Who is associated with the illumination experiment of the Hawthorne experiment?

• A New Vision An Essay by Professors Michel Anteby and Rakesh Khurana
• Introduction
• The Hawthorne Plant
• Employee Welfare
• NextIllumination Studies and Relay Assembly Test Room

They say figures don’t lie, but we have shown that we can take a set of figures and prove anything we want to.

Donald Chipman, Supervisor, Western Electric, 1931

Illumination Study, 1926

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.

Performance Recording DeviceThe 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.

Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room, ca. 1930 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. 1

1Daily History Record, Relay Assembly Test Room, February 20, 1928, Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Studies Collection, Baker Library, Harvard Business School. ←

• Enter Elton Mayo
• Human Relations and Harvard Business School
• Women in the Relay Assembly Test Room
• The Interview Process
• Spreading the Word
• The "Hawthorne Effect"
• Research Links

The Hawthorne plant of the General Electric Company, Chicago was manufacturing telephone system bell. It employed about 30,000 employees at the time of experiments. There was dissatisfaction among the workers and productivity was not upto the mark. In order to find out the real cause behind this, a team was constituted led by Elton Mayo, Whitehead and Roethlisberger and company representative William Dickson. The aim was to study the relationship between the physical working conditions and the productivity. The entire experiment was conducted in four phases:

1. Illumination Experiments (1924-1927)

Experiments to determine the effects of changes in illumination on productivity.

2. Relay Assembly Test Room Experiments (1927-1928)

Experiments were conducted to determine the effects of changes in hours and other working conditions on productivity.

3. Mass Interviewing programme (1928-1930)

Conducting plant wide interviews to determine worker attitudes and sentiments

4. Bank wiring observation Room Experiments (1931-1932)

Determination and analysis of social organization at work.

1. Illumination Experiments

Illumination Experiments were undertaken to find out how varying levels of illumination i.e. the amount of light at the workplace (a physical factor) affected the productivity.

Hypothesis: Higher the illumination, higher the productivity.

Experiment: A group of workers was chosen and placed in two separate groups. One group was exposed to varying intensities of illumination. This group was named experimental group as it was subjected to experimental changes. Another group was called controlled group as it continued to work under constant intensities of illumination. The researchers found that as they increased the illumination in the experimental group, both groups increased production. When the intensity of illumination was decreased, the production continued to increase in both the groups.   The production in the experimental group decreased only when the illumination was decreased to the level of moonlight. Thus it was concluded that illumination did not have any effect on productivity but something else was interfering with the productivity. Therefore another phase of experiments was undertaken.

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