In that case, the needed correction wasn’t to alter working environments, but to alter the workers themselves, to cure the sickness in their minds. In his 1919 book, Democracy and Freedom: An Essay in Social Logic, Mayo called for a dose of corrective thinking, one that would allow disaffected employees to return to a state from whence spontaneous and unforced collaboration with their coworkers might once again arise. Three years later, with the patient getting worse, “Doctor” Mayo decided it was time to start making house calls, and he boarded a boat for San Francisco in 1922. By healing the workingman, he was going to save Western civilization from itself.
As Matthew Stewart points out, Mayo’s diagnosis of what ailed society was essentially a pastiche of contemporary thinking from a variety of realms. His end-of-days narrative came straight out of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, published in 1918. His alarm about the “anomie” resulting from workers’ struggle to find meaning in the repetitive tasks of the modern industrial enterprise was lifted directly from French sociologist Émile Durkheim’s groundbreaking 1897 treatise, Suicide, in which he’d defined “anomic suicide” as the result of the moral confusion brought about by dramatic economic upheaval. Mayo’s description of the unconscious mind echoed Freud, his ideas about “reveries” and “passive obsessions” came straight from the French psychoanalyst Pierre Janet, and his celebration of spontaneous collaboration echoed the idealist British philosophers of the time. Finally, he co-opted Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto’s view that responsibility for preserving social order lay with the elite.
Adding it together, though, Mayo had arrived at an idea all his own. The solution to workplace strife, he argued, was a kind of therapeutic human relations, a soft alternative to the “bossism” of Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. Mayo considered himself a scientist, too, but his wasn’t a science of the stopwatch; rather, it was one conducted in the laboratory of the mind. By developing a psychology of the workplace, Mayo promised to re-create the social harmony that industrialism had destroyed, to cure the workers of the world of irrational and unreasonable resentments that prevented them from a full embrace of a common organizational purpose. (It apparently never occurred to him that a worker could be suffering from rational—that is to say, legitimate—dissatisfaction.)
Mayo borrowed more than ideas; he borrowed credentials, too. When he set out for the United States, he was armed with a letter from the office of the prime minister of Queensland that incorrectly identified him as a “Professor of Psychology and Physiology.” He later bamboozled the status-happy types at Harvard into thinking he’d actually earned a medical degree in England. No matter. Elton Mayo had a job to do, and if he showed anything during his rise to global prominence over the next two decades, it was that something as insignificant as the truth wasn’t going to get in his way. And even when he wasn’t engaged in an outright lie, he was a liar by omission. In response to a suggestion that he could have corrected others’ mistaken assumption that he was indeed a doctor, Mayo explained that to have done so would have “interrupted the flow of conversation.”2
Mayo was greeted with skepticism by those he wished to treat—unions considered anything short of organizing workers as an attempt on the part of management to induce complacency. Mental illness being what it is, mind you, he could forgive the workers their delusions and their radical politics. They were sick. Fortunately, however, he found a number of other constituencies receptive not just to his diagnosis of the problem, but also to his prescribed cure.
Mayo provided succor to one side of an ongoing political debate. On the one hand, John Dewey advocated for “industrial democracy”—the importing of the principles of civic democracy into the workplace. On the other, “democratic realists” doubted the capacity of the masses for rational thought and argued for a revision of American democracy toward government for the people by an enlightened administrative elite.3 Mayo came down on the side of administrative authority.
And by authority, he meant authority. Mayo favored not just industrial autocracy but monopoly; the manager who was free from competition, he argued, was able to devote even more attention to the psychiatric care of those under their employ. John D. Rockefeller, grappling with both antitrust authorities and restive workforces at once, found Mayo’s message particularly persuasive. For starters, Mayo explicitly favored enlightened management over government intervention. He was practical as well: Mayo wasn’t just promising to study workers, he was promising to make them easier to control, a highly appealing prospect at a time when radical political ideologies were bubbling through America’s restive population of immigrant workers. Mayo’s philosophy was conservative through and through, defining workplace conflict as a social disease and prescribing cooperation—not money—as its cure. Rockefeller provided the crucial financial backing that gave Mayo a national platform—and a foot in the door at HBS.
But you didn’t have to be a monopolist to find wisdom in his words. Managers everywhere found comfort in the putative doctor’s suggestion that the solution to management-labor conflict was a substitution of therapy for democracy—not a lessening of management control, but its opposite. Not only that, in the midst of the Great Depression, when Mayo’s star was shining brightest, his was the most cost-effective solution to industrial strife. If low wages didn’t cause the sickness, then higher wages were not the cure. And the renovations he called for weren’t on the factory floor but in the workingman’s mind. By insisting that group performance was more a function of social cohesion than of monetary incentive, Mayo was implicitly arguing in favor of substituting the spiritual rewards of work for higher pay.
