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What the Hawthorne Studies Taught Us About People at Work
Principles of Management · Chapter 4: The Human Side of ManagementSection 4.2 · lesson 16 of 11713 min · free with a free account
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In this lesson
People at work, and an honest look at the evidence.
- Describe what the studies were designed to test
- State what they are conventionally taken to show
- Define the Hawthorne effect
- Assess the studies honestly, including the reanalysis
Transcript
Everything said in the video, section by section (1,800 words). Read along, or search it.
The Human Side of Management
What the Hawthorne Studies Taught Us
The last section named the research program most closely tied to the behavioral turn. This section examines it properly. These are the Hawthorne studies. Few studies in management are cited more often, or misunderstood more often. We'll describe what they were originally designed to test. It was quite different from what made them famous. We'll walk through all four phases, and state what they are conventionally taken to have shown. Then we'll do something many accounts skip. We'll look honestly at the later reanalysis of the original data. By the end, you should be able to separate what survives scrutiny from what does not. And you'll carry away a practical caution, one that applies every time a manager runs a pilot. For a working manager, that caution may matter more than the history does.
The Research Program
A Narrow Starting Question
The Hawthorne studies were a series of research studies at a large manufacturing plant. They ran across several years, beginning in the mid nineteen twenties. The program was named for the plant's location. Here is the first thing to get right. The research did not set out to study morale, supervision, or group behavior at all. It began with a comparatively narrow, specific question. What effect do physical working conditions have on worker output? More specifically, what happens to output when you change the level of workplace lighting? That is a thoroughly classical question. It treats output as something the physical environment can tune. Keep that starting point in mind. Everything famous about these studies came from an answer that refused to cooperate.
Phase 1
The Illumination Experiments
The earliest phase is known as the illumination experiments. Researchers varied the level of workplace lighting, and tracked the output of workers performing manual tasks. The physical-conditions hypothesis made a straightforward prediction about how output should respond. The result genuinely surprised the researchers running the experiment. Output rose under conditions they had predicted would reduce it. It even rose in a comparison group whose lighting was not increased at all. On the hypothesis being tested, that should not have improved anything. Yet output improved anyway. A comparison group exists precisely so that nothing interesting happens to it. Here, something did. That puzzle is what prompted the far more extensive phases of research that followed.
Phases 2 To 4
Following the Puzzle
Three further phases followed, each examining a different side of the puzzle. The first was the relay assembly test room. A small group of workers was moved to a separate room. There, researchers could vary conditions more deliberately. Rest breaks, hours, and other factors. And they could observe output under close, sustained attention. The interviewing program changed approach entirely. It stopped manipulating conditions. Instead, researchers systematically interviewed large numbers of employees, about their work, their supervisors, and their working conditions. What workers said about their own experience was treated as data worth collecting in its own right. The bank wiring observation room went further still. Researchers watched a small group doing its normal work, largely undisturbed. The goal was to see how the group regulated its own output through informal social dynamics, with no change introduced by the researchers.
Table 4.2.1
4 Phases, Reported and Reexamined
Table four point two point one sets out the four phases. It shows what each reported, and what later scholarship proposed instead. Start with the illumination experiments. Output rose regardless of whether lighting increased, decreased, or stayed the same. The alternative explanation points to statistical and procedural limits in the design, and to other uncontrolled changes at the same time. In the relay assembly test room, output rose across most condition changes. It rose even when conditions reverted toward the original. Later scholars point to three other things going on. The group's composition changed, workers received performance feedback, and a particular pay arrangement was in place. The interviewing program reported that supervision quality, and the chance to express grievances, mattered substantially to worker attitude. The alternative explanation concerns who answers, and how. Self-selection, and social-desirability effects in what employees chose to tell an interviewer. And then the bank wiring room. The group enforced an informal output norm, through social pressure on members above or below it. Here the finding is largely undisputed. So one phase stands apart from the other three. We'll come back to why that matters.
Conventional Interpretation
What the Studies Were Taken to Show
Taken together, the studies were conventionally read as showing three things. First, attention and the social conditions of work affected output. They mattered more than the physical variables the original experiment had actually been designed to test. Second, informal group norms regulated output, independently of the formal incentive scheme in place. That finding comes most directly from the bank wiring observation room. Third, the quality of supervision genuinely mattered to how workers experienced their work, and responded to it. That one draws mostly on the interviewing program, and the relay assembly test room. Of all the findings, the group-norm finding has survived later scrutiny best. Here is what it describes. Workers applied informal social sanctions to colleagues who produced noticeably more, or noticeably less, than the group's accepted pace. And they did it regardless of what the formal incentive scheme rewarded. The group's own standard operated, whatever the official incentive said.
