What the Human Relations School Claims

The Human Relations School holds that an organisation is not a machine of positions but a social system — a network of groups, norms, sentiments and relationships that the organisation chart does not show and that determines much of what actually happens. Its founding proposition is that productivity is a function of social and psychological factors at least as much as of physical conditions or wage incentives.

Its target was the classical model in both its forms: Taylor's economic man, motivated by the differential piece-rate, and Weber's impersonal office, in which the person is irrelevant to the position. Against both, the school put social man — a worker motivated by belonging, recognition and security, whose behaviour is shaped by the group they belong to rather than by the incentive scheme they face.

Context: The Setting and the Cast

The studies ran at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Illinois — a plant of roughly 29,000 employees manufacturing telephone equipment for the Bell System. Western Electric had an unusually progressive personnel regime for its time: pension schemes, sickness benefits, recreation facilities. This matters, because it removes the easy explanation that workers were simply badly treated.

The intellectual context matters too. Hugo Münsterberg's Psychology and Industrial Efficiency (1913) had already opened the question of the worker's mind a decade earlier. Mayo himself came from an unusual background — trained partly in psychopathology, influenced by Pierre Janet's work on obsessive thinking, and by Durkheim's concept of anomie. He was not an industrial engineer looking for efficiency; he was a clinician looking for the social causes of individual distress, and he found a factory to look at.

The Five Phases in Detail

Phase 1 — The Illumination Experiments (November 1924 – April 1927)

Three separate series were run, each more carefully controlled than the last.

• First series (1924–25). Three departments — relay assembly, coil winding and inspection — had illumination varied. Output rose in all three, but with no consistent relationship to light levels. The researchers concluded that other factors had contaminated the results.
• Second series (1926). A test group and a control group were segregated. The test group's light was varied; the control group's was held constant. Both groups increased output by roughly similar amounts. The variable being tested had no distinguishable effect.
• Third series (1926–27). Light for the test group was reduced step by step — to ten, then five, then three foot-candles. Output continued to rise until illumination fell so low that the operators protested they could no longer see what they were doing.

The suggestion experiment. In one variation, operators were told the lighting was being improved while bulbs of the same wattage were substituted; they reported the room was brighter and more pleasant. Told the light was being reduced while the same bulbs were again substituted, they complained of dimness. Nothing had changed but the announcement. This is the cleanest single demonstration in the whole programme that perception, not physical condition, was driving the response — and it is a detail almost no aspirant knows.

The verdict at the time: the researchers declared the illumination study a failure. Illumination, they concluded, is only one and apparently a minor factor among many affecting output, and "the human factor" had defeated the experimental design. That admission of failure is what prompted the far more ambitious relay-room study.

Phase 2 — The Relay Assembly Test Room (April 1927 – 1932)

The setup. Five women assembled telephone relays — each relay comprising some thirty-five parts and taking about a minute — with a sixth acting as layout operator supplying components. Two operators were chosen first and invited to select the rest, so the group began as friends. They were moved to a separate room with a test-room observer seated with them, whose role combined record-keeping with a deliberately friendly, consultative style. Output was recorded automatically: each completed relay dropped through a chute and punched a hole in a moving paper tape, giving continuous, objective data.

Thirteen experimental periods were run over the first two years, with the room continuing until 1932.

The result. Output rose roughly 30 per cent across the study. The decisive moment was Period 12: rest pauses, the free lunch and the shortened week were all withdrawn and conditions returned exactly to those of Period 3 — and weekly output reached its highest recorded level to that point. If material conditions caused productivity, removing them should have reduced it. It did not.

What changed instead. The researchers concluded that the operative variables were social: the women had become a cohesive group with a distinct identity; they were consulted before every change and could veto proposals; the observer supervised in a friendly, non-punitive manner unlike the departmental foreman; and they enjoyed the status of being the plant's most-watched employees.

The replacement of two operators. At the end of the eighth period, in January 1928, two of the original operators were removed from the study — the record cites declining output, excessive talking and, in the language of the time, insubordination. They were replaced by two others, one of whom, needing money for a sick family member, became the group's informal pacesetter. Mayo's account treats this as incidental; Carey's later reading treats it as decisive. You should mention it in any critical answer.

Phase 3 — The Two Control Studies (August 1928 – September 1930)

This is the phase standard notes omit, and it exists for a reason the exam rewards understanding. The relay room had changed four things at once: the pay system, the physical conditions, the supervisory style, and the social composition of the group. No conclusion about which mattered could be drawn. Western Electric therefore ran two further studies, each changing one thing.

