produce something - a humanizing praxis.

Our ability to achieve a developmentally valuable coupling in any context

depends on 1) our developmental state, 2) the context - a developmentally
appropriate context.

2. We engage in cultural transmission. The socio-historical experience is

embodied in objects. The purpose of objects is not directly perceivable. To
master them and their accompanying rituals is to master our history. Look
at our constructed environment. To move through it smoothly we have to
master a lot of human history. Our constructed environment supports
more complex activities.

Pushing the Envelope: the Organization as a Developmental Context – Possibilities

and Constraints

The “container” model of behavioural change

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The Devaluation of Work

Consistent with this view of development, our jobs should be seen as ends in
themselves. The time one spends at work is not only 8 hours out of your day, but is 8
hours of development. We could say that as an experience, work should be valuable in
itself, and not simply as a means to other ends. However, we've reached a situation
today in which "work" for many of us is considered to be a necessary evil, a way to
obtain food, shelter, material goods, money to spend for pleasure - in short, for the
important things in life.

Look at some distinctions we commonly make:

Work vs. play or leisure
Labor vs. knowledge (Plato)
Material needs vs. psychic needs

Work becomes satisfaction of material needs, such as security and comfort,

while our leisure time is for the satisfaction of our health and psychic needs.

Thus there is a tendency to devalue the work part of our lives. Even many
psychologists implicitly devalue work….

Carl Rogers (a “humanist” psychologist) said

"When material needs are largely satisfied, as they tend to be for many people in
this affluent society, individuals are turning to the psychological world, groping
for a greater degree of authenticity and fulfillment."

So I guess that with a little self-help and sensitivity training one's alienation and sense
of being lost will be washed away.

Or consider Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs:

Self-actualization
The desire to become everything one is capable of
becoming. Presses toward full use of talents, capacities,
and potentialities. Self improvement.

Self-Esteem
Self-respect (competence, confidence, personal strength,
achievement, independence, freedom) and esteem from others
(prestige, recognition, acceptance, attention, status, fame,
reputation, appreciation)

Social Needs
Belongingness and Love - affectionate relationships w/ others, group
membership, intimacy

Safety Needs

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 Security, order, stability, predictability - job tenure, financial protection, insurance, savings
accounts

Physiological needs
hunger, thirst, sex

In this scheme also the Psychic (our mental health and development) is something
lacking - we have to satisfy the material first before we can seek fulfillment.

Both psychologists assume a separation of the material and the psychic.

In this scheme, psychical goals like authenticity or fulfillment easily become

commodities. A leisure industry develops. (Go to the gym, read books, get intellectual
stimulation, unwind)

Perhaps even worse, in these schemes human values come to take on economic
significance.

Maslow's Eupsychian Management suggested a way of how to decide whether

a job with a higher salary which entails leaving one's home and friends is worth
the move.

"I have asked myself how much money is it worth to me to give up my

friendship with my best friends...If, for instance, I arbitrarily assign a
value of $1,000 a year to having an intimate friend (which is certainly a
modest figure), then this new job which has been offered at a raise of,
let's say, $2,000 or $3,000 or $4,000 a year simply is not what it looked
like at first. I may actually be losing value, or dollar value".

Values are dollar values, how to get the most from a buck. This type of
reasoning is presented as the best form of humanism.

So too, we can say that our “psychology” is directly related to our form of life –
in the terms we used, to the manner in which we are connected or coupled to our
surroundings. If our development is a process of informing and being informed by our
activities of operating on the world, then our development is related to the kinds of
contexts we move through and to which we have to adapt – the actual physical
structures of our world, our social relationships and our social institutions.

Our society and business institutions are becoming more complex every day. In
response to globalization and increasing competition new types of organizations are
being constructed, and new types of demands are being placed on individuals. In
response, we are creating new types of people. The way we have viewed topics such
as leadership, motivation, conflict, communication and decision-making will undergo
change in response to these changing demands.

To see how our current way of experiencing work is contingent on the

character of our social institutions it would be helpful if we were to step outside of our
situation and look at the history of how work, technologies, and social organization has
changed over time. We would therefore see how technology, work groups, leadership,
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labour and motivation has also changed. For the present, we will simply make a few
comments on the transition from medieval economies to the industrial revolution.