Is it really any wonder that Elton Mayo eventually found himself selling the “most prominent and seductive managerial ideology” of the mid-twentieth century? John Van Maanen, a professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management, explains: “What could be more attractive to owners and managers than to be repeatedly told that one’s employees . . . are really irrational and illogical . . . that their lack of cooperation is but a frustrated urge to cooperate; that their economic wants mask a need to be consulted and listened to in the workplace; that these needs are best met by a more or less therapeutic regime that plays close attention to the social and emotional needs of employees; and that you—as owner or manager—are charged with a historical mandate (or destiny) to bring social harmony to the workplace?”
Less than two months after arriving in San Francisco, Mayo met Vernon Kellogg, a leader of the National Research Council, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences that had been established in 1916 and tasked with the coordination of research between industry and the academy. Wowed by Mayo’s message, Kellogg invited him to Washington, D.C., where the Australian preached his sermon to a receptive choir of administrative scientific elites. His platform then expanded to national media such as Harper’s, where he promised in a 1924 article titled “Civilization: The Perilous Adventure” that his industrial psychology was not just one way but the only way to save society.
That caught the attention of the philanthropists at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial foundation, who agreed to fund a position for him at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. At that point, it was time to put up or shut up. Scientific theories are one thing; scientific proof is another. But Mayo delivered: When Philadelphia-based Continental Mills, a textile manufacturer, asked Mayo to help solve the problems of high turnover and low productivity, Mayo suggested regular breaks to stave off monotony and fatigue. The result: a 30 percent improvement in productivity, and a similar increase in Mayo’s renown.
That’s when he came into contact with Wallace Donham, another nondoctor with a penchant for describing his own work in the grandiose terms of societal ailment and its cure. With Taylorism no longer viable as a central theology at HBS, Donham was in dire need of a replacement that promised the prospect of serious scientific inquiry while also reaffirming the centrality of the corporate administrator’s ro
le in society. Elton Mayo’s ideas fit the bill to a tee. Donham decided to secure Mayo a position on the faculty of HBS, provided he could obtain Lowell’s approval.
Financially, it seemed a no-brainer. The Rockefellers had agreed to support Mayo’s research for another four years. The Boston retailer A. Lincoln Filene, himself an advocate for more rigorous research into industrial relations, chipped in with a pledge to cover any of Mayo’s expenses not covered by the grant. Owen Young, president of General Electric, offered to drum up corporate financial backing if either of the first two came up short.
But Lowell was unconvinced, worried that by hiring Mayo, the Harvard Corporation would be making a tacit promise to continue funding research into industrial relations if and when the Rockefeller money was withdrawn. (The horror!) Donham responded by obtaining an understanding between all involved (Mayo, the Rockefellers, himself) that the project would be experimental, with zero expectation of any future commitments by Harvard whatsoever. With the possibility of financial risk removed from the equation, Lowell eventually agreed to the appointment, and in June 1926 Elton Mayo was named an associate professor of industrial research at HBS.
Lowell’s financial concerns proved unwarranted. Over the next twenty years, a river of Rockefeller money—$1.5 million—flowed into Mayo’s program at the School. (It still stands as one of the most generously funded programs in the history of the social sciences. For Donham, who called fundraising an “almost intolerable burden,” it must have seemed like manna from heaven.) Once there, Mayo found another devotee of Vilfredo Pareto, Dr. Lawrence J. Henderson, a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty and a biochemist of international repute. An actual doctor in the company of self-appointed medics to the human soul, Henderson had pretensions in the other direction, and thought he could build a bridge between Pareto’s theories of societal equilibrium and the homeostasis of the human body itself.
The two men combined forces, an early product of which was the construction of a “Fatigue Laboratory” in the basement of Morgan Hall. Mayo brought the money in, via a separate $35,000 grant from the Rockefeller foundation, with another of his socio-scientific soufflés: specifically, his theory that fatigue, high blood pressure, psychosis, and revolution were interrelated.4 Henderson directed the lab’s activities, which included, in its early years, the spectacle of students running—in suit and tie—on a specially designed treadmill while having their respiration and blood chemistry monitored. While the lab eventually made some minor contributions to science—its 1934 discovery that the human body can store little sodium led to the use of salt tablets by steel mill workers, preventing cramps, strokes, and even death—it never managed to prove Mayo’s original theory correct. Along with his professional reputation, it stands as another example of Elton Mayo managing to build something real on top of something fake.
Mayo spent the next two years at Harvard spinning his wheels. His HBS connections opened doors at a half-dozen New England companies, but workers remained uninterested in his therapeutic services and he also struggled to secure the “confidence and cooperation”5 of their bosses, management. He had the confidence of Wallace Donham, mind you, who trusted enough in “Doctor” Mayo to let the Australian loose on the students of HBS itself. Mayo, who saw mental illness where others might simply see the result of too much work, proceeded to convince Donham that HBS’s underperforming students were simply suffering from insanity. In his 1929 letter to the president of Harvard, the dean thanked Mayo’s Department of Industrial Research for giving valuable assistance “to students suffering from nervous and mental fatigue, to those maladjusted to the environment of the School, and to those who were obsessive in greater or less degree or whose technique of thinking out their personal problems was obviously faulty.”
