All about Hawthorne Effect in Management

Have you heard about the Hawthorne effect before? It seems like it’s actually a real thing.

The Hawthorne effect is a term used to describe the improvement in employees’ productivity that lasts temporarily .

If you’ve been in that situation where your employees throughout a certain week seem so productive and the next week, they are back to their usual selves, you might have experienced the Hawthorne effect in management.

We’ll discuss all there is to know about the Hawthorne effect, the Hawthorne experiment, and how Hawthorne studies human resource management.

The Hawthorne Effect refers to a rise in productivity when employees are being observed or monitored.

What is the Hawthorne effect?

The Hawthorne effect in management is a term that refers to employees’ increased productivity for a given period of time that declines afterwards. The reason for the improved productivity is said to be that the employees are getting attention or are being observed and monitored.

The Hawthorne effect in management has been observed many times, even when we had no idea what it was about. Let us take look at a few examples. Let’s say at your company, you’re looking to give out an award for the most hardworking employee. Throughout the week of your monitoring, all your employees suddenly become very active. Everyone is running into the manager’s office to ask questions about a certain task they could complete, people are spending more time at work, and nobody is slacking off.

You will be shocked at the sight of this because it has never been this way before. The next week, you award the most hardworking person, and everyone is back to normal all of a sudden. No one wants extra work. People are dozing off at their desks. Everyone is waiting to run away from the office, while you are perplexed at the sudden change.

Let’s look at a different example; let’s say you invite some researchers and scholars over to your company to carry out a study and your employees are aware of the project. The next thing is everyone seems more productive than ever. You might be wondering what changed. After these scholars and researchers leave, your employees return to normal.

Well, if you had no idea what was going on, then we do — it’s the Hawthorne effect.

The Hawthorne Experiment

The term currently being discussed arises from an experiment that was done many years ago. The experiment took place in the late 1920s at a company called Hawthorne Works Electric Company in Illinois, Chicago.

At the time, the owner called on some researchers to carry out a study to see if the employees were influenced by the change in their environment. The changes to be made included a light change, break time, and work hours.

The study was to see how these environmental changes would affect the productivity of the employees. Now, throughout the study, the researchers noticed an improvement in the employees’ productivity. But this wasn’t the most surprising thing, their productivity increased despite the changes made to the light, break time, and work hours.

There was no change even if the light was brighter or lower, or if the break time and work hours were longer or shorter — they continued to remain productive. But after the study was concluded, their productivity reduced drastically. The researchers arrived at the conclusion that the employees were more productive because they were being monitored and observed.

In 1958, a researcher by the name Henry A. Landsberger conducted an analysis to understand what the experiment done in the 1920s at the Hawthorne company resulted from. He named it the “Hawthorne effect” in reference to the company name. He also defined the effect as “a temporary improvement in employee productivity resulting from being observed while at work.”

However, some claims from the University of Chicago in 2009 stated that the previous experiment and results were “over exaggerated” because the data wasn’t adding up. They didn’t dispute the fact that there could be an effect like that.

Conclusion

The Hawthorne effect in management constantly happens in our offices today, and it’s still unclear if they are accurate or not.

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