IDEAS TO SHAPE THE FUTURE

History, as Mark Twain observed, may not repeat itself but it certainly rhymes. And the future of management is likely to rhyme with great resonance over the forthcoming decades.

Nearly a century ago, in 1926, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Foundation awarded a grant of $100,000 a year for five years to the Committee on Industrial Physiology of Harvard University. This was hardly headline news. But the research undertaken proved truly groundbreaking. The grant was used to explore the reality of working life. How did people really work in factories? What concerned and motivated the people actually doing the work? What factors affected their morale and productivity?

In asking such questions the researchers were taking a radically different route from their predecessors. Their aim was later described as to achieve an “intimate, habitual, intuitive familiarity with the phenomena.” This eventually produced more than 20,000 interviews. The resulting experiments, run by Elton Mayo but involving other researchers (including Harvard’s Fritz Roethlisberger and William Dickson), were carried out at Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois between 1927 and 1932.

The Hawthorne studies began with experiments in which the lighting in the factory was altered. The theory was that brighter light would raise morale and, as a result, increase productivity. The researchers set out to establish the lighting level which maximized productivity without being prohibitively expensive. This seemed straightforward, simply a question of finding the balance between cost and effect.

Hawthorne workers were separated into two groups. In one group the lighting levels were increased: productivity increased. In the other group the lighting remained at its normal level: productivity increased. Lighting levels were further increased, but still the productivity levels in the two groups remained much the same.

This seemed surprisingly inconclusive. How could productivity rise when the lighting remained exactly the same? The researchers, therefore, started reducing lighting levels. They reduced the lighting in one group drastically: productivity increased. Eventually, the light was reduced to extreme dinginess. It was expected that the workers would be depressed and irritable working in moonlight. In fact, their productivity remained at a similar level, and sometimes increased. To prove the point, two workers were isolated in a very small room with minimal lighting. Their productivity continued at a healthy level.

The researchers shook their heads and contemplated what all this meant. They were confused but, being researchers, returned with a more complicated experiment. In the factory’s relay assembly test room, a group of six women who assembled telephone relay switches were selected and isolated in a test room. There they were diligently observed. Conditions were changed and tinkered with. But, nothing seemed to reduce productivity.

The conclusion from the research team was that they had missed something. This something was the relationships, attitudes, feelings, and perceptions of the people involved. The research program had revolved around selecting small groups of workers to be studied. This, not surprisingly, made them feel special. For the first time they actually felt that management was interested in them. The second effect was that the people felt like they belonged to a select team. “The desire to stand well with one’s fellows, the so-called human instinct of association, easily outweighs the merely individual interest and the logic of reasoning upon which so many spurious principles of management are based,” commented Mayo.

History rhymes. In the age of AI and the metaverse, organizations are managed by and for humans. Simply, the management challenge of our times is to make people feel special and to enable them to identify with their group.

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