Behavioral Science Movement

• Author: Marcia Anderson
• Pages: 53-54

Page 53

The exact date of when the behavioral science, or human relations, movement came into being is difficult to identify. However, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that much attention was paid to workers' needs, because there was little understanding of how those needs affect total worker productivity. Prior to that time, most managers viewed workers as a device that could be bought and sold like any other possession. Long hours, low wages, and miserable working conditions were the realities of the average worker's life.

Then, at the beginning of the twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), one of the most widely read theorists on management, introduced and developed the theory of scientific management. The basis for scientific management was technological in nature, emphasizing that the best way to increase output was to improve the methods used by workers. According to this perspective, the main focus of a leader should be on the needs of the organization, not the needs of the individual worker. Taylor and his followers were criticized on the grounds that scientific management tended to exploit workers more than it benefited them.

In the 1920s and early 1930s the trend started by Taylor was gradually replaced by the behavioral science movement, initiated by Elton Mayo and his associates through the famous Hawthorne studies. Efficiency experts at the Hawthorne, Illinois, plant of Western Electric designed research to study the effects of illumination on worker productivity. At first, nothing about this research seemed exceptional enough to arouse any unusual interest, since efficiency experts had long tried to find the ideal mix

Abraham Harold Maslow (1908–1970). Psychologist Abraham Maslow proposed his motivation theory in 1943. © BETTMANN/CORBIS

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of physical conditions, working hours, and working methods that would stimulate workers to produce at maximum capacity. Yet by the time the Hawthorne studies were completed ten years later, there was little doubt that they were one of the most important organizational studies, causing the behavioral science movement to gather momentum. The major conclusion of the Hawthorne Studies was that attention to workers, not illumination, affected productivity. Essentially, then, the scientific management movement emphasized a concern for output, while the behavioral science movement stressed a concern for relationships among...