The Hawthorne Experiments

In Roethlisberger’s article, he mainly discussed three Hawthorne Experiments, which includes the “illumination” experiments, the “Relay Assembly Test Room” experiment, the interviews about employee satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and the “Bank Wiring Observation Room” experiment. The purpose of the experiments was to study the effect of environment conditions, which include physical environment conditions and psychological factors, on workers’ productivity. Such as the level of illumination, rest breaks, work hours, temperature, and humidity.

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In the first test, the “illumination” experiments, the original purpose was determining the relationship between illumination and worker efficiency. Investigator supposed that increasing the illumination level could help to reduce workers’ fatigue and grow up the output. Two groups of workers, the “test group,” and the “control group,” were selected in the study. The brightness of the light was increased and decreased to find out the effect on the productivity of the test group. The researchers were surprised that the productivity increased even when the level of illumination was decreased. In the conclusion of the first experiment, employee output was not necessarily related to lighting conditions, and some other variables had not been controlled in the test. Increasing productivity was due to workers’ receiving attention.

In the second test, the “Relay Assembly Test Room” experiment, the researchers wanted to identify how other variables could affect productivity. A group of five girls were placed in a separate room where their conditions of work could be carefully controlled, where their output could be measured. In the result, it showed that the output went up whatever investigators c...

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... menu machine. At the beginning, he said he felt good, because there was no difficult for him to do the job; he felt happy to earn money by this simple work. However, after two month, he said that he was boring to face to the same simple process in KFC, and he felt it wasted his time to find a better job. Whatever he did the work so outstanding, he said it was just push the button. Nobody care how great he did, let along to hope leader to know. I think my friend’s situation is one of the reasons that fast food store cannot hold employee so long, and most employees come from young people, who do not really worry the money problems, because their parents can help them sometimes. It is true as what Roethlisberger said; people hope to be considered as special. Probably they consider the benefit, but even the money cannot be an absolute reason keeps workers’ initiative.