by Phil Green
The “Hawthorne Effect” is named after a series of productivity improvement experiments
lasting several years between 1924 and 1932 from the Hawthorne plant, near Chicago,
owned by the Western Electric Company.
The folklore that developed from these experiments, and that still persists today,
is that the productivity of people who are singled out in an initiative of any kind
improve, because of the attention they receive.
In the experiments, the women working in the plant were given a variety of different
working conditions. Their productivity was measured with each condition. Lighting
was increased or decreased, rest pauses and duration of work were changed, and so on. The study’s designers thought that these variables affected productivity.
The
folklore that developed from the Hawthorne experiments was long ago shown to be
bunk This folklore was long ago shown to be bunk.
In an article in Science magazine,
H. McIlvaine Parsons, reviewed the original data and interviewed some of the women
who were the subjects of the study.
Parson’s review of the studies—almost 50 years
later—reached a very different conclusion: “this new look at Hawthorne has ... brought
a new factor to light—information feedback.” In other words, it was that measurement
and feedback to workers that increased productivity, rather than the variables whose effect they wanted to measure.
Parsons found that in one of the experiments, five
women in a test room received feedback
every half hour on their production of relays.
They also received a daily report that “specified the total number of relays each
worker had completed, type of relay, total time for sets of 50, and time breaks.”
What the Hawthorne experiments showed was that the productivity did not change because
the lights were made brighter or dimmer. The productivity changed when the subjects
of the study received feedback on their own performance, coupled with the ability
for self-control and reward.
The critical variable is information feedback
Measurement
plays another important role besides feedback. Measurement in any social setting
is not a neutral and objective means of assessing performance, or the variables
that affect it.
In organizational or social settings, it is itself a source of perturbation.
Measurements do funny things to people, especially when there is a potential reward
or punishment, or even the hope or fear of one, and people do funny things to measurements.
Measurement is a source of perturbation as well as feedback
Measurement changes
people’s behaviour first by stating priorities of the measurer and implying the
measurer’s values. A measurer cannot independently measure their company the way
one can measure the temperature of a pot of water. They are both measuring and changing
their company simultaneously. They cannot know the “natural state” of either budget
variance or production tonnage, because by measuring them they change the state.
A well-designed measurement and feedback system encourages the right behaviours
and helps people improve their performance. It is more than a tool to measure performance.
© 2007 Phil Green