The Transition to the Industrial Revolution

Overview

In the Middle Ages people were for the most part responsible for their own
work. The Apprentice system, in which a Master craftsman had his own shop with
Journeymen and Apprentices, was generally a close-knit group working together. This
changed with the industrial revolution as many craftsmen stopped working and
formed larger scale operations.

In the businesses that arose in the Industrial Age there was an aggressive effort
by management to gain control over the technical knowledge connected with work.
(this effort still dominates American labour relations).

This means that a basic division of responsibility was established between

expert managers and worker-drones, which still exists even in today’s “enlightened”
world of shared decision-making and flex-time policies.

Critical Technologies

The Big technology that allowed for the development of the factory system was the
steam engine, which allowed us to harness the energy available in coal. There were
in addition a number of other inventions such as the cotton jenny (to make yarn or
thread) in the textile industry.

The increase in the size of factories led to changes in the banking sector and made
available a greater supply of capital for building them.

Skilled workers were formed who were able to adjust to new conditions in the
factories. Greater freedom in doing business supported innovators and
entrepreneurs who wanted to make money. Larger numbers of workers were
brought together in one place, because of expensive machines and need for
supervision. A rising class of entrepreneurs from the craft class with vision to create
new ways of working. Factories administered by owners, assisted by a new class of
managers.

In agriculture, machinery like ploughs and threshing machines, new crops and
breeds, better drainage, fertilizer, specialization of crops and large estates led to
increased productivity of farms that supplied food for cities.

Incentive and motivation & the subjective meaning of work

Less positive desire to work in new factories; small craftsmen driven out of business
and peasants driven off land by new divisions. Better wages but worse conditions.
People uprooted to work in dirty cities. Factory discipline must have seemed as
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 irrational as irrelevant to one’s interests, as army discipline today. Work for the
paupers, the poor. Employers had to control the workers via techniques such as
fines for lateness and absenteeism, low wages (so hunger would keep them at
work), long hours (to keep them out of public houses), corporal punishment,
dismissal. Some firms used wage incentives. Employers had considerable powers
over employees, since joint action by employees was forbidden and many workers
were legally tied to employers.

The nature of work groups

Large groups of workers, many women and children. People had previously worked
at home and were not accustomed to factory. No doubt deeply disturbed by
conditions and discipline.

Leadership and management

Foremen had personal relationship but also used punishment. Obedience and
deference was a part of the feudal system, but peasants didn’t take their duties too
seriously. Now they had to.

The division of labour

Workers were frequently late, absent, idle or drunk, fought with each other,
produced poor quality work and had no ambition. Work is meaningless (unlike at
home), worked for money at meaningless tasks from which they were alienated.
Employers built military-style hierarchical structures with maximum division of
labour, where workers were controlled by rewards and punishments. Little concern
for their welfare, who were regarded as part of the factory equipment.

Relations with wider society

A transformation of society – creation of large towns, and an urbanized working

class who had no power and were alienated and discontented with their work. Also
increased prosperity for both employers and workers. Led to the eventual growth of
trade unions and Marxist ideology. Humanitarian influences and unions eventually
led to improvements, as employers came to realize that workers would produce
more if treated better.

Liberal Capitalism – 1850-1939

Technologies

Continuous innovation resulting in larger and more efficient factories. Steel replaces
iron, electricity replaces steam, new industries such as cars and planes.

Incentive and motivation & the subjective meaning of work

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 Differed depending on the country. Consumption in U.S., for national effort in
U.S.S.R., Japan workers looked after for life as in feudal system. Monetary incentives
offered. Government regulations and unions prevented much bad treatment. Easier
to move to other jobs and less fear of dismissal.

The nature of work groups

Assembly-line production groups, supervision usually authoritarian, workers

assumed to be lazy and incapable of self-discipline and motivated by economic
needs. Relationships were impersonal and rules were devised to define rights and
duties of employees.

Leadership and management

Leadership and management style stayed the same till the end of this period.

The division of labour

There was a belief in greatest possible division of labour so every worker could be
an expert at some little thing. Time and method study, standardization of jobs,
workers still discontented with jobs.

