Was There a Hawthorne Effect?

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Abstract
The "Hawthorne Effect" has been the most enduring legacy of the celebrated studies of workplace behaviour conducted in the 1920's and the 1930's at the Hawthorne plant of the Western Electric company. Paradoxically, it is not clear that this effect constituted more than an incidental and intermediate finding for the original researchers. This paper examines the empirical evidence for Hawthorne effects using the original data from the Hawthorne Relay Assembly Test Room, where a group of workers was closely studied, with a variety of experimental and other changes in th work environment, over a period of more than 5 years. Using both narrow and broad definitions of an experimental change and allowing for other factors and for potential interdependance of the owrkers' output levels, I assess whether such experimental changes had a common effect that could be regarded as a pure result of the experimentation. The main conclusion is that there is only a slender evidence of a Hawthorne effect in the Hawthorne Relay Assembly Test Room.
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