What is the effect of Hawthorne?
The effect of Hawthorne concerns the improvement of the productivity of the worker that results from observation by management or researchers. The data that this conclusion eventually provided came from experiments made between 1924 and 1932 at the Hawthorne Works, which is owned by the Western Electric Company. Experiments were originally intended to determine how different variables influenced the output of workers. The effect of Hawthorne, which concerns the effects of observation, was not originally tested by one of the variables; The conclusions of the observation were only later drawn in retrospective analyzes. Scientists who conducted this research have tested things such as a gap and the timing of breaks, the amount of payment, the length of the working day and the food allocation to workers. Head researcher Elton Mayo stressed that productivity depends on organizational sociology. The results use that factors such as standards in the workplace and managers relationships had a strong impact on the speed of workers.
Only in a later data analysis was the effect of Hawthorneisolated and got a specific name. Henry Landsberger, in 1958, published a book entitled Hawthorne Revisited , which named and specifically described the effects of pure observation. Landsberger also noted that it seemed that workers were working harder after any protocol change, although this change simply was a conversion to the previous procedure.
Hawthorne effect provided the theoretical basis for the corporate area of human relations. She introduced the idea that paying attention to workers, although this attention is extremely passive, can increase motivation. The idea of the effect of Hawthorne thus provided the justification of the layers of the corporate structure responsible not for manuging itself, but simply for attention.
The existence of the effect of Hawthorne also served as a warning brand for scientists in social sciences. Specifically, this means that when designing experiments must be taken care of being comparedOne type of change with a different type of change rather than any type of change. Otherwise, the experiment could combine false positive with one specific variable than with the effect of variation in general.
Later evidence questioned the size of the Hawthorne effect. The recent article published in The Economist suggests that Hawthorne's effect ignores some other features of the experiment. For example, if the variable always changes at the weekend, the changes attributed to the Hawthorne effect will always appear on Monday. The article suggests that increased productivity always appears on Monday, regardless of experimental observations. The Hawthorne effect, however, has become the basic principle of corporate psychology and sociology.