Betty Woods of the State Street Council and lots of activities happening during
people week along State Street. This is [inaudible]...WBBM Chicago. Well I was an
observer stationed in the test room during the experiments, and my job was to
keep accurate records of all that happened, create and maintain a friendly
atmosphere, and exercise partial supervisory function.
When they asked me would I like to work in a test room, I thought it was gonna
be something different than what they were doing. My name was Theresa Lehmann at
that time. Well we liked it. All of us liked it. You know, every day we had to do
something different. It wasn't the same thing over and over. We had men working
with us, Mr. Highberger and Mr. Chipman, mostly Mr. Chipman. He was there with us
all the time. He was nice. He was real nice. Hi Mr. Chipman. Hi [inaudible]! Are you in to see
the old game? I sure am. Did you ever hear of the Hawthorne studies? It
probably is in a textbook on human relations. It doesn't mention the Hawthorne
studies .1924 was the year it started. It all happened at this plant, the Hawthorne
Works.
[Theresa] Hi! [laughing]
[camera click] Theresa! [camera click]
[indistinct chatter]
[Man] How are you? [Theresa] Oh just fine. How are you? [Man] You look like the
blushing bride. [Theresa] [laughs]
Hi Mr. [inaudible].
[Indistinct chatter] [Theresa] Oh no that's my book. [laughter]
[Theresa] My pictures.
[Man] Oh your pictures.
[Indistinct chatter]
You know, this is really a fun deal to get together with a gang like this that
you haven't seen for so long. [Woman] Oh it is.
[Man] When is Theresa gonna show us what she has in the book there?
[Man] Yeah that's a pretty impressive looking book.
[Theresa] Oh some old-time pictures... [inaudible]. This is me. I was maybe about 18
years old on that picture. [Woman] Now what year would these be?
The roaring 20s, an era of excitement
like few others in American history, an era of uproar in
well, everything. A scandalous dance called the Charleston caught on bringing
hemlines up so they could swing to the new music. Ladies bobbed their hair and
covered it with cloche hats. The noble experiment tried vainly to erase demon
drink from America. Speakeasies, though, became as common as
prohibition agents, and bootleggers were both the heroes and the villains of the
age. Scarface Al Capone was a legendary example. Harding headlined the executive
branch and teapot dome, but America kept cool with Coolidge.
A young pilot named Charles Lindbergh flew nonstop across the Atlantic and
shrank the world, earning its lasting adulation. The incomparable Babe Ruth, too,
is known and loved throughout the world. But perhaps the grandest star of the era was
the automobile. Nothing in the 20s revolutionized the lifestyle of
Americans more than the incredible motorcar. Henry Ford's development of the
assembly line boosted both employment and wages and
set off the modern American industrial revolution. Everywhere, more and more
people went to work in factories, turning out products by the hundreds of millions,
but somewhere along the assembly line, the workers often got lost in the rush
of production. Considered an extension of the machinery, the industrial man was
often less important than his output. Working conditions were difficult,
supervision usually autocratic, and benefits non-existent for most workers.
In sweatshops and even in better factories, it was production that
mattered, At Western Electrics Hawthorne Works in
Chicago in the 1920s, telephone equipment was being manufactured by 40,000 people,
but Hawthorne employees had received their company paid pension plan back in
1906. They had vacations one week after five years, and they had sickness
disability pay. Hawthorne was considered a progressive place to work. Those who
worked at Hawthorne were really respected in the -- in the neighborhood. It was
considered quite a privilege to be working here. At this and three other
companies in 1924, the National Academy of Science began an experiment to
determine how illumination affects worker efficiency. The premise was that
output would improve if the lighting of work areas was improved. Something very
curious happened when new experimental lights were installed. Output went up
among those employees being studied and also among those whose lighting had not
been changed, and most puzzling of all, it continued to go up even when lights were
turned down. Having proved nothing ,these studies were called off by the National
Academy. It might all have ended there. [Man] Looks like a good cigar.
[Man] Ah, that's a Dandy.
[Man] We're talking about the 20s. [Man] Oh the 20s. [Man] Oh that's in another era.
