ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

HAWTHORNE STUDIES & ITS

CRITICAL ANALYSIS

HAWTHORNE EFFECT: (DEFINITION)

Observation that employee motivation is affected as much or more by recognition and show of concern,
as it is by improvements in their work conditions. Observed by the US productivity researcher George
Elton Mayo (1810-1949), during 1927 to 1933 at the Hawthorne (Illinois) plant of Western Electric
company (where he was assessing the effects of lighting conditions). He reported that the worker
performance went up and up whether the lighting was good or bad, because (presumably) workers were
responding to the management's show of concern for their problems. This study was later severely
criticized as too skimpy and unscientific to be of any practical value.

SUMMARY:
Keeping in view the various critiques already held on Hawthorne studies, I
think we could see the Hawthorne effect at several levels.

At the top level, it seems clear that in some cases there is a large effect that experimenters did not
anticipate, that is due to participants' reactions to the experiment itself. This is the analogue to the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle but (unlike in quantum mechanics) it only happens sometimes.
So as a methodological heuristic (that you should always think about this issue) it is useful, but
as an exact predictor of effects, it is not: often there is no Hawthorne effect of any kind. To
understand when and why we will see a Hawthorne or experimenter effect, we need more
detailed considerations.

At a middle level, I would go with Adair (1984), and say that the most important (though not the
only) aspect of this is how the participants interpret the situation. Interviewing them (after the
"experiment" part) would be the way to investigate this.

This is important because factory workers, students, and most experimental participants are
doing things at the request of the experimenter. What they do depends on what their personal
goals are, how they understand the task requested, whether they want to please the experimenter
and/or whether they see this task as impinging on other interests and goals they hold, what they
think the experimenter really wants. Besides all those issues that determine their goals and
intentions in the experiment, further aspects of how they understand the situation can be
important by affecting what they believe about the effects of their actions. Thus the experimenter
effect is really not one of interference, but of a possible difference in the meaning of the situation
for participants and experimenter. Since all voluntary action (i.e. actions in most experiments)
depends upon the actor's goals AND on their beliefs about the effects of their actions, differences
in understanding of the situation can have big effects.

At the lowest level is the question of what the direct causal factors might be. These could
include:

 Material ones that are intended by the experimenter

 Feedback that an experiment might make available to the participants
 Changes to motivation, goals, and beliefs about action effects induced by the
experimental situation.

INTERPRETATION AND CRITICISM:

H. McIlvaine Parsons (1974) argues that in the studies where subjects received feedback on their
work rates, the results should be considered biased by the feedback compared to the
manipulation studies. He also argues that the rest periods involved possible learning effects, and
the fear that the workers had about the intent of the studies may have biased the results.

Parsons defines the Hawthorne effect as "the confounding that occurs if experimenters fail to
realize how the consequences of subjects' performance affect what subjects do" [i.e. learning
effects, both permanent skill improvement and feedback-enabled adjustments to suit current
goals]. His key argument is that in the studies where workers dropped their finished goods down
chutes, the "girls" had access to the counters of their work rate.

It is possible that the illumination experiments were explained by a longitudinal learning effect. It
is notable however that Parsons refuses to analyze the illumination experiments, on the grounds
that they have not been properly published and so he cannot get at details, whereas he had
extensive personal communication with Roethlisberger and Dickson.

But Mayo says it is to do with the fact that the workers felt better in the situation, because of the
sympathy and interest of the observers. He does say that this experiment is about testing overall
effect, not testing factors separately. He also discusses it not really as an experimenter effect but
as a management effect how management can make workers perform differently because they
feel differently. A lot to do with feeling free, not feeling supervised but more in control as a
group. The experimental manipulations were important in convincing the workers to feel this
way that conditions were really different. The experiment was repeated with similar effects on
mica splitting workers.
The Hawthorne effect has been well established in the empirical literature beyond the original
studies. The output ("dependent") variables were human work, and the educational effects can be
expected to be similar (but it is not so obvious that medical effects would be). The experiments
stand as a warning about simple experiments on human participants viewed as if they were only
material systems. There is less certainty about the nature of the surprise factor, other than it
certainly depended on the mental states of the participants: their knowledge, beliefs, etc.

Research on the demand effect also suggests that people might take on pleasing the experimenter
as a goal, at least if it does not conflict with any other motive, but also, improving their
performance by improving their skill will be dependent on getting feedback on their
performance, and an experiment may give them this for the first time. So you often will not see
any Hawthorne effect—only when it turns out that with the attention came either usable feedback
or a change in motivation.

In a 2011 paper, economists Steven Levitt and John A. List claim that in the illumination
experiments the variance in productivity is partly accounted for by other factors such as the
weekly cycle of work or the seasonal temperature, and so the original conclusions were
overstated. If so, this confirms the analysis of SRG Jones's 1992 article examining the relay
experiments.
 ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

Submitted To:
Mam. Khaula Walayat
Submitted By:
Muhammad Anjum
L3F09MCOM5564