The murky origins of Human Resources

The Hawthorne experiments 100 years ago birthed a new, intrusive approach to managing workers

One hundred years ago this month, an epoch-making series of experiments on American workers began. These took place at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works at Cicero, near Chicago, Illinois, and continued for eight years until they stopped in 1932. Funded by General Electric director Gerard Swope, Raytheon founder Vannevar Bush, Edison vice-president John Lieb and the venerable inventor Thomas Edison himself, the experiments appeared to have dramatic and counter-intuitive results.

The experiments seemed to demonstrate that adjustments in workspace lighting, rules for rest periods and other tweaks could improve workers’ performance – providing workers were consulted beforehand. For those watching, observing and compiling the studies, it looked as if the workers appreciated the attention being given to them and their workspace. This seemed to prove that personnel management, communication and cooperation were the real keys to raising productivity.

The idea that personnel management is key to a happy, more productive workforce is alive and well today in both America and Britain. But if we probe a little deeper into the birth of this belief, it turns out that it only appeared to originate with the Hawthorne experiments. Its real origins lie in the work of Elton Mayo, a professor of industrial research at Harvard Business School who, in 1928, joined Western Electric’s researchers.

Mayo was concerned with combating industrial action and absenteeism, and reducing labour turnover. To do so, he believed it was important ‘to ensure spontaneity of cooperation; that is, teamwork’, to quote his 1945 work, The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilisation. People’s desire to work together, he wrote, is ‘a strong, if not the strongest, human characteristic. Any disregard of it by management or any ill-advised attempt to defeat this human impulse leads instantly to some form of defeat for management itself.’

Mayo effectively used the Hawthorne experiments to justify a new approach among capitalist elites to the labour conflicts of the 1930s and 1940s. According to Mayo, the Hawthorne experiments showed that addressing worker grievances over pay and working conditions would make little difference to productivity. What was key, he argued, was the attention paid to the workforce by management.

According to a caustic appraisal of Mayo from renowned Fortune journalist William H Whyte, the Hawthorne experiments merely confirmed Mayo’s pre-existing bias. Nevertheless, Whyte added, Mayo’s work ‘proved to be an immensely powerful manifesto’ for a new approach to workforce management.

And it was all based on Mayo’s tendentious take on the Hawthorne experiments. When in the 2000s, top US economists eventually discovered the raw Hawthorne lighting data that had long been thought destroyed, they found that descriptions of supposedly remarkable improvements in worker performance proved to be ‘entirely fictional’. Yes, an adjustment to lighting did raise productivity slightly in the first treatment sequence for the first experiment. But this finding was not confirmed in either the second sequence or in the second and third experiments. Furthermore, as Mayo must have known, tests at Hawthorne were abandoned in 1932, when all but one of the women workers there were fired.

Though they may have been partly based on a wilful misrepresentation of research at Western Electric, Mayo’s ideas have proven incredibly influential. For one thing, they played a role in the thinking of Britain’s postwar Labour government. His contention that management needed to ensure ‘spontaneous’ teamwork among workers provided the basis for the human-relations school of management in Britain. And this in turn gave rise to the discipline now known worldwide as Human Resources (HR).

Given Mayo’s focus on the need to manage the emotions of the workforce through consultation and surveillance, it is hardly a surprise that HR threatened to intrude into workers’ private lives. Mayo’s ideas were reinforced by the work of psychologist Kurt Lewin during the Second World War. His studies of ‘change management’ and of the morale of American front-line troops encouraged growing employer interest in employees’ private lives.

By the 1950s, it was considered all too normal for management to be attending to workers’ inner lives. So much so that Whyte, in his bestselling The Organisation Man (1956), warned that management wanted ‘the whole man… and not just part of him’. It wanted ‘in decimal figures a man’s degree of radicalism versus conservatism, his practical judgement, his social judgement, the amount of perseverance he has, instability, his contentment in dark, his hostility to society, his personal sexual behaviour’.

Whyte’s portrait of the proto-HR tyranny may seem a little overcooked. Yet the modern workplace certainly bears the stamp of Mayo and Lewin’s HR dream. Today, potential and new recruits are interviewed and ‘onboarded’ with in-depth questions about their personality traits and interests. Staff are subject to regular performance appraisals and counselling. Many have to engage in Mayo-esque team-building games during awaydays.

Moreover, the field of HR has expanded massively in recent years. In the US, between 2001 and 2022, the number of HR people – including those working in labour relations and job analysis – nearly doubled.

If there is a difference between then and now it’s that the intrusive power of HR is often clothed in rhetoric about mental health. HR departments are concerned about wellbeing rather than productivity, diversity and inclusion rather than the work ethic.

Yet for all HR’s efforts, most workers seem more uninterested in their jobs than ever before. As pollsters Gallup reported in 2023, among full- and part-time employees in North America, Europe and East Asia, less than a quarter are engaged with what they do.

Mayo’s tendentious use of the Hawthorne experiments all those years ago hasn’t led to a satisfied or productive workforce. But it has encouraged management to intrude on workers’ private lives like never before.