“Write short note on Human Relations School of Thought by Elton Mayo as a social organisation of work process in industry.” (2010)
The Human Relations School arose as a corrective to Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s scientific management, which treated the worker as an isolated “economic man” moved only by pay. Elton Mayo (The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, 1933) and his colleagues argued instead that the factory is a social system. In their view, output depends on group relations, sentiments and supervision as much as on wages and technique.
The Hawthorne studies (Western Electric, Chicago, 1924–32)
- Illumination experiments (1924–27): output rose in both test and control groups whatever happened to the lighting, which pointed to social rather than physical factors.
- Relay Assembly Test Room (1927–32): six women’s output rose over successive changes in rest pauses and hours, and stayed high even when the original conditions returned. The researchers credited attention, cohesion and friendly supervision.
- Interviewing programme: some 21,000 employee interviews revealed that grievances carried personal and social meanings.
- Bank Wiring Observation Room (1931–32): fourteen men enforced their own output norm against the incentive scheme. They sanctioned “rate-busters” and “chiselers” through ridicule and “binging”, so the informal group, not the wage, set production.
The findings were reported in Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, Management and the Worker (1939).
Core propositions
- Work is a group activity, and the worker is a social being seeking belonging and recognition.
- Informal organisation, with its cliques, norms and leaders, exists within every formal structure and can support or resist it.
- Supervisory style, communication and participation shape morale and productivity.
- Mayo drew on Émile Durkheim‘s idea of anomie. He read industrial conflict as a breakdown of social integration that management could repair by rebuilding community at work.
Critiques
- Methodological. Alex Carey (“The Hawthorne Studies: A Radical Criticism”, 1967) argued that the data did not support the conclusions. Output gains fit better with pay incentives, the replacement of two uncooperative workers and tighter discipline. Henry A. Landsberger (Hawthorne Revisited, 1958) coined the term “Hawthorne effect”.
- Managerial bias. The school treated conflict as poor communication rather than a clash of interests. It largely ignored unions and class. Marxists read it as a subtler form of control that enlisted workers’ sentiments.
- Neglect of wider society. John H. Goldthorpe and colleagues (The Affluent Worker, 1968) found Luton car workers with an instrumental orientation, shaped outside the factory, which the human relations view could not explain.
Relevance to India
- N. R. Sheth (The Social Framework of an Indian Factory, 1968) found shop-floor relations organised through caste, kinship and village ties. The informal group in India carries the wider social structure into the factory.
- Quality circles and employee-engagement programmes carry Mayo’s legacy forward. The 2024 Samsung strike at Sriperumbudur showed their limits: workers wanted union recognition, not only welfare measures.
Conclusion
Mayo’s lasting contribution was to show that the work process is socially organised. It paved the way for studies of informal organisation from Chester Barnard to Michael Burawoy. Its weakness was to ignore power, which later sociology put back at the centre.