Mayo, Elton: The Fruitful Legacy of an Intellectual Explorer

Eric J. Sanders ()
Additional contact information
Eric J. Sanders: Elmhurst University

Chapter 62 in The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, 2021, pp 1047-1066 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Elton Mayo was one of the key initial researchers in the field of human relations. His work influenced psychology, sociology, anthropology, and management and led to the later development of new areas of study, including organizational behavior and from that field, organization development. His focus on clinical research in the field that was tied to business measures that mattered to the firms is a model that the best organization researchers continue to use today. This chapter presents an overview of his early life and career, develops the concepts and methodology used in his research including the Hawthorne studies, and summarizes his key contributions to the field of organization research. These include the “Hawthorne Effect” that people change their behavior when they know they are being observed, the spontaneous development of informal organizations, the power of interviewing and storytelling in qualitative research, and the many future scholars he recruited and mentored across the social sciences, including Fritz Roethlisberger (management), George Lombard (psychology), Abraham Zaleznik (psychology), Conrad Arensberg (anthropology), and George Homans (sociology).

Keywords: Elton Mayo; Hawthorne studies; Hawthorne effect; Clinical research; Field research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-38324-4_17

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783030383244

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-38324-4_17

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().