Phase 4 — The Mass Interviewing Programme (September 1928 – 1930)

Origin. The programme began not as research but as a practical exercise: material was needed for supervisor training, so employees were asked what they thought of their supervision, their jobs and their conditions.

The methodological turn. The first year used a directed interview with a fixed questionnaire. Interviewers found that employees kept straying from the schedule to talk about what actually mattered to them — and that the digressions were more revealing than the answers. From 1929 the method shifted to non-directive interviewing: the interviewer listened, did not lead, did not argue, did not advise. Average interview length rose from around thirty minutes to about ninety. In total 21,126 employees were interviewed.

What it found.

• Complaints are symptoms, not facts. A grievance about lockers or equipment often expressed something else entirely — status anxiety, a difficult supervisor, trouble at home. The manifest content masks the latent cause.
• Satisfaction depends on social position. How a worker felt about the job tracked their standing within their group and their personal history far more closely than objective conditions.
• The interview itself was therapeutic. Simply being heard, at length and without judgement, improved morale measurably — a finding so striking that Western Electric institutionalised it, running a personnel counselling programme in the plant for roughly two decades.
• The informal group surfaced. Interviewers kept hearing about deliberate output restriction — which is precisely what prompted the fifth phase.

Its lasting methodological legacy. Non-directive interviewing shaped counselling practice and became a foundation of qualitative field research. This is worth a line: the Hawthorne programme's most durable contribution may be a method rather than a finding.

Phase 5 — The Bank Wiring Observation Room (November 1931 – May 1932)

The setup. Fourteen men — nine wiremen, three soldermen and two inspectors — wiring banks of terminals for telephone switches. The design, shaped by the anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner, was observational rather than experimental: an observer sat in the room recording behaviour without interfering, while an interviewer worked outside. Nothing was manipulated. The point was to watch a group as an anthropologist watches a community.

The paradox. The men were on a group incentive: the more the group produced, the more each earned. Yet the group had fixed its own output at a level below what management's standard rewarded, and enforced it — forfeiting money to do so.

Why they restricted. The reasons the men gave, and the observer inferred, were rational rather than irrational: fear that high output would lead to a cut in the piece-rate; fear that finishing the available work would produce layoffs, an acute anxiety in 1931–32; protection of slower colleagues; and a settled distrust of management's intentions. This is the point to press in an answer — the group was not being emotional; it was insuring itself.

What it established. The informal organisation has its own norms, sanctions, leadership, status hierarchy and boundaries, and it can defeat a formal incentive system designed by engineers. Roethlisberger and Dickson's framework of the formal and informal organisation coexisting within one plant comes directly from this room.

Mayo's Social Theory — Beyond the Findings

Mayo was not principally an industrial researcher. He was a social theorist who used a factory as evidence for a diagnosis of modern civilisation. Answers that stop at "social man" and "informal organisation" miss most of what he actually argued.

1 · The Rabble Hypothesis — Stated Properly

Mayo attributed to classical economics three assumptions, and rejected all three:

1. Society consists of a horde of unorganised individuals — atomised, unattached, related only by exchange.
2. Every individual acts to secure their own self-preservation and self-interest.
3. Every individual thinks logically, to the best of their ability, in service of that interest.

Against these Mayo held that people are group beings before they are individuals; that the desire to stand well with one's fellows outweighs individual economic calculation; and that behaviour is far more often non-logical — governed by sentiment and custom — than logical. Naming all three assumptions, rather than gesturing at "the rabble hypothesis", is precise and rare.

2 · Logical and Non-Logical Behaviour — and the Pareto Circle

Mayo's distinction between logical and non-logical action came from Vilfredo Pareto, whose ideas circulated at Harvard through the seminar convened by the biochemist L. J. Henderson — the so-called Pareto Circle, whose members included Mayo, Roethlisberger and Homans. Pareto's point was that people act from sentiment and then construct rational justifications afterwards. Mayo applied this directly to the shop floor.

Roethlisberger gave it the formulation students should learn: management operates on the logic of cost and efficiency; workers operate on the logic of sentiments; and because neither recognises the other as a logic at all, each finds the other simply unreasonable.

3 · Established Society and Adaptive Society

This is Mayo's central historical thesis and the frame within which everything else sits.

• In the established society — traditional, slow-changing — social codes were stable, membership in a community was secure from birth, and cooperation was spontaneous: nobody had to engineer it.
• In the adaptive society — modern, industrial, technologically restless — change destroys those codes faster than new ones can form. The individual is detached from any stable group, and cooperation must be deliberately created because it no longer arises on its own.

