IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-030-38324-4_17.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Mayo, Elton: The Fruitful Legacy of an Intellectual Explorer

In: The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers

Author

Listed:
  • Eric J. Sanders

    (Elmhurst University)

Abstract

Elton Mayo was one of the key initial researchers in the field of human relations. His work influenced psychology, sociology, anthropology, and management and led to the later development of new areas of study, including organizational behavior and from that field, organization development. His focus on clinical research in the field that was tied to business measures that mattered to the firms is a model that the best organization researchers continue to use today. This chapter presents an overview of his early life and career, develops the concepts and methodology used in his research including the Hawthorne studies, and summarizes his key contributions to the field of organization research. These include the “Hawthorne Effect” that people change their behavior when they know they are being observed, the spontaneous development of informal organizations, the power of interviewing and storytelling in qualitative research, and the many future scholars he recruited and mentored across the social sciences, including Fritz Roethlisberger (management), George Lombard (psychology), Abraham Zaleznik (psychology), Conrad Arensberg (anthropology), and George Homans (sociology).

Suggested Citation

  • Eric J. Sanders, 2021. "Mayo, Elton: The Fruitful Legacy of an Intellectual Explorer," Springer Books, in: David B. Szabla (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Organizational Change Thinkers, edition 2, chapter 62, pages 1047-1066, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-38324-4_17
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-38324-4_17
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-030-38324-4_17. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.