[Theresa] Yeah that's the test room there. [Man] Let's open it to that cuz that's the --
that's the test room group. [Man] Now that is the heart of the study.
[Man] Chip where were you then? [Chip] I was over in this
direction in front of the girls. [Man] What position did you have Theresa?
[Theresa] Back there in the middle. The blonde there.
[Man] The chute. Can you see the chute on there?
[Man] Oh here they are. I remember when they dropped...
Relay making was picked for a new experiment when Western Electric alone
decided to probe the inconclusive results of the illumination studies. Six
young women assembled the electromagnetic switches while rest
brakes and different hours were tried. It was the core of what would later be
called the Hawthorne studies, industry's first scientific inquiry into employee
attitudes. Continuing changes in routine were freely discussed with the workers,
whose output, as well as involvement in the project, increased dramatically. Each
completed relay was counted by a tireless tape, which recorded an overall
production increase of 30 percent. In this small room for more than five years,
observers studied workers producing more in less time than ever before.
Industrial history was in the making.
Earlier, Hawthorne's George Pennock brought the Harvard Business School into
the studies. Associate dean George Lombard. Harvard became connected with the
Hawthorne studies soon after Mr. Pennock had heard Elton Mayo give a talk in New
York. Mayo was interested at the time in topics of fatigue and monotony, and
Mr. Pennock thought that some of the ideas that Mayo expressed might be of some
interest in connection with the Hawthorne studies. So we asked Mayo to
come out to the Hawthorne plant and then began a long series of associations
between our two institutions.
The Hawthorne Harvard cooperative inquiry continued into the 30s, delving into
production areas all over the plant. When the early returns from the relay room
began to be understood, the investigators felt the attitudes of other workers
ought to be explored. They began industry's first formal
employee interviewing program. Some twenty thousand Hawthorne people aired
their feelings about their jobs, their supervisors, their working conditions,
about anything and everything. In other experiments, investigators found the
first clues to the social organization of people at work, an organization that
seemed to have as much or even more impact on output than anything
management did. Though not all the results were as dramatic as the relay
room, in general, output increased wherever these tests were tried.
The investigators found industry had never tapped the workers' real worth and
sent the massive proof back to Harvard for compilation. When the studies were
finished, the late Bill Dickson and Fritz Roethlisberger came back to Harvard with
the really ton of material of records that had been kept and
accumulated during the studies, and they began the long and careful job of
writing up these studies and stating the findings in a systematic way. This
work resulted in the publication of "Management and the Worker," which has now
gone through many printings and has become a book that is well known, not
only to college and graduate students, but also to professional workers in
personnel, in business, and other kinds of organizations. The point of view which
gradually emerged from the studies was to regard a business organization as a
social system. Everyone knows that people are important in business, but a way of
thinking which allowed the satisfactions and dissatisfactions of workers to be
thought about in relationship to output and productivity and to allow new
studies and new actions to be taken had not been available before. This is the
real contribution of the Hawthorne studies.
[Music]
So, companies discovered people and raised a question that persists. 50 years
after the studies, has modern business yet struck the balance between the
worker and his job? We can contribute something. I mean we're not just machines
and we're not just there turning out the paper, you know, and just watching the
sheets flow out of a machine. We have ideas how to -- to better the shop, and I
think they found out that working as a group, our shop really contributed
something. It seems to me that uh, like I said, the new breed of supervisor likes
participative management, and we've been given that chance, and it's worked out so
far. We're facing the supervisor and it seems more or less like he's our equal,
you know. He's on the same level as we are. I think the supervisor -- he gets
involved more. He gives us a chance to do things the way we want to do them if -- as
long as we get the job done.
Supervisory attitude is altogether different than it was in those days. You
know, you can sit down and talk to the supervisor and tell them something about
the job. He'll listen. Years ago, he was -- he knew everything.
In a lot of the classes in the universities, the Hawthorne studies often
come out, but how much stays with a student when he gets to be a manager? I
don't know, but there's certainly a lot more there than we make you sit.