HAWTHORNE STUDIES

What did the Hawthorne Studies that were conducted in the 1920's teach us about the concept of organizational culture?

What did the Hawthorne Studies that were conducted in the 1920's teach us about the concept of organizational culture?

Human Resource Management

Human Resource Management (HRM) is a formal program designed to enhance the effective and efficient use of staff to achieve organizational goals. Essentially it is the people practice and the hiring of new employees to become members of their success. Human Resource can be compared and analyzed with the management process in a way that management process reviews human resource activates in a broader picture. The implementation of process management seems to be very stringent: "In practice however, this process seems too difficult to understand and put into action."

Concept of organisational culture taught by the Hawthorne Studies

Hawthorne studies are a very well known name in the field of psychology because of their contribution to understanding organizational behaviour and the effect of their explanation of the organizational culture. To properly be able to understand the concept of organizational culture, and the concept the studies highlight about them, it is essential to thoroughly understand the studies themselves (Katzell, R. A. pp. 803-835).

The Hawthorne Studies (Overview)

A number of research investigations were carried out at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne plant in Illinois from 1924 to 1933 that have become collectively known as the Hawthorne studies. All but the first of these were carried out by a research team led by Elton Mayo of Harvard University. Mayo and his research team were initially interested in how changes in the work environment would impact the productivity of factory workers. These research interests were quite consistent with the prevailing theories of classical management, especially Frederick Taylor's Theory of Scientific Management.

The Hawthorne Studies Findings

The results did not indicate any connection between illumination and productivity, so two more tests were conducted in a single department, comparing the productivity of a control group to that of a test group working under varied amounts of light (in the second test) and under artificial lighting (in the third test). Again, the results did not show any relationship between lighting and productivity, and the research team was puzzled by these outcomes.

After further informal experiments ending in April 1927, the engineers could only conclude that lighting was at best a minor factor affecting output, and that in large departments there were too many uncontrollable variables present to be able to accurately evaluate the effect of any single variable. At this point, the engineers added Fritz J. Roethlisberger from the Graduate School of Business Administration at Harvard University to their research team. William Dickson, the chief of employee relations research at the Hawthorne plant, was also assigned to work on the experiments (Mayo, 1945).

Elton Mayo, also of Harvard, provided "help and guidance" to the researchers. This group of collaborators designed another study involving a small group of workers isolated in a single room (the "Relay Assembly Test Room") where work-related factors ...