The Hawthorne effect is the increase in productivity resulting from observation by management or researchers. The effect was discovered in experiments conducted between 1924 and 1932 at the Hawthorne Works plant. The experiments tested various factors, and lead researcher Elton Mayo concluded that productivity depended on organizational sociology. The Hawthorne effect was only isolated and named later. It provided the theoretical foundation for human relations in business and serves as a warning to researchers. While subsequent evidence has questioned its extent, it remains a fundamental principle in business psychology and sociology.
The Hawthorne effect refers to the improvement in a worker’s productivity that results from observation by management or researchers. The data that ultimately led to this conclusion came from experiments conducted between 1924 and 1932 at the Hawthorne Works plant, owned by the Western Electric corporation. The experiments were originally intended to determine how different variables affected workers’ output. The Hawthorne effect, which concerns the effects of observation, was not one of the variables initially tested; the observation conclusions were drawn only later, in retrospective analyses.
The original experiments at the Hawthorne Works facility tested for a variety of different factors. The researchers conducting this research tested things like the distance and times of breaks, the amount of payment, the length of the working day, and the allocation of food to workers. Lead researcher, Elton Mayo, pointed out that productivity depended on organizational sociology. He used the findings to argue that factors such as workplace norms and relationships with managers had a major impact on worker speed.
It was only in a later analysis of the data that the Hawthorne effect was isolated and given a specific name. Henry Landsberger, in 1958, published a book called Hawthorne Revisited which he specifically named and described the effects of pure observation. Landsberger also noted that workers appeared to work harder after each protocol change, even if this change simply represented a return to the previous procedure.
The Hawthorne effect provided the theoretical foundation for the business field of human relations. He introduced the idea that paying attention to workers, even if this attention is extremely passive, can increase motivation. The idea of the Hawthorne effect thus provided a justification for layers of the corporate structure responsible not for management per se, but simply for attention.
The existence of the Hawthorne effect has also served as a warning sign to researchers in the social sciences. In particular, it indicates that care should be taken when designing experiments to compare one type of change with another type of change, rather than no type of change. Otherwise, an experiment could associate a false positive with a specific variable rather than with the effect of the change in general.
Subsequent evidence has questioned the extent of the Hawthorne effect. A recent article published in the Economist suggests that the Hawthorne effect itself ignores some other features of an experiment. For example, if variables always change on weekends, changes attributed to the Hawthorne effect always occur on Monday. The article suggests that productivity gains always occur on Mondays, regardless of experimental observation. However, the Hawthorne effect has become a fundamental principle in business psychology and sociology.
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