Exhibit at Baker Library Marks HBS Centennial

Elton Mayo (ca. 1946): Supervision attuned to a worker’s psychological needs rather than based on fear or coercion would produce, Mayo believed, “a major revolution in industrial method” and “an almost incredible human advance.”

Fritz J. Roethlisberger (ca. 1958): Eventually succeeding Mayo as the School’s lead researcher at Hawthorne, Roethlisberger, through his summaries of the research conducted there (including the bestseller Management and the Worker), ensured that Mayo’s efforts enjoyed wide exposure.

Barely out of its teens and still unsure of its identity as an institution, Harvard Business School got a big break in 1928. That story is revealed in “The Human Relations Movement: Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments (1924–1933),” the first of several exhibitions in Baker Library marking the Centennial year of HBS. On display through January 17, the exhibit may also be viewed online at Baker Library.

As the manufacturing arm of AT&T, Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant, located outside Chicago in Cicero, Illinois, was known for the practice of “scientific management” (as espoused by time-and-motion guru Frederick Taylor). Tens of thousands of employees in the Hawthorne facility’s multiple and diverse production units made most of America’s telephones and related equipment. Four years after the company launched a study of its workers’ productivity, a perplexed Hawthorne official invited HBS professor Elton Mayo to visit and peruse the study’s ambiguous data, “to see what he can tell us about what we’ve found out.”

Over time at Hawthorne, Mayo and his protégé, HBS professor Fritz J. Roethlisberger, discovered that physical working conditions and financial incentives were less important in determining employee productivity than employees’ feelings about their colleagues, jobs, and life outside work. “Management, then, was not about controlling human behavior but unleashing human possibility,” as HBS associate professor Rakesh Khurana and HBS assistant professor Michel Anteby write in their introduction to the exhibit.

Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room (ca. 1930): Selected to work in an experimental test room, six young women employees noted, as did Mayo, that the setting’s intimacy engendered stronger friendships than occurred on the factory floor. Over time, their productivity increased as well. These findings helped Mayo and Roethlisberger conclude that mental attitudes, interpersonal relationships, and proper supervision were keys to productivity and job satisfaction.

Mayo and Roethlisberger, through their work and that of HBS colleagues who picked up their mantle, were instrumental in establishing the importance of human relations in the organizational and industrial setting. And for the School, the two men helped set in place what was to become the cornerstone of HBS’s academic foundation: field-based empirical research.