Alienation

The economic system and structure of work that developed in the 19 th century
radically changed our relationship to work, to the products of our work, and to other
people. Imagine that you are an Eskimo living in a small nuclear family group up in
northern Canada. You and your family make all the hunting tools you need to get food,
you make all of your clothes, and build your own shelters. Are you going to be
concerned that the spear you make is of good quality? Are you going to be sure that
the stitching in the furs you use for clothing is well sewn? Are you going to be sure you
build a shelter that keeps out the wind? Of course you are, because you are making
these things for yourself. Care in what you make is built into the work. Your personal
survival and that of your family depends on it.

Throughout prehistory it was the fact that producers and consumers were either
one and the same individuals or close kin that guaranteed the highest degree of reliability
and durability in manufactured items. Later differentiation of function in communities led
to people specializing, and trade grew, but the connection between and consumer
remained intimate, permanent, and caring.

Imagine that you are living in a barrio in Madrid. When you need a plumber, an
electrician, or someone to do other repairs on your apartment, who is going to provide
the best service? Someone who lives in your barrio. These are the people who you are
going to stop to chat with on the street, see in Mass on Sunday, or in the local bar for
an aperitivo on Saturdays. Service based on personal relationships will generally be
better than service provided by people who don’t know you.

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 With the industrial revolution and development of the factory system in the
th
19 century relationships began to change. The intimate, personal relationship
between the producer and consumer was replaced by a purely economic or
technological relationship.

Why Nothing Works

It is no wonder therefore that all manufacturing businesses have the problem of

lack of quality. It is very hard for people to care about strangers or products that are
produced for strangers. Quality is a constant problem because the intimate sentimental
and personal bonds which once made us responsible to each other and to our products
have withered away and been replaced by money relationships. In large companies there
is also the problem that people involved in the production process do not even know
each other’s names. Each person has a smaller and smaller role in the production
process. The size and internal organization of today’s corporations exacerbates the
quality problem.

The very fact that many large organizations have to specifically focus on training
employees in how to improve quality indicates the size of the problem.

Why the Help Won’t Help

The effects of changed social relationships can also be seen in the lack of quality
service. How were higher standards achieved in former times? Service was provided by
people who had an investment in your satisfaction – people with whom, in one way or
another, you lived in close proximity. In the past producer and consumer knew each
other and had an interest in each other’s welfare.

The division of labor characteristic of the industrial revolution is now being

extended in the “post-industrial”, information age. There is indeed today an increase in
the number of white-collar service jobs, especially in the retail area. These jobs too are
being divided up and subject to specialization.

The concept of alienation captures some important aspects of our relationship to

the world that arose with the industrial revolution. The word “alienation” means to be
“separated from” or “estranged.” In our modern social and economic world, we can
identify several ways in which our relationships to the world and each other has changed:

1. Our relationship to what we produce, the product of our creative activity. We no

longer produce directly for ourselves. The thing we produce does not belong to
us, it is taken away and sold. We embody a part of ourselves, our labor, in an
object and then lose it. The more we produce, the greater the loss. Life is put into
an object, then life belongs to object and not to us.
2. Our work is external to us, it is imposed on us from without. We no longer work
for ourselves and our own survival and that of our family, or because we seek
fulfillment. Work is an obligation, and when it is an obligation we no longer freely
develop our physical and mental capacities. Rather, we become physically
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 exhausted and mentally debased. It is not our own work that we do, but the work
of others. It is in our leisure hours that we feel like a human being.
3. We also become alienated from other people. In an environment of alienated
labor all men look upon other men from point of view of workers who see other
workers as objects whose labor is bought and sold, not a full member the human
species.

We must see this as the product of structural constraints on the forms our
psychology can take under certain social and economic conditions. This is to say that
there are pressures on us to not identify with the objects we produce, to treat work as
someone exterior to us, and to treat each other as objects.

The Psychological Study of Work

“Scientific” knowledge became the new religion in human relations after the
founding of Wundt’s first psychology lab in Leipzig in 1879. At the beginning of the 20th
century, psychologists began studying work behaviour. Their goal was to increase
worker efficiency.

Frederick “Speedy” Taylor and Scientific Management

Frederick Taylor is considered to be the founder of the Scientific Management

approach to the study of work behaviour. He was born in 1856 in Germantown,
Pennsylvania, the second son of an affluent Quaker lawyer. His family was cultivated
and he travelled a lot while growing up.

