Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Experiments

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Elton Mayo’s Hawthorne Experiments

Biography of Elton Mayo

George Elton Mayo was born on 26th December 1880 in Adelaide, South

Australia. He was brought up by his respected colonial family. His

father was a civil engineer who was married to Henrietta Mary nee

Donaldson. They wanted their son, Elton Mayo to do well in his

education and to succeed something in life. Mayo was looking forward

to follow his grandfather’s path in medicine but, he failed his

studies at university in Edinburgh, Scotland. In Great Britain, he

wrote a book on Australian politics for the Pall Mall Gazette and

taught at the Working Men’s College in London. Mayo returned to South

Australia to work in an Adelaide Publishing organisation, where his

management practices were not accepted.

He went to university and he became the most intelligent student in

philosophy. In 1912, he became a foundation lecturer and taught many

subjects such as, philosophy, economics and new psychology of Pierre

Janet (the French psychologist, who had researched the problems of

repetitive and monotonous tasks in industry), at a newly established

university in Queensland.

In Queensland, Mayo married to Dorothea McConnell, who has been

educated in landscape art at the Sorbonne. They had two daughters,

Patricia and Ruth Elton Mayo. Patricia followed her father’s

management thinking. Ruth became a British artist and novelist.

Throughout the First World War, he served on government bodies and

lectur...

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