Page 35 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

6 Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work

manual labor and almost no thinking. In fact, referring to his
studies with steel workers, Taylor wrote:

This work is so crude and elementary in its nature
that the writer firmly believes that it would be possible
to train an intelligent gorilla so as to become a more
efficient pig-iron handler than any man can be. Yet it
will be shown that the science of handling pig iron is
so great and amounts to so much that it is impossible
for the man who is best suited to this type of work to
understand the principles of this science, or even to
work in accordance with these principles without the
aid of a man better educated than he is.

Thus, the prevailing thinking was that thinking was not
required. The focus was strictly on behavior and how to maxi-
mize an individual’s output.

The Hawthorne Studies
Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo was also con-
cerned with the study and measurement of processes and envi-
ronmental variables to increase employee productivity. Mayo
and his colleagues worked with female employees who assem-
bled telephone relays at Western Electric Hawthorne Works near
Chicago from 1927 to 1932. During this time the researchers
manipulated various factors such as light levels, work schedules,
rest breaks, and refreshments. The women baffled the research-
ers by continuing to increase their productivity even under
extremely unfavorable conditions, for example, very low levels
of light. Mayo and his colleagues finally concluded that it was
the attention given to these employees by the researchers that