While in college he invented the overhand pitch in baseball (noting that the
underhand pitch was inefficient), and a curved tennis racket (not so successful).

He decided against an academic career at Harvard as a lawyer because he

suffered from headaches and painful eye trouble, apparently an astigmatism. He
showed an early tendency to be obsessed with order and organization.

Instead he studied to be an engineer .

After college he got a job as an apprentice patternmaker at Ferrell & Jones, a

small pumpmaking company in Philadelphia that was owned by a family friend. After 4
years left that job to take a job at the Midvale Steel Company in Philadelphia – first as
a labourer, then a shop clerk, eventually a machinist and then machine shop foreman.
He hid the fact that he was a gentleman’s son, and he claimed to get along very well
with the workers. However, he didn’t fraternize with them, didn’t smoke or drink or go
to their houses or to the bars with them. He thought those activities were a waste of
time.

His work experience led him to disapprove of certain workshop practices, such
as the worker’s refusal to work at their full capacity. The piece-rate system was in
force, which should have meant they would earn more for more production. However,

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if they produced too much, the boss would raise the rate in order to save on labour
costs. Therefore they would work just enough to meet their production requirements.

Taylor believed that men had a “natural instinct and tendency” to take things
easy. He witnessed skilled workers systematically restricting output and encouraging
others to do the same. He saw men who believed that as the actual producers of
goods, they and not their employers should determine how much and how fast they
worked. Because the workers had technical knowledge and dexterity, which the
employers lacked, they could enforce their own work rules with virtual impunity. But
Taylor could only comprehend these arrangements as wasteful malingering.

When he became foreman at the machine shop he took a hardline approach -

threatening, cajoling and humiliating his men to work harder. The men hated him. The
employer (with whom he dined), appreciated his efforts. He did this for two years.

Taylor convinced his employer to allow him to conduct some experiments to

determine the maximum capacity of the firm’s metal cutting machines. He decided
that what was needed was an improvement in the quality of the machines, a
differential pay rate that would reward the most productive workers, and a division of
skilled labour into carefully timed operations that would put an end to workers
wasting time and give management the upper hand in raising levels of production. He
wrote out cards detailing all operations and how to improve them.

In 1898 Frederick Taylor landed job as consultant with the Bethlehem Iron Co.
in Pennsylvania, one of America’s largest Iron companies. He had also by this time re-
confirmed something he knew a long time before...inefficiency costs money.

Industrialists know how much work to expect from a machine, but have no idea
how much work to expect from a worker. If we could estimate how much work a
capable worker could produce working “all out”, we could then have a standard by
which to assess the efficiency of other employees doing the same job. Then we could
increase efficiency and output.

Started to work on three basic principles:

1. To select the best man for the job.

2. To instruct them in the most efficient methods, the most economical
movements, to employ in their work.
3. to give incentives in the form of higher wages to the best workers.

Situation: 75 workers loading pig-iron onto railway cars at average of 12 ½ tons per
day. Taylor studied the men for a day and a half, stopwatch in hand, and decided that
they should be able to do 75 tons a day. Lowered it 40% because of unavoidable
delays, fatigue, etc.

Decided a really efficient worker should be able to load 47-48 tons per day. Company
believed only 18-25 tons under best conditions.

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Chose 10 men (strong, industrious and thrifty) and asked them whether they wanted
to make more money. Told that they had to do exactly as told and they would be paid
for amount of work done. No argument, no back-talk, no initiative. Lift when told, sit
when told, put down when told, walk when told to walk, rest when told to rest.

Only one man ended up loading 47 ½ tons in a day, and this Dutch worker maintained
this rate for 3 years, earning 60% more than before. All the other nine quit.

Able to decrease the number of workers needed to load wagons from 500 to 140,
increase daily earnings by 60%, and save the firm $75,000 a year.

Increased efficiency of shovellers by instruction, higher wages for more output, and
new sided shovels.

The Downside
The workers hated him. Stop-watch, timing movement and rest pauses, altering layout
of plant, changing traditional ways of doing things.

Taylor claimed that he was trying to reconcile differences between employees and
management by increasing efficiency and wages. However, most workers saw what he
was doing as a means of exploitation – increasing output for profits of the owners.

Not surprising, since his view was that “all employees should bear in mind that each
shop exists first, last, and all the time, for the purpose of paying dividends to its
owners.”

