Page 36 - Build a Culture of Employee Engagement with the Principles

7
The Workplace “Carrot-on-a-Stick”

resulted in their increased performance; the finding became
known as the Hawthorne Effect. Although there has been con-
siderable controversy over this research and the conclusions
drawn at the time, there is no question that it shed light on the
importance of psychological factors affecting employee motiva-
tion and productivity, including worker autonomy, consulting
with employees about their work, and paying attention to social
factors in the workplace, including group cohesiveness and rela-
tions between supervisors and employees. If Taylor took away
the “human” from the study of employee motivation and produc-
tivity, Mayo gave it back.

Skinner’s Approach
The science of behavior was greatly furthered and forever
changed by B. F. Skinner and his principles of operant condi-
tioning introduced in The Behavior of Organisms (1938). Skin-
ner used reinforcement and punishment techniques to motivate
the behavior of lab animals such as mice and pigeons. These
same principles and techniques proved to be highly effective in
motivating human behavior and dovetailed perfectly with the
field of scientific management and its focus on behavior. There
appeared to be no need to consider people’s thoughts or feelings
to explain behavior. Thus, in what was becoming a tug-of-war of
competing approaches to the study of motivation, Skinner suc-
ceeded in taking the “human” back out.

Henry Murray’s Exploration in Personality
However, also published in 1938 and in stark contrast to Skinner,
Henry Murray’s book, Explorations in Personality, suggested
that humans are motivated by factors such as their relationships
to others and their level of professional achievement. Murray