The Hawthorne Experiments

(Brendan Coutts, 'Management Today' - November/December 2003)

There are no simple coin-in-the-slot explanations for human behaviour - in the workplace or anywhere else - so lets analyse holistically.

Controversy is nothing new in the discussion of the famous Hawthorne experiments. Recently Louis Coutts and Harry Onsman have renewed the debate.It is testimony to their current and ongoing relevance that the original interpretations of the events at Hawthorne remain intact.

The original research was revelationary, extensive and complex, and an enormous number of secondary sub-commentaries, partial reinterpretations and re-reinterpretations were spawned. These discussions and criticisms continued heatedly until about the mid 1980's, when all of the discussion around Hawthorne was scrutinised under the light of the original work in a series of comprehensive reviews and articles (for example, by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld). It was found that the original report remained untainted.

At the root of the original work was the “discovery” that the causes of human behaviour are deeply complex and must be viewed holistically for there to be any real understanding. The criticisms levelled at Hawthorne often fell into the one-dimensional trap of ascribing a particular mechanistic cause to a particular result. But where critics would point to their own single pet causes, the original reporters would identify a range of interrelated factors which affected the entire workplace culture. Much of the criticism of Hawthorne was not in disagreement with the findings of the original investigators. Some critics suggest that one experiment was devalued because of poor experimental procedure, whereas it was the very inability to maintain the boundaries of the experiment which pointed to new and far more significant understanding of workplace behaviour. This type of holistic interpretation of the behaviour of the men and women at the Hawthorne plant, has made the original work a rich source of interpretation and analysis and at the same time very robust.

Misunderstanding of the experiments is widespread. There is excessive and erroneous reference to the “lighting tests” for which, until recently, no data could be found, and which were only a very minor preliminary to the experiments proper. At the same time there has been a lack of discussion about some of the experiments which were far more significant. The often quoted “Hawthorne Effect” is often regarded as central to the findings of the experiments. In fact the original investigators never used the term, and it arose later in sociological literature. Much that has been written about the experiments has been based on secondary and tertiary sources. This appears to be what has happened in Harry Onsman's letter, which makes so many serious errors of fact that it is not possible to address them here. He cites the work of Parsons, but the limitations of that work are shown by Sonnenfeld. There are some lesser inaccuracies in Louis Coutts' article, but they are generally not the ones suggested by Onsman.

The encouraging fact is that both authors seem to agree on the validity of the conclusions drawn from the Hawthorne experiments, some of which are:

• Workers will not behave purely according to the formal rules of the workplace.
• This means that the way workers behave, and the way management thinks they behave can be two different things.
• This results in, and enforces, a failure in communication between different levels in an organisation.
• This causes stress at the level where up-going and down-coming information must be reconciled. In these cases, not only will management not know what is really taking place in their organisation, but they will not be aware that they do not know.

Worker behaviour can rarely be explained purely by basic cause and effect mechanisms.

Where this is recognised and workers are listened to openly and with greater awareness, and where they are involved in decisions which affect them, they will have less fear and more trust.

Where this happens, better communication, morale and productivity are promoted.

The freshness of the Hawthorne experiments lies in that they do not depend on simple mechanistic, coin-in-the-slot solutions. Investigation of the original material yields rich rewards because their humanistic analysis embraces the diversity of factors at play in any human workplace. It is not surprising then, that management consultants, who are faced with the reality of the coalface, are still drawn to the Hawthorne experiments after 70 years.