The consequence, borrowing Durkheim's term, is anomie — normlessness. Mayo added a clinical dimension from his early training under the influence of Pierre Janet's psychopathology: the anomic worker falls into obsessive reverie, brooding and preoccupation that no improvement in wages or lighting can touch. Note the contrast worth writing: Mayo used anomie; Weber's parallel term is disenchantment. Do not swap them.

4 · Spontaneous Cooperation and the Social Skill Lag

If cooperation no longer arises spontaneously, securing it becomes the administrator's central task. Mayo's diagnosis of why it is not being secured is his most quoted proposition: technical skill has advanced far faster than social skill. Civilisation has learned to build aircraft and telephone exchanges and has not learned to make people work together. The remedy he proposed was training in the human and social sciences for those who administer — and here his argument takes a turn that his critics never forgave.

5 · The Political Thesis — Why He Is Called Anti-Democratic

In The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization (1945) and The Political Problem of Industrial Civilisation (1947), Mayo extended the argument to politics. The collapse of spontaneous cooperation, he held, explains modern political instability; and the remedy is neither class politics nor collective bargaining but an administrative elite trained in social skill, capable of restoring cooperation from above.

This is why the ideological critics were so severe. Mayo's scheme has almost nothing to say about trade unions, treats conflict as a symptom of failed communication rather than of divergent interests, and locates the solution in a managerial class rather than in workers' own organisation. When you write about the critique of the Human Relations School, this is the substance behind the slogans.

"And Others": The Rest of the School

The Criticism: A Century of Attack

Hawthorne is the most criticised body of research in management history. Organising the attacks chronologically, by what kind of objection each makes, is what demonstrates control.

Wave 1 — The Ideological Critique (1949–1960)

• Reinhard Bendix and Lloyd Fisher (1949), in "The Perspectives of Elton Mayo", argued that Mayo's value premises were managerial and unexamined — he adopted management's definition of the problem without ever asking whether workers might legitimately define it differently.
• Daniel Bell (1947), in "Adjusting Men to Machines", made the sharpest formulation: the school's project is to fit the worker to the production system rather than to ask whether the system should fit the worker.
• Clark Kerr and Lloyd Fisher (1957), in "Plant Sociology: The Elite and the Aborigines", charged that Mayo treats workers as an anthropological subject to be studied and managed by an elite, and that he simply omits trade unions, collective bargaining and the wider political economy.
• Loren Baritz (1960), The Servants of Power, gave the movement its most enduring epitaph: industrial social science placed itself at management's disposal. The associated jibe — "cow sociology": contented cows give more milk — captures the charge that worker satisfaction was pursued instrumentally, as a means to output, not as an end.
• C. Wright Mills extended this: the human relations expert is a technician of a new managerial elite, and the discipline is a science of manipulation.
• Alan Fox's later distinction between the unitary and pluralist frames of reference names the underlying error precisely: the school assumes the organisation has one common goal and therefore that conflict must be pathological, when a pluralist reading would treat divergent interests as legitimate and permanent.

Wave 2 — The Evidential Critique (1967–1978)

• Alex Carey (1967), "The Hawthorne Studies: A Radical Criticism", American Sociological Review. The single most important critical paper. His points:
  • The relay room studied five workers — a sample far too small to support general conclusions.
  • Two operators were replaced for insubordination and falling output, and their more productive replacements drove the group average up. A change in personnel was read as a change in attitude.
  • The group piece-rate introduced in Period 3 was never removed, so a wage incentive ran through every subsequent period and was never controlled for.
  • Supervision in the test room was arguably stricter, not friendlier — the observer disciplined and dismissed.
  • The Second Relay Assembly Group showed that the wage incentive alone raised output — and this finding was de-emphasised.
  Carey's conclusion is deliberately provocative: the studies' own evidence supports the "crude" view that money and discipline drive output, and the human relations interpretation was imposed on data that did not require it.
• H. M. Parsons (1974), "What Happened at Hawthorne?", Science. Argues the mechanism was operant learning with feedback: for the first time the women could see their own continuous output figures, and pay was contingent on output, so they learned to work faster. On this reading there was no mysterious "Hawthorne Effect" at all — just reinforcement.
• Franke and Kaul (1978), "The Hawthorne Experiments: First Statistical Interpretation", American Sociological Review. The first regression analysis of the relay-room data. They attributed the great majority of the variance to managerial discipline (the dismissal of the two operators), the economic adversity of the Depression, and scheduled rest time — leaving little for social factors. Their method was itself later contested, notably by Bloombaum (1983), which is worth noting so your answer does not overclaim.

