Lessons from Hawthorne Experiments and Understanding the Behavior of Working Groups (Essay Sample)

Evolution of Management Thought
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1. What lessons can we learn from the “Hawthorne Experiments”?
Hawthorne is an electric plant designed by the Western Electric Company that was established in 1920’s by Fritz Roethlisberger and Elton Mayo. Experiments were done on Hawthorne plant employees and the experiments made emphasis on social and psychological aspects of their behavior in the company. Vannevar Bush, an MIT professor in 1924 started series of experiments at the company. Bush wanted to find out the effect of certain changes in the work environment on the productivity of employees. In this paper, we explain the experiments and the lessons learned from the Hawthorne experiments (Warne & Busse, 2017. pp.91-114).
The illumination study was the first study. When the researcher switched on the lights, productivity increased. This, however was not the expectation of the researchers. But Bush together with his team decided that the attention that was paid to them caused the changes in output (Warne & Busse, 2017, pp.91-114).
Moving on, Elton Mayo and his team in 1927 went to Hawthorne Works to undertake the second set of experiments. The Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments was the first Round. In this experiment, a group of six women was isolated with an established production rate. The women’s production of telephone relay totaled to 2400 a week (Warne & Busse, 2017, pp.91-114).
In the five years that followed, the researchers tried out twenty-three different changes to the environment of work to observe any occurrences. Productivity increased more and more and by the end of the first phase of experiments, it was noted that productivity was not affected by the changes in the physical environment (Warne & Busse, 2017, pp.91-114).
In 1931, the Bank Wiring Observation Room experiment was established by