Taylor and Gilbreth’s Time and Motion Study. Psychologists study fatigue and
conditions of work (physical) or devising tests for vocational guidance.

Other early psychologists experienced the same hostility.

Taylor’s work became a blueprint for rearranging authority in the workplace.

It had the following characteristics (History of Labour article):

1. A general principle of maximum fragmentation which decomposes work into

its simplest constituent elements or tasks.
2. A divorce of planning and doing work, thus removing as far as possible any
discretion within the work to be performed.
3. The divorce of direct and indirect labour which embodies the principle of task
control. Here a planning department was envisaged to plan and coordinate
the manufacturing process.
4. Minimisation of skill requirements (i.e. the conception and execution of
techniques) and job-learning time.
5. Reduction of material-handling to a minimum. A mechanism was sought for
providing an efficient monitoring system over factory work with the use of
time and methods study which was used to find the one best way of doing a
job.

Some Assumptions about Human Nature –The Economic Man

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Psychologist at this point had accepted the attitudes of management which arose in
the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Human nature is presumed to be fixed –
that is, it does not change with changes in social and economic structure. This view of
human nature was that:

1. most people find work distasteful

2. most people are naturally lazy
3. solely motivated by fear or greed and will do the least work possible for the
highest wage.
4. we are rational creatures who use our reason primarily to calculate exactly how
much satisfaction maybe obtained from the least amount of effort, or how much
discomfort can be avoided. “Satisfaction” is not pride in one’s job, or feeling
we’ve accomplished something, or the positive regard of others – it refers only to
money. “Discomfort” does not refer to failing at one’s task, or losing respect, but
solely to fear of starvation.
5. Humans are naturally competitive, basically self-interested, concerned with their
own survival
6. Humans are machines, a mechanism with a mind attached. The mind of the
worker is not the concern of the employer (nor to early psychologists) If work
conditions – lighting, humidity, temperature, ventilation, etc. were alright, what
right does someone have to complain?

This view had important implications for research by early psychologists:

Worker must be studied as an isolated unit

Worker resembled a machine whose efficiency could be scientifically estimated.
The main factors influencing efficiency were a) wasteful or ineffectual
movements in doing his job, b) fatigue – a physico-chemical state of the body
due to the accumulation of waste products, and c) defects in the physical
environment such as poor lighting, excessive humidity, inadequate heating, loud
noise, etc.

When we make any claim that human nature is “fixed” and does not change, certain
ways of treating people automatically follow, and we mistakenly assume that this is
just the way things are. And people are often more than willing, it seems, to try to
meet our expectations. If you treat people as if they are basically lazy, how do you
think they are going to act? Lazy. If you assume that people do not want to be
responsible for their own behaviour and you take away any possibility of decision-
making, how are they going to act? Dependently. On the part of management no
alternative ways of trying to structure work, motivate or lead people will even be tried
out because the employees are acting just the way we expect them to, validating our
assumptions.

Hawthorne Studies – 1924-27

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 Luckily, the limitations of the Scientific Management approach and it’s
assumptions about human nature were demonstrated in a series of studies conducted
at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works, a division of Bell Telephone Co. Company
outside Chicago. These experiments were carried out from 1924-27.

The Hawthorne Works had 30,000 employees who were treated well in a
material sense – they had a good pension, sickness benefits and recreation facilities -
but there were indications of problems – grumbling and dissatisfaction, high
absenteeism, high turn-over, lateness, and poor quality work.

Efficiency experts were called in, and they played with altering work hours,
length and spacing of rest periods, lighting and other environmental variables. The
results were inconclusive. The research was conducted from the Scientific
Management point of view – perhaps the physical conditions were not conducive of
quality work? Maybe the workers were suffering from fatigue?

When the efficiency experts couldn’t pinpoint any significant problems, the
company called the National Academy of Sciences in Washington D.C. and they sent
out a team of researchers led by Elton Mayo, who conducted a series of studies over a
number of years. Three of these studies will illustrate their findings.

1. The Illumination Study

The first study they carried out was a controlled experiment in the tradition of
Scientific Management. They set up two groups of employees doing the same work,
and divided them into an experimental and a control group. The experimental group
received more light to work by.

Contrary to their expectations, productivity in both groups went up.