Wave 3 — The Modern Reanalyses (1992–2011)

• Stephen R. G. Jones (1992) re-examined the relay-room data and found little evidence of a Hawthorne effect of the kind the textbooks describe.
• Levitt and List (2011), "Was There Really a Hawthorne Effect at the Hawthorne Plant?", American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. This is the finding to close on. The illumination data had never been formally analysed and were believed destroyed. Levitt and List located them. Their verdict is blunt: the supposedly remarkable data patterns that generations of textbooks have described are not present in the original records. Output tracked day-of-week and pay-period cycles more closely than it tracked the experimental lighting changes. They allow that subtler Hawthorne-type effects may exist, and propose a better test — comparing responses to experimenter-induced changes against naturally occurring ones — but the famous story is not in the data.
• Izawa, French and Hedge (2011), in Human Factors, independently located archival illumination material at Cornell and made the same broad point: every previous account rested on secondary sources, and the primary data had never been properly analysed.
• Richard Gillespie (1991), Manufacturing Knowledge, offers the constructivist reading: the Hawthorne "findings" were negotiated between researchers, managers and workers, each with interests in the outcome — knowledge produced rather than discovered.
• McCambridge, Witton and Elbourne (2014), a systematic review in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, concluded that the concept is used so loosely across research fields that new and more precise concepts are needed to study research participation effects at all.

Wave 4 — The Standing Theoretical Objections

• The happy worker fallacy. The assumed causal link from satisfaction to productivity has never been robustly established; the correlation is weak and the causation may run the other way.
• Peter Drucker objected that human relations offered psychology without any theory of the enterprise's purpose or of the economic dimension of work, and warned of psychological despotism — the classical school directed the hands, this one manages the personality.
• Herbert Simon held that sentiment analysis is no more rigorous than the proverbs it replaced; the behavioural revolution he led was a demand for testable propositions.
• The Marxist and labour-process objection — conflict between capital and labour is structural, not a failure of communication, and treating it as psychological serves to disarm it.
• Over-correction. In discovering the informal organisation the school under-weighted the formal — and in a large public bureaucracy, structure, rules and hierarchy still do most of the work.
• Closed system still. Like the classicists, the school studied the organisation in isolation from its environment — the objection systems theory and Riggs's ecological approach later formalised.
• Ethical objection. The Bank Wiring men were observed covertly for their group behaviour without being told the study's purpose; by any modern standard the consent was inadequate.
• Contextual generalisation. Findings from one American plant, in one industry, during the Depression, were universalised into a theory of organisations everywhere.

Classical and Human Relations: Complementary, Not Rival

The 2017 stem asked precisely this, and the answer is that the two schools describe different layers of the same organisation.

The complementarity argument: the chart tells you who reports to whom; the informal network tells you whether anything will actually happen. Roethlisberger and Dickson's own framing — formal and informal organisation coexisting and requiring joint study — is the authority for this position.

The Human Relations School and Paper 2: Indian Administration

Cross-Links Across Paper 1

UPSC Previous Year Questions — Verified

Practice Questions For Test Series

1. "The Second Relay Assembly Group and the Mica Splitting Test Room decide the Hawthorne argument." Discuss.
2. "Period 12 is Mayo's evidence; Period 3 is Carey's." Examine the relay-room design and its confounds.
3. "The Hawthorne conclusions outran the Hawthorne evidence." Evaluate in the light of Carey, Franke and Kaul, Jones, and Levitt and List.
4. Explain Mayo's distinction between the established and the adaptive society, and assess its usefulness for understanding administrative morale in India.
5. "Mayo's remedy was an administrative elite, and that is why he is called anti-democratic." Critically examine.
6. "Human relations was cow sociology." Assess Baritz's charge with reference to India's honorarium-based frontline cadres.
7. Examine Kurt Lewin's contribution to the Human Relations School and its neglect in standard accounts.
8. "The Bank Wiring Room shows workers behaving rationally, not emotionally." Discuss.

Answer-Writing Toolkit

Two Introductions

• Empirical hook: "When the lights at Hawthorne were dimmed almost to moonlight and output continued to rise, the classical model of the worker ceased to be tenable. What replaced it — the organisation as a social system of groups, norms and sentiments — is the Human Relations School. That the famous lighting result may never have been in the data at all is a complication the school's defenders must now answer."
• Conceptual: "Mayo's decisive move was to reject the rabble hypothesis — the assumption that society is a horde of unorganised individuals, each self-interested and each thinking logically. Everything the school discovered follows from that rejection."

