Relay Assembly Test Room
Research on productivity at massive manufacturing complexes like the Hawthorne Works was made possible through partnerships among industries, universities, and government. In the 1920s, with support from the National Research Council, the Rockefeller Foundation, and eventually Harvard Business School, Western Electric undertook a series of behavioral experiments. The first, a sequence of illumination tests from 1924 to 1927, set out to determine the effects of lighting on worker efficiency in three separate manufacturing departments. Accounts of the study revealed no significant correlation between productivity and light levels. The results prompted researchers to investigate other factors affecting worker output.
The next experiments beginning in 1927 focused on the relay assembly department, where the electromagnetic switches that made telephone connections possible were produced. The manufacture of relays required the repetitive assembly of pins, springs, armatures, insulators, coils, and screws. Western Electric produced over 7 million relays annually. As the speed of individual workers determined overall production levels, the effects of factors like rest periods and work hours in this department were of particular interest to the company.
In a separate test room, an operator prepared parts for five women to assemble. The women dropped the completed relays into a chute where a recording device punched a hole in a continuously moving paper tape. The number of holes revealed the production rate for each worker. Researchers were unsure if productivity increased in this experiment because of the introduction of rest periods, shorter working hours, wage incentives, the dynamics of a smaller group, or the special attention the women received. In 1928, George Pennock, a superintendent at Western Electric, turned to Elton Mayo at Harvard Business School for guidance. “We’re going to have a man come out from one of the colleges and see what he can tell us about what we’ve found out,” Pennock wrote.
The Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room
George Pennock welcomed Mayo’s arrival at the Hawthorne Works in 1928. “We have become…skeptical of being able to prove anything in connection with the behavior of human beings under various conditions,” he wrote.Other Hawthorne experiments taking place at the time included the effect of wage incentives in the mica splitting department. In the study of fourteen men in the bank wiring test room, where conditions were unaltered, no change in productivity occurred—attributed in part to an implicit understanding among the workers not to exceed what they considered a fair quota.
The studies monitoring the output of relay assembly workers, which began in 1927, continued until 1932, becoming the longest running Hawthorne experiments. Homer Hibarger and later Donald Chipman, Western Electric supervisors, reviewed production performance tapes and the results of routine physical exams and maintained a log sheet of work, daily events, and supervisor’s observations. The six operators studied in a separate test room were single women in their teens and early twenties. They came from Polish, Norwegian, and Bohemian families, whom they helped support.
The Interview Process
Assisting Mayo was his research assistant, Fritz Roethlisberger. Unassuming, bookish, and disciplined, Roethlisberger had studied philosophy at Harvard. He worked as a psychological counselor for Harvard students and became known as an expert listener. Roethlisberger, who found himself “spellbound by Mayo’s…creative imagination and clinical insights,” would himself become one of Harvard Business School’s beloved and highly sought after professors.
Under Mayo and Roethlisberger’s direction, the Hawthorne experiments began to incorporate extensive interviewing. The researchers hoped to glean details (such as home life or relationship with a spouse or parent) that might play a role in employees’ attitudes towards work and interactions with supervisors. From 1928 to 1930 Mayo and Roethlisberger oversaw the process of conducting more than 21,000 interviews and worked closely training researchers in interviewing practices.
Mayo and Roethlisberger’s methodology shifted when they discovered that, rather than answering directed questions, employees expressed themselves more candidly if encouraged to speak openly in what was known as nondirected interviewing. “It became clear that if a channel for free expression were to be provided, the interview must be a listening rather than a questioning process,” a research study report noted. “The interview is now defined as a conversation in which the employee is encouraged to express himself freely upon any topic of his own choosing.”
Interviews, which averaged around 30 minutes, grew to 90 minutes or even two hours in length in a process meant to provide an emotional release. The resulting records, hundreds and hundreds of pages in which employees disclose personal details of their day to day lives, offer an astonishingly intimate portrait of the American industrial worker in the years leading to and following the Depression. In a pre-computer age, thousands of comments were sorted into employees’ attitudes about general working conditions, specific jobs, or supervisors and among these categories into favorable and unfavorable comments used to support interpretations of the data. Both workers’ and supervisors’ comments would aid in the development of personnel policies and supervisory training, including the subsequent implementation of a routine counseling program for employees.
