Elton mayo brief biography of martin
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Treating workers like people: A history
“The Human Relations Movement: The Harvard Business School and the Hawthorne Experiments (1924-1933),” the first in a series of exhibits to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Harvard Business School (HBS), is on view through Jan. 17 at the School’s Baker Library.
Culled from a massive collection of archived material, including graphs, charts, interviews, and correspondence, the current display chronicles the work of HBS Professor of Industrial Management Elton Mayo and his HBS colleagues, who, in the 1920s and ’30s, studied various factors affecting worker productivity at Western Electric, the manufacturing arm of AT&T. The research was seminal in the development of the human relations movement.
Through black-and-white photos of employees engaged in various tasks, graphs and charts on dated, faded green paper measuring worker performance levels, books detailing research results, letters, and memorabilia from the era, the exhibit t
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Introduction
Elton Mayo, an Australian-born psychologist, is a seminal figure in the field of industrial and organizational psychology. His pioneering work in the early 20th century laid the foundation for modern human relations management and organizational behavior. Mayo’s key contributions, particularly the Hawthorne Studies, have had a lasting impact on how organizations understand employee motivation, productivity, and workplace dynamics.
Early Life and Background
Elton Mayo was born on December 26, 1880, in Adelaide, South Australia. He was the second of seven children in a well-to-do family. His father, George Gibbes Mayo, was a civil engineer, and his mother, Henrietta Mary Mayo, was a homemaker. Mayo’s early education took place at Queen’s School and later at the University of Adelaide, where he initially studied medicine. However, he soon realized that his interests lay elsewhere and shifted his focus to philosophy and psychology.
During his universit
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My grandfather, George Elton Mayo (1880-1949), the psychologist, organizational theorist and acknowledged founder of the Human Relations Movement, had innovative ideas and theories based on a lifetime of research which he often expressed in speeches that remain disturbingly relevant to the world today. This speech, “The Descent into Chaos“, was given bygd him at a New England Conference on National Defense in April 1941.
He is an inveterate optimist who fryst vatten not sobered by a comparison of our own time with the high expectations of a century ago. Bernard Cracroft, writing in 1867, expressed the general attitude of the early years of the nineteenth century. “The mercantile fever, the ardent faith in progress” was based upon belief in “the boundless development of human energy striving like fire ever upwards.” “Unforeseen but probable discoveries” were expected at any moment to “throw additional millions into the lap of human comfort.” bygd such means it was expected that ma