ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests the role of collaboration at work, its origins in Elton Mayo’s theory of child rearing, his teaching, and his personal relations with his associates. Mayo believed that in an effective democracy authority must freely move from central to peripheral organizations in response to critical changes in the society’s political environment. Mayo illustrated collaboration at work when his associates, T. North Whitehead, William J. Dickson, and Fritz J. Roethlisberger, presented papers on the Hawthorne research to the New York conference of the Personnel Research Federation in January 1935. To industrialists and administrators Mayo’s general point was that social relations determine the course of economic activities, not vice versa. As well as recommending that the conditions of effective collaboration be researched in organizations, Mayo proposed that the origins of the skills for collaboration be recognized in the raising of children.