Two Conclusions

• Balanced: "Mayo's data were weaker than his conclusions, his sympathies lay with management, and he dissolved structural conflict into misunderstanding. Yet the questions he opened — how groups govern output, how sentiment shapes grievance, how being watched changes behaviour — have never been closed, and no administration that ignores them survives contact with its own staff."
• Indian: "Indian administration is formally Weberian and informally Mayoist: the file moves through the channel of submission, but it moves at the speed the informal network permits. Reform that redesigns the chart while ignoring the network will keep failing for reasons the Bank Wiring Room explained in 1932."

Ten Power Keywords

• Rabble hypothesis — three assumptions, all rejected.
• Non-logical behaviour — from Pareto, via the Pareto Circle.
• Established and adaptive society — Mayo's historical thesis.
• Anomie — from Durkheim; do not attribute it to Weber.
• Spontaneous cooperation — what administration must now manufacture.
• Social skill lag — the civilisational diagnosis.
• Period 12 — every privilege withdrawn, output highest yet.
• Binging — the group enforcing its own norm.
• Straightening the record — managing the appearance of output.
• Cow sociology — Baritz's charge in its sharpest form.

Frequently Asked Questions

What were the five phases of the Hawthorne studies?

The illumination experiments (1924–27), run in three series by the National Research Council before Mayo joined; the Relay Assembly Test Room (1927–32), with six women across thirteen experimental periods; the two control studies — the Second Relay Assembly Group and the Mica Splitting Test Room (1928–30) — designed to separate the wage incentive from the social factors; the Mass Interviewing Programme (1928–30) covering 21,126 employees; and the Bank Wiring Observation Room (1931–32), in which fourteen men enforced their own output norm.

What happened in Period 12 of the Relay Assembly Test Room?

In Period 12 all the introduced privileges were withdrawn — rest pauses, the free lunch and the shortened week — and conditions returned exactly to those of Period 3. Output nevertheless rose to its highest recorded level to that point. This is the result on which the human relations interpretation rests: if material conditions caused productivity, removing them should have reduced it.

What were the Second Relay Assembly Group and the Mica Splitting Test Room?

They were control studies run because the first relay room had changed four variables at once. The Second Relay Assembly Group kept five operators in the regular department and changed only the pay system, introducing a small-group piece-rate; output rose about 12 to 13 per cent, and the study was stopped early because other workers resented the arrangement. The Mica Splitting Test Room moved five operators to a separate room with changed supervision and rest pauses while leaving their individual piece-rate untouched; output rose about 15 per cent before declining. Together they suggest that both wage incentive alone and social factors alone raised output.

What is Mayo's rabble hypothesis?

The rabble hypothesis is the set of assumptions Mayo rejected: that society consists of a horde of unorganised individuals; that each acts to secure their own self-preservation and self-interest; and that each thinks logically in service of that interest. Against these he held that people are group beings, that the desire to stand well with one's fellows outweighs economic calculation, and that behaviour is largely non-logical.

What is the difference between the established and the adaptive society?

In the established or traditional society, social codes were stable, group membership was secure and cooperation arose spontaneously. In the adaptive or modern industrial society, rapid technological change destroys those codes faster than new ones form, leaving the individual detached and producing anomie. Cooperation must therefore be deliberately created, which Mayo regarded as the central task of administration.

Have the Hawthorne findings been disproved?

The evidence has been substantially weakened rather than the phenomenon disproved. Alex Carey in 1967 showed the studies were confounded by a wage incentive and by the replacement of two operators; Franke and Kaul in 1978 attributed most variance to discipline and the Depression; Jones in 1992 found little evidence of a Hawthorne effect in the relay data; and Levitt and List in 2011 recovered the original illumination data, long believed destroyed, and found that the dramatic patterns described for decades were not present. Henry Landsberger's defence remains the standard reply: the programme's value lies less in what it proved than in what it made thinkable.

Conclusion

The Human Relations School was not the refutation of classical theory but the discovery of a second layer. Classical theory described the organisation that exists on paper; Mayo and his colleagues described the one that exists in the corridor. The 2017 examiner was right to suggest complementarity — the chart tells you who reports to whom, and the informal network tells you whether anything will actually happen.

Its weaknesses must be conceded, and conceded specifically: the relay room confounded pay with sentiment, two operators were replaced mid-study, the control rooms produced results Mayo's team downplayed, and the illumination data — when finally recovered eighty years later — did not contain the pattern the textbooks had described. Mayo's own remedy, an administrative elite trained in social skill, sits uneasily with democratic politics and ignored organised labour entirely.

And yet the central proposition has survived every attack. An administration is a society before it is a structure, and reform that redesigns the structure while ignoring the society will produce, as it has repeatedly produced in India, a perfectly rational organisation chart above a set of people doing something else entirely.