Scientific Management

rom 1924[-]32, an innovative series of research studies was funded by the Western Electric Company at its Hawthorne plant in Chicago, then a manufacturing division of AT&T. The plant was one of the oldest in operation and employed approximately 25,000 of Western Electric's 45,000 workers. The research proceeded through five phases: (1) The initial Illumination studies (1924[-]27) were aimed at evaluating the effect of lighting conditions on productivity; (2) the Relay-assembly Room studies (August 1928[-]March 1929) assessed the effects of pay incentives, rest periods, and active job input on the productivity of five selected woman workers; (3) the Mica-Splitting Test group (October 1928[-]September 1930) in which a group of piece-workers were used to corroborate the relative importance of work-group dynamics vs. pay incentives; (4) the Bank Wiring Observation group (November 1931[-]May 1932) a covert observational design in which the dynamics of control in a work-group of 14 male employees on the regular factory floor were observed; and (5) the plantwide Interviewing program (September 1928[-]early 1931) essentially an attempt by the company to categorize concerns, mitigate grievances, and manipulate employee morale according to the principles of social control learned in the previous phases). The latter two phases were interrupted by the detrimental effects of the Great Depression on company production orders, but the interviewing phase was later reinstated as a "Personnel Counseling" program, and was even expanded throughout the Western Electric company system between 1936[-]1955.
The Hawthorne effect, defined as the tendency under conditions of observation for worker productivity to steadily increase, was discovered during the earliest "scientific management" phases of the research. It was suggested that when human work relations (ie., supervision and worker camaraderie) were appropriate, adverse physical conditions had little negative effect upon worker