In his autobiography The Elusive Phenomena, Roethlisberger wrote of grappling with objective, hard data versus subjective, soft data. “I felt very strongly,” he noted, "that in the gooey soft data there existed uniformities about human behavior that had to be coaxed out by…the method of clinical observation and interviewing which I was advocating for the administrator to use. Roethlisberger discovered that what employees found most deeply rewarding were close associations with one another, “informal relationships of interconnectedness,” as he called them. “Whenever and where it was possible,” he wrote, “[employees] generated them like crazy. In many cases they found them so satisfying that they often did all sorts of nonlogical things…in order to belong. In Mayo’s broad view, the industrial revolution had shattered strong ties to the workplace and community experienced by workers in the skilled trades of the 19th century. The social cohesion holding democracy together, he wrote, was predicated on these collective relationships, and employees’ belief in a sense of common purpose and value of their work.
The Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room
George Pennock welcomed Mayo’s arrival at the Hawthorne Works in 1928. “We have become…skeptical of being able to prove anything in connection with the behavior of human beings under various conditions,” he wrote.Other Hawthorne experiments taking place at the time included the effect of wage incentives in the mica splitting department. In the study of fourteen men in the bank wiring test room, where conditions were unaltered, no change in productivity occurred—attributed in part to an implicit understanding among the workers not to exceed what they considered a fair quota.
The studies monitoring the output of relay assembly workers, which began in 1927, continued until 1932, becoming the longest running Hawthorne experiments. Homer Hibarger and later Donald Chipman, Western Electric supervisors, reviewed production performance tapes and the results of routine physical exams and maintained a log sheet of work, daily events, and supervisor’s observations. The six operators studied in a separate test room were single women in their teens and early twenties. They came from Polish, Norwegian, and Bohemian families, whom they helped support.
The Interview Process
Assisting Mayo was his research assistant, Fritz Roethlisberger. Unassuming, bookish, and disciplined, Roethlisberger had studied philosophy at Harvard. He worked as a psychological counselor for Harvard students and became known as an expert listener. Roethlisberger, who found himself “spellbound by Mayo’s…creative imagination and clinical insights,” would himself become one of Harvard Business School’s beloved and highly sought after professors.
Under Mayo and Roethlisberger’s direction, the Hawthorne experiments began to incorporate extensive interviewing. The researchers hoped to glean details (such as home life or relationship with a spouse or parent) that might play a role in employees’ attitudes towards work and interactions with supervisors. From 1928 to 1930 Mayo and Roethlisberger oversaw the process of conducting more than 21,000 interviews and worked closely training researchers in interviewing practices.
Mayo and Roethlisberger’s methodology shifted when they discovered that, rather than answering directed questions, employees expressed themselves more candidly if encouraged to speak openly in what was known as nondirected interviewing. “It became clear that if a channel for free expression were to be provided, the interview must be a listening rather than a questioning process,” a research study report noted. “The interview is now defined as a conversation in which the employee is encouraged to express himself freely upon any topic of his own choosing.”
Interviews, which averaged around 30 minutes, grew to 90 minutes or even two hours in length in a process meant to provide an emotional release. The resulting records, hundreds and hundreds of pages in which employees disclose personal details of their day to day lives, offer an astonishingly intimate portrait of the American industrial worker in the years leading to and following the Depression. In a pre-computer age, thousands of comments were sorted into employees’ attitudes about general working conditions, specific jobs, or supervisors and among these categories into favorable and unfavorable comments used to support interpretations of the data. Both workers’ and supervisors’ comments would aid in the development of personnel policies and supervisory training, including the subsequent implementation of a routine counseling program for employees.
In his autobiography The Elusive Phenomena, Roethlisberger wrote of grappling with objective, hard data versus subjective, soft data. “I felt very strongly,” he noted, "that in the gooey soft data there existed uniformities about human behavior that had to be coaxed out by…the method of clinical observation and interviewing which I was advocating for the administrator to use. Roethlisberger discovered that what employees found most deeply rewarding were close associations with one another, “informal relationships of interconnectedness,” as he called them. “Whenever and where it was possible,” he wrote, “[employees] generated them like crazy. In many cases they found them so satisfying that they often did all sorts of nonlogical things…in order to belong. In Mayo’s broad view, the industrial revolution had shattered strong ties to the workplace and community experienced by workers in the skilled trades of the 19th century. The social cohesion holding democracy together, he wrote, was predicated on these collective relationships, and employees’ belief in a sense of common purpose and value of their work.
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