Worker Interdependence and Output: The Hawthorne Studies Reevaluated

Abstract

Recent work has called into question the interpretation of the evidence from the classic Hawthorne studies, arguing that external factors suffice to explain the variation in workers' output found at the Hawthorne plant. In contrast, this paper demonstrates that, allowing for a wide range of other factors mediated by the social interactions in the working group, workers' productivity levels in the Hawthorne plant were indeed interdependent. Using five years of weekly data from the original Hawthorne studies, a structural model of worker productivity is estimated. This model allowsfor interdependence of workers' output levels, while recognizing that, although mediated by small group interactions, external and experimental variables can also play a role. The results reveal the joint importance of externalfactors and worker interaction in affecting the level and variability of output. The human relations approach to industrial sociology is not controverted by the original Hawthorne data from which it began. 'TIhe Hawthorne studies of the late 1920s and early 1930s have had widespread influence in industrial sociology and provide the foundation for the sub-fields of human relations, organizational development and organizational design (Roethlisberger and Dickson 1939; Whitehead 1938; Homans 1951). Beginning with what in retrospect appear to be naive attempts to relate worker productivity to the intensity of illumination in the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, the studies elaborated the role of social interaction in the determination of work effort and output levels. The increasing complexity of such interactions that the Hawthorne researchers found and explored - first in the Illumination and the Relay Room experiments, later in the Mica Splitting Test Room and the Bank Wiring Observation Room -changed many ways of thinking about the labor process and, whatever the current status of the Hawthorne studies themselves, altered forever the landscape of industrial sociology. Major works