Джордж Элтон Мейо: Жизнь и вклад в организационную психологию

Australian academic

George Elton Mayo (26 December 1880 – 7 September 1949) was an Australian born psychologist, industrial researcher, and organizational theorist. Mayo was formally trained at the University of Adelaide, acquiring a Bachelor of Arts Degree graduating with First Class Honours, majoring in philosophy and psychology, He was a lecturer in psychology and mental philosophy at the UQ between 1911 and 1922, when he sailed to the United States. In Philadelphia he conducted research at a textile plant in order to develop a method to reduce the very high rate of turnover in the plant. Mayo's association with the Hawthorne studies as well as his research and work in Australia led to his enjoying a public acclaim granted to few social scientists of his day. Mayo has been credited with making significant contributions to a number of disciplines, including business management, industrial sociology, philosophy, and social psychology. His field research in industry had a significant impact on industrial and organizational psychology. According to Trahair, Mayo "is known for having established the scientific study of what today is called organizational behavior when he gave close attention to the human, social, and political problems of industrial civilization." (p. 15).

Mayo was the eldest son of George Gibbes Mayo, a draftsman and later a civil engineer, and his wife, Henrietta Mary Mayo (née Donaldson). His grandfather George Mayo (1807–1894) was a well known South Australian medical practitioner. Elton attended several schools in Australia (Queen's School, St Peter's College, and the University of Adelaide) and after 1901 attended medical school of University of Edinburgh and in London, neither of which he completed. In 1903 he went to West Africa, and upon returning to London, began writing articles for magazines and teaching English at the Working Men's College. He returned to Adelaide in 1905 to a partnership in the printing firm of J. H. Sherring & Co., but in 1907 he went back to the university to study philosophy and psychology under William Mitchell. He won the Roby Fletcher prize in psychology and graduated with honours (B. A., 1910; M. A., 1926) and was named the David Murray research scholar in scientific studies. In 1911 he became foundation lecturer in mental and moral philosophy at the new University of Queensland and in 1919–23 held the first chair of philosophy there. He moved on to the University of Pennsylvania, but spent the second half of his career at Harvard Business School (1926–1947), where he was professor of industrial research. Two influences on his career from his time at the University of Queensland were Mayo's friendship with the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his work with shell shock cases returning from the First World War. Malinowski first met Mayo on his way to and from the Trobriand Islands; they became close friends and were regularly in touch until Malinowski's death in 1942. The work with shell shock soldiers provided a focus for Mayo's interests in clinical psychology and developed his skills in psychotherapy. In this he was strongly influenced by the work on hysteria and obsession of the French psychiatrist, Pierre Janet, who became a critic of Sigmund Freud. For the rest of his working life, Mayo was an active psychotherapist and this practical experience was an important influence on his theoretical and methodological work in America.

One of Mayo's (1924) earliest research efforts involved workers at a Philadelphia textile mill. The mill had been experiencing a high rate of turnover. Mayo believed that the repetitive work in the spinning department gave rise to mental abnormalities in the workers. He found that the introduction of rest periods helped reduce turnover. The research helped make Mayo more widely known in the U. S. The research he conducted under the rubric of the Hawthorne Studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s, underlining the importance of groups in affecting the behaviour of individuals at work. Elton Mayo laid the ground rules for interviewing, the principles of which have been subsequently repeated in numerous 'how to' books on leadership, coaching and mentoring over the last half century.

Fritz J. Roethlisberger, Mayo's graduate assistant, and William J. Dickson, head of the Department of Employee Relations at Western Electric, conducted the bulk of the practical research, with Mayo rarely visiting the Hawthorne plant in Cicero, Illinois. Mayo concluded that productivity partly depended on the informal social patterns of interaction in the work group. Mayo, in communicating to business leaders, advanced the idea that managers who understand the nature of informal ties among workers can make decisions for management's benefit. The qualitative aspects of the research suggested that norms of co operation among workers were related to productivity.

Although biographers agree about Mayo's contributions, there is no consensus about his credentials. The Encyclopædia Britannica, biographical dictionaries,

Cullen Many, including Reinhard Bendix and Lloyd H. Fisher, criticized Mayo for generalizing his results of the Hawthorne studies. The two state that Mayo's research concerned small, isolated groups, and it was not clear that the conditions and supervision he achieved could have been replicated in large groups and factory settings. His theories are also based upon the assumption that humans, by nature, want to cooperate and form groups, and he never allows for the possibility of José Ortega y Gasset's idea of "the stranger," built upon the proposition that humans, by nature, are suspicious of others. More recently, in 2003, James Hoopes criticised Mayo for "substituting therapy for democracy." Re analyses of the original Hawthorne data indicate that the quality of the research was poor.

George Elton Mayo: Psychology of Pierre Janet, London: Greenwood Press, 1972; Routledge, reprint edition 2013. George Elton Mayo: The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization, Routledge, reprint edition 2003. George Elton Mayo: Critical Evaluations in Business and Management, Ed. John Cunningham Wood, Michael C. Wood, 2004. George Elton Mayo: The Social Problems of an Industrial Civilization, Routledge, 2007.