1. Introduction
"Human Relations" is an expression that is frequently used to designate the ways in which managers interact with their subordinates. When "personnel management" encourages more and better jobs, we have "good" human relationships in the organization. When morale and efficiency deteriorate, human relationships are "poor." To create good human relationships, managers need to know why employees act the way they do and what social and psychological factors motivate them.
2. Hawthorne's experiments
A famous series of studies on human behavior in work situations was carried out at the Western Electric company between 1924 and 1933. Over time they became known as the "Hawthorne Studies" because many of them took place in Westerri Electric's Hawthorne plant near Chicago The studies aimed to investigate the relationship between light level in the workplace and employee productivity - the kind of issue Frederick Taylor and colleagues would have addressed.
In some of the early studies, Western Electric researchers divided staff into experimental groups, which were subjected to deliberate lighting changes, and control groups, whose lighting remained constant throughout the experiments. The results were ambiguous. When the lighting conditions of the experimental groups were improved, productivity tended to increase as expected, although the increases were not uniform. But productivity tended to continue to increase when lighting conditions worsened, and to further complicate matters, the output of control groups also tended to improve when their lighting conditions changed, although no changes had been made to control group lighting.It was evident that something other than lighting was influencing worker performance.
In a new set of experiments, a small group of workers was placed in a separate room and some variables were altered: wages were increased; rest periods of various lengths were introduced; the working day and the working week were shortened. The researchers, now serving as supervisors, also allowed the groups to choose their rest periods and weigh in on other proposed changes. And again the results were ambiguous. Performance tended to increase over time, but it increased and decreased unevenly. Elton Mayo (1880 1949) and some of his colleagues from Harvard University, including Fritz J. Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson, participated in this series of experiments.
In these experiments and in subsequent ones, Mayo and his colleagues decided that financial incentives, when offered, were not the cause of increases in productivity. They believed that a complex chain of attitudes had affected these increases. Because they had been selected for special attention, the experimental and control groups acquired group pride that motivated them to improve their job performance. The friendly supervision had further reinforced the intensification of his motivation. The researchers concluded that employees would put more effort into the job if they think management cares about their well-being and supervisors pay special attention to them. This phenomenon was later called the Hawthorne effect.
The researchers also concluded that informal work groups (the social environment of the staff) have a great influence on productivity. Many of the employees considered their work boring and meaningless. But their relationships and friendships with coworkers, sometimes influenced by common antagonism against "bosses," gave their working life some meaning, providing them with a partial means of protection against management. For these reasons, peer pressure, and not peer pressure, often had the greatest influence on staff productivity.
Thus, for May the concept of social man "(motivated by social needs, looking for relationships at work and responding more to the pressures of the work group than to administrative control) had to replace the old concept of" rational man »Motivated by personal financial needs.»
3. Contributions and limitations of the human relations approach
Contributions. By highlighting social needs, the human relations movement improved the classical perspective that viewed productivity almost exclusively as an engineering problem. In a way, Mayo rediscovered Robert Owen's old principle that a genuine interest in workers, "life machines" as Owen used to call them, would pay dividends.
In addition, these researchers emphasized the importance of manager style and thereby revolutionized manager training. The focus was increasingly focused on teaching administrative skills as opposed to technical skills. Lastly, his work revived interest in group dynamics. Administrators began to think based on group processes and rewards to complement their previous focus on the individual.
Limitations. Although Hawthorne's experiments profoundly influenced how managers conceived of their work and how management research was later conducted, they had many design, analysis, and interpretation deficiencies. The consistency of the Mayo and colleagues' conclusions with the data is still the subject of much debate and much confusion.
The concept of "social man" was an important counterweight to the one-sided model of "rational economic man"; but it also did not fully describe individuals in the workplace. Many administrators and writers assumed that the satisfied employee would be more productive. However, attempts to increase production in the 1950s by improving working conditions and staff satisfaction did not deliver the impressive productivity improvement that had been expected.
Apparently, the social environment of the workplace is only one of the interaction factors that influence productivity. Here are others: salary levels, the degree of interest in the tasks, the culture and organizational structure, the relationships between employees and managers. In conclusion, the issue of productivity and worker satisfaction has turned out to be a more complex problem than originally thought.
4. From human relations to the behavioral science approach
Mayo and his colleagues were the first to apply the scientific method to their studies of people in the workplace. Later researchers had more rigorous training in the social sciences (psychology, sociology, and anthropology), also using more refined research methods. Hence the latter have been called "behavioral scientists and not" human "relations theorists.
Mayo and human relations theorists introduced the concept of "social man," motivated by the desire to establish relationships with others. Some behavioral scholars, including Argyris, Maslow, and McGregor, argued that the concept of "self-actualizing man more accurately explained man's motivation.
According to Abraham Maslow, the needs that we are motivated to satisfy fall into a hierarchy. At the bottom of this are the physical and security needs. At the top are the needs of the ego (the need for respect, for example) and those of self-realization (among which is the need for meaning and personal growth). In general, lower-level needs have to be met before higher-level needs are examined. Since many of them have been satisfied in the modern world, almost all of us are motivated, at least in part, by those of the ego and those of self-realization. The manager who knows these needs is in a position to use different ways to motivate his subordinates.
Some psychologists thought years later that this model is also inadequate to properly explain what motivates the worker. They claim that not everyone passes predictably from one level to another in the hierarchy of needs. For some, work is merely a means of meeting their lower order needs. Others are just content to see their higher order needs met, and sometimes even opt for jobs that threaten their safety in order to achieve unique goals. For these behavioral scientists, the most realistic model of human motivation is the "complex man." The good manager knows that no two people are exactly alike, and he tailors his attempts to influence people by catering to their individual needs.
Download the original file
