He found that factory workers produced more when someone paid attention to them.
George Elton Mayo was born in Adelaide, Australia, in 1880. He studied philosophy and psychology at the University of Adelaide before moving to the United States, where he joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1926.1 His most significant work began in 1928, when he was invited to investigate puzzling results from productivity experiments at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois.
The Hawthorne experiments had started in 1924 as a straightforward study of lighting and productivity. Researchers had varied the brightness of the factory floor to find the optimal level. Productivity went up when the lights were brightened. It also went up when the lights were dimmed.2 The physical variable could not explain the result.
Mayo and his colleagues, including Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson, conducted a series of follow-up experiments between 1928 and 1932 involving relay assembly workers, interviewing programs, and bank wiring observation.3 The plant housed over 40,000 workers assembling telephones and cables for AT&T.
Mayo concluded that workers were motivated not primarily by wages or physical conditions but by social relationships, the attention of supervisors, and a sense of belonging to a group.4 The tendency for people to change their behavior when they know they are being observed became known as the Hawthorne Effect.5
In 1933, Mayo published The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization. The ideas did not catch on immediately. Many business schools continued teaching that motivation was primarily about money through the 1950s.6 Mayo died in 1949. The movement he helped launch, the human relations school of management, became the foundation for the fields of organizational behavior and human resource management.