One ongoing challenge: The Rockefeller money was renewed on an annual basis. To keep it coming, Mayo desperately needed to come up with another win like he had in Philadelphia. In a letter to the philanthropists in April 1928, Mayo was equivocal: His research was proceeding well, although the lack of corporate partners was hindering his ability to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion. The truth? “[He] had a grand theoretical artifice and no data to fill it,” writes Matthew Stewart. “He was a researcher without research.”6
The solution to all his problems came just two weeks later, when Mayo finally responded to an invitation he’d received to visit the Hawthorne Works, a giant factory on the outskirts of Cicero, Illinois (aka Chicago’s west side), that employed 22,000 workers who made most of the telephones in America. Hawthorne was owned by Western Electric, which was in turn owned by AT&T.
The invitation had come as the result of an address about the benefits of psychology in the workplace that Mayo had made to a group of industrialists at the Harvard Club in New York in October 1927. In the audience: T. K. Stevenson, personnel director of Western Electric, who had been having trouble interpreting some intriguing but inconsistent data from a project that had sought to correlate lighting conditions to productivity. He wondered if Mayo might be able to make sense of it.
One set of data made perfect sense to the researchers: A test group of employees who had been submitted to increasing intensities of light had shown increasing productivity as a result. If things had ended there, the study would have ratified the theory that had given rise to it in the first place, the result of an ongoing debate between industrial engineers of the time over the relative merits of natural versus electric light. General Electric, which claimed that electric light paid for itself ten times over in increased productivity, had sought a “neutral” third-party endorsement of that position, and in 1924 had persuaded the National Research Council to act as their front man by sponsoring the Hawthorne study itself.7
The problem was that the researchers had been too scientific. Specifically: They’d also used a control group, for whom lighting conditions were kept constant, and that group had also shown an increase in productivity. Three years of sponsored research were suddenly at risk. A number of additional experiments showed equally curious results. While investigating the impact of fatigue on productivity, initial findings showed that when conditions improved (for example, an increase in rest periods), so too did productivity. But when those conditions were reset to their original levels (in this example, a reduction in rest periods), productivity didn’t follow, and stayed elevated instead.
All of this, mind you, had happened before Mayo arrived on the scene. Tasked by Stevenson to hypothesize correlations that would stick, his first theories showed the influence of his colleague Dr. Henderson. An example: The closer a worker was to “organic equilibrium,” as measured by blood pressure, heart rate, or even hemoglobin count, the more productive he or she would be. Wrong. Having ventured too far out into the realm of falsifiable proposition, Mayo beat a quick retreat and got behind a theory that would be much harder to disprove: It was the presence of the supervisors themselves that had made all the difference.
It didn’t matter that the researchers were already aware of the fact that the one constant finding seemed to be that the workers worked harder when they knew they were being watched, a phenomenon that later came to be known as “the Hawthorne effect.” Because what they didn’t have was a satisfactory explanation for it. And it was in that gap that Elton Mayo’s rootless ideas finally found their home. To him, the answer—his “great éclaircissement”—was in the nature of the interaction, not just the interaction itself. After all, Taylorist supervisors watched their workers all day long. But whereas the Taylorist motivated by talking (or yelling, or swearing), the Hawthorne researchers had done more listening than anything else.
All they needed to do to take things to the next level, Mayo told them, was to elevate the capabilities of the supervisors to therapeutic heights. Simply probing the conscious mind of the worker was futile, Mayo knew, as the true source of their problems was in the unconscious, a product of the night mind. “If all fear of bully-ragging can be taken out of supervision,
and if a majority of supervisors are trained interviewers,” he wrote in reference to Hawthorne in 1929, “industry will enter upon a new and undreamed era of active collaboration that will make possible an almost incredible human advance.” And who better to oversee such training than Elton Mayo himself?
The one problem with the above: Elton Mayo was, by one colleague’s estimation, “a fundamentally lazy man.” In all of 1928 and 1929, he spent just six days at Hawthorne, suggesting that he’d arrived with his conclusions preordained, and not the other way around.8 He also decided to train his interviewing team in Boston, where he had them practice their skills by posing as doctors in white coats and interviewing actual patients in a Boston psychopathological clinic. Writes Matthew Stewart: “There is no better snapshot of Mayo’s philosophy of management in action. Workers were directly analogous to psychiatric-ward patients, in his mind, while he and his team were obliged, for the sake of the common good, to put on the costumes of learned authority and claim credentials they didn’t have.”9
Mayo swatted away both contradictory findings at Hawthorne—including one that showed that pay was as important a variable as any—as well as professional critiques. In response to a suggestion from University of Chicago industrial psychologist Arthur Kornhauser that a lack of meaningful scientific controls rendered much of his research “rather fruitless,” Mayo reported to his partners at Hawthorne that he would “cram the methods of the Western Electric Company down the throats of researchers like Kornhauser and his tribe.”10 (Kornhauser was Jewish, and the slight was not the only instance of anti-Semitism in Mayo’s own writing.) In the end, just like Taylor, Elton Mayo insisted on pushing a simple explanation to a complex set of facts, one that was too simple to be true, but simple enough to be sold.
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