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impersonality, technical competence and authority. In short, the bureaucratic organisation has clear division of labour (a characteristic it shares with scientific management), a hierarchy with centralised decision-making, formal rules, selection based on qualifications, and authoritative management. Members of a bureaucracy have power qua their technical knowledge, which is the feature that, according to Weber, makes bureaucratic administration specifically rational (1924: 21).
Bureaucratization offers above all the optimum possibility for carrying through the principle of specializing administrative functions according to purely objective considerations. Individual performances are allocated to functions who have specialized training and who by constant practice increase their expertise. ‘Objective’ discharge of business primarily means a discharge of business according to calculable rule and ‘without regard for persons’. (Weber, 1924: 22, emphasis in original)
Calculable rules are to ensure the reliable functioning of the bureaucratic organisation, and the disregard of persons quite literally means to dehumanise the bureaucracy; that is, to liberate it from the personal, irrational and emotional elements that escape calculation. This rational model of organisations has, however, received heavy criticisms and has seen the introduction of a challenging view that puts to the fore the human side to organisation.
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– was challenged by a new notion of humans as social animals and corresponding new ideas about employee motivation. This human relations shift is in no small part due to humanistic psychology and what has become known as the Hawthorne effect.
The findings from the Hawthorne experiments – a series of productivity studies conducted from the mid-1920s to early 1930s – showed that worker productivity, unexpectedly, increased even as adverse working conditions were imposed.
Moreover, the effect of incentive plans was less than expected (which is counterintuitive to scientific management). What can be concluded from the experiments is that social norms, group standards, and attitudes influence individual output and work