ABSTRACT
Many people have read about the Hawthorne experiments on illumination (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939; Snow, 1927), in which a set of selected employees moved to a specially prepared space, where they assembled electrical products under a variety of lighting conditions. The results surprised everyone. Regardless of the direction of the lighting change (even when lighting levels dropped), the work output of the employees increased. Even when the investigators gave the appearance of having changed the lighting, but had in fact simply taken out and replaced the same lamps, performance increased. The results led to an important series of studies concerning the relationships between employers and employees (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). On closer analysis the investigators realised that the special experimental set-up, the separation from other employees, and the knowledge that they were participating in work that might benefit their working conditions, were powerful motivators to the participants in the lighting experiments. The investigators, and many others, concluded that the physical environment at work was relatively unimportant to workers’ performance. Management-employee relations seemed to be the important consideration.