A Term In General Use
The Hawthorne Effect
From this research program came a term that entered general use, well beyond management. The Hawthorne effect is a change in behavior that occurs because a person is aware of being observed. The key part of that definition is the last clause. The change happens independently of whatever specific change is actually being tested. So the observation itself becomes a cause, tangled up with the thing you meant to study. Today the term is used broadly across research methodology. It reaches well beyond management, and even beyond workplace settings. It works as a caution. Measuring something can itself alter the thing being measured. Hold on to that idea, because the next slide complicates where it came from.
The Reanalysis
Going Back to the Original Data
Now the reanalysis, stated plainly. Later scholars went back to the original Hawthorne data and records. The methodological limitations they found are well documented. The samples were small. The controls were incomplete. And the record-keeping did not always let later researchers reconstruct exactly what had changed, and when. On that basis, alternative explanations for the headline results have been proposed. The composition of the small test groups changed over the course of the studies. Workers received performance feedback about their own output during the research. And specific pay incentive structures were in place during different phases. Put together, this reanalysis has a clear consequence for the strong version of the Hawthorne effect. That is the claim that mere observation, by itself, reliably and substantially changes behavior in any comparable setting. The original Hawthorne evidence does not support that claim well. The term's broader usefulness as a caution is a separate matter.
Two Readings
The Illumination Result, Read Twice
It helps to put the two readings of the illumination result side by side. The conventional interpretation says the researchers' attention itself raised output. Social conditions mattered more than the physical variable being studied, and workers responded psychologically to being observed. On that reading, the studies support a broad, general Hawthorne effect. The reanalysis points instead to concrete, documented factors. Group composition changed during the study period. Rest breaks and shortened hours were introduced alongside the lighting changes. Workers received direct feedback on their own output. And the pay incentive structure in place may explain much of the rise. Now notice what the reanalysis does not claim. It does not say the result was fabricated, or that nothing interesting happened. It says several factors besides observation-awareness were present at the same time, and the design never separated them out. That is a narrower and more careful claim than either endorsing the story fully, or dismissing it fully.
Survives Or Not
Sorting the Findings
So what survives, and what does not? Separating the two matters more than a single verdict of true or false. Three things survive scrutiny reasonably well. The first is the bank wiring room's finding. Informal groups enforce their own output norms through social sanction, largely independent of formal incentive. The second is the general caution that observation and measurement can affect what is being measured. That is now a standard concern in research design. The third is qualitative. Supervision quality, and the chance to be heard, mattered to how workers described their own experience of work. Two things do not survive well. One is the strong claim that attention alone, isolated from every other concurrent factor, was the dominant cause of the illumination result. The other is any claim that the original studies had experimental controls rigorous by modern standards. Controls of that kind would have been needed to rule out the alternative explanations in the table. Notice that the survivors are the more modest claims. The casualties are the strong ones.
Why They Still Matter
The Right Questions, Weaker Answers
Given all that, why do the Hawthorne studies keep their place in management history? The reason is worth stating precisely. They redirected the field toward the social and psychological side of work. They did it at a moment when almost no one, in management thought, was looking there systematically at all. And they asked the right questions. Does supervision quality matter? Do informal groups regulate behavior independently of formal incentives? Does being observed change what is observed? Those questions were right, even where the original answers proved weaker than first claimed. A study can be historically consequential and methodologically flawed at the same time. Hawthorne is the clearest case in the management field. For a management student, the lesson to carry forward is practical. Whenever a manager introduces a new program, measures a team closely, or runs a pilot, the extra attention can itself produce a temporary improvement. So a rise seen during unusually close attention is not, on its own, proof that the change under test caused it.
Case Vignette
Camille's Pilot That Didn't Last
Here is that lesson in a composite case, constructed for instruction. Camille is an operations manager at a fictional retailer. She piloted a new checkout procedure at one store, for six weeks. During the pilot she visited the store personally twice a week. She reviewed its numbers closely, and checked in directly with staff about how the new procedure was going. Output and customer-satisfaction scores rose noticeably over those six weeks. Confident in the result, Camille rolled the procedure out company-wide. Then her attention necessarily shifted to broader oversight, across many stores. At the original pilot store, the gains largely disappeared. Results settled back close to where they had started. Without intending to, Camille had run something close to a small-scale repeat of the Hawthorne pattern. It was never fully clear what produced the improvement. Was it the new procedure, or her own close, visible attention to one store? That attention could not be sustained once it was spread thin across every location at once. Next, Subchapter four point three turns to Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs, examined with the same honesty about its evidence.
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