Elton Mayo

Human relations and the Hawthorne effect. Mayo, an Australian at Harvard, interpreted the Hawthorne studies at a Western Electric factory near Chicago from the late 1920s as showing that attention and social belonging mattered more to output than lighting or pay. That gave managers the language of morale and human relations. Later reanalyses found the original data much weaker than the story built on it, and the Hawthorne effect is now disputed.