They then lowered the levels of light, and productivity again went up in both
groups.

These findings were a bit surprising. What was going on? There must be some other
factor which caused the increase in output. They decided to conduct further studies
to determine what.

2. The Relay Assembly Room Study

The next experiment was more observational and without strict controls, in which
changes were made in the conditions of work and the results were observed.

Two girls were chosen to participate and they were allowed to select four other girls
for a small group of six (we can expect they would choose other girls they knew).

Their job was assembling telephone relays at a long bench. A relay was a small,
intricate mechanism of 40 parts that went inside the telephone. The company had
designed a standardized procedure for assembling the relays. The girls were seated
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at long bench with the parts in front of them in containers. At the end of the table
there was a chute into which they dropped the finished relays which were
mechanically counted.

The researchers first measured their basic rate of output. Then a series of changes
in the work conditions were introduced over a period of several years. An observer
in the workshop noted all that went on, keeping the girls informed about the
experiment, asking for advice or information, and listening to their complaints.

Initially the standard work week was 48 hours, and no rest pauses.

Series of changes introduced, each lasting from 8 to 12 weeks

1. Put on piece work for eight weeks – output up

2. Two 5-minute rest pauses, morning and afternoon, for 5 weeks –
production up
3. Two-10 minute rest pauses – production up sharply
4. Six 5-minute rest pauses – production falls slightly – break in rhythm.
5. Back to two 15 minute rests and free hot lunch – output up
6. Added stopping at 16:30 instead of 17:00 – output up
7. Stopped at 16:00 instead of 16:30 – output stays the same.
8. Back to 17:00 (slight decrease)
9. Sat. morning off (slight decrease)
10. Back to standard (slight decrease)
11. 15-minute rests and lunch (large jump in production).

Final output over 3000 relays a week.

Conclusions (From J.A.C. Brown, The Social Psychology of Industry):

“Stuart Chase, in his books The Proper Study of Mankind and Men at
Work, gives an interesting account of the implications of this piece of research.
Briefly they were that production was raised primarily because of a change in
the girls' attitudes towards their work and their work-team. 'By asking their
help and cooperation, the investigators had made the girls feel important. Their
whole attitude had changed from that of separate cogs in a machine to that of
a congenial group trying to help the company solve a problem. They had found
stability, a place where they belonged, and work whose purpose they could
clearly see. And so they worked faster and better than they ever had in their
lives.’ It has been demonstrated that industry, apart from the production of
goods, has also a social function to perform; that the primary group rather than
the isolated individual should be the basic unit of observation in all industrial
research; and that adequate motivation is more important than the conditions
of the physical environment. Chase continues: ‘A factory performs two major
functions; the economic one of producing goods and the social one of creating
and distributing human satisfactions among the people under its roof. A great
deal of study by efficiency experts had been devoted to the production
function, but very little to the social function until the Hawthorne experiment
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 came along and discovered that the two were inseparable. If a factory’s human
organization is out of balance all the efficiency systems in the world will not
improve the output.” (p. 72)

Other significant results:

Regular medical examinations did not show any signs of cumulative fatigue.
Absenteeism dropped by 80%
Each girl developed her own technique for putting the relays together, and
would often vary the task just to make it interesting. The intelligent the
greater number of variations.
Group given considerable freedom of movement, came and went as
pleased, not pushed around. Group developed increased sense of
responsibility, discipline came from within group.
Feelings counted more than hours of work or wages. Equity – were they
receiving fair wages compared to others. High wages little ground for
satisfaction if job was low-status. Workers not primarily motivated by
economic incentives.

“Underneath the stop-watches and bonus plans of the efficiency experts, the
worker is driven by a desperate inner urge to find and environment where he can
take root, where he belongs and has a function; where he sees the purpose of his
work and feels important in achieving it. Failing this, he will accumulate frustrations
and obsessions. ‘Fatigue’, and ‘monotony’ are effects of frustration rather than the
causes of it. For their neglect of the human function of production, managers have
paid a high price in strikes, restricted output, and a vast sea of human waste.”
Simply put, the girls were paid attention to. Detailed interviews of their work and
eating and sleeping habits were taken. Their opinion mattered.

3. The Bank Wiring Room Study

This experiment further highlighted the fact that the social work group is
important in influencing the behaviour of employees and the amount of work they
would do. Observers had noted that certain work groups effectively restricted
output despite wage incentives via group pressure.
Mayo decides to study one of these departments – the bank wiring room. The
work consisted of attaching wires to switches for certain parts of telephone
equipment.

Fourteen men worked in a room - 9 attached wires, 3 soldered, and 2 inspected.

This was purely observational research, no changes were made. An observer was
present in room (employees get used to this), and another researcher, who never
entered the room, would interview the men off the job. The goal was to find out as
much as possible about the worker’s feelings, thoughts and attitudes, values and
family history. Total confidentiality and trust was ensured.
Observations:

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 Men working together had spontaneously developed into a team with
natural leaders who had risen to the top with the active consent of the
group (do not necessarily or even usually coincide with those put in
authority by management, but have greater power in group than
management).
Complete indifference by group to management financial incentives.
Output restricted to exactly 6000 units per day even though 7000 was
possible.

Values and customs of the group were more important to the individuals than
monetary incentives. Social norms developed, never clearly expressed, of what was
considered to be a fair day’s work. The men adopted an unofficial code of behavior:
1. You should not turn out too much work. If you do you are a ‘rate buster.’
2. You should not turn out too little work. If you do you are a ‘chiseller’.
3. You should not tell a supervisor anything that will react to the detriment of
an associate. If you do, you are a ‘squealer’.
4. You should not attempt to maintain social distance or ‘act officious’. If you
are an inspector, for example, you should not behave like one.

Here there was a highly integrated group with its own social structure and code of
behaviour – a code which conflicted not only with the intentions of management
but also with the expressed purpose and social function of industry, which is to
produce more goods. There are two lessons to be learned:
1. No collection of people can be in contact for any length of time without
such informal groupings arising and natural leaders being pushed to the
top.
2. It is not only foolish but futile to try to break up these groups; a wise policy
would see to it that the interests of management and workers coincided to
such an extent that the collection of informal groups which makes up a
factory would be working towards the same goals instead of frustrating
each other’s efforts.

Overall summary of conclusions to be drawn from Mayo’s Hawthorne Studies

(J.A.C. Brown, p. 85):

1. Work is a group activity

2. The social world of the adult is primarily patterned about work activity.
3. The need for recognition, security, and sense of belonging is more
important in determining workers’ morale and productivity than the
physical conditions under which he works.
4. A complaint is not necessarily an objective recital of facts; it is commonly
a symptom manifesting disturbance of an individual’s status position.
5. The worker is a person whose attitudes and effectiveness are conditioned
by social demands from both inside and outside the work plant.
6. Informal groups within the work plant exercise strong social controls over
the work habits and attitudes of the individual worker.
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 7. The change from an established to an adaptive society (i.e., from the
older type of community life to the atomistic society of isolated
individuals, from eotechnic to paleotechnic society) tends continually to
disrupt the social organization of a work plant and industry generally.
8. Group collaboration does not occur by accident; it must be planned for
and developed. If group collaboration is achieved, the work relations
within a work plant may reach a cohesion which resists the disrupting
effects of adaptive society.

The “Hawthorne Effect”

The Hawthorne studies also sensitized us to something we now call the

“Hawthorne Effect.” This refers to the fact that when we make a change in an
organization - in procedures, in management structure, in rules and regulations - with
the hope of positively affecting the work output, that any resulting positive effect on
productivity or quality of work may or may not be due to the change itself. Just as in
the illumination study, work productivity increased regardless of whether light was
increased or not. This means that we can’t always know why productivity increases,
unless we do further investigation.

The Modern Approach to Behaviour in Organizations

Modern texts on Organizational Behavior or the Psychology of Work will at

least briefly discuss Scientific Management and the Hawthorne Studies. As a result of
the Hawthorne studies psychologists studying work behaviour became more
enlightened. It was realized that if we want to increase employee efficiency and
motivation that we have to take more into account than simply monetary reward,
fatigue, and the physical movements of the job. It is agreed by psychologists today that
we But I don’t think that we have discovered anything new about “human nature.” We
have discovered how our views of human nature are instrumental in helping us
achieve the only real goal – to increase employee efficiency and motivation. It shows
us that “science” is not necessarily objective.

Continued in second notes.

Notes written and compiled by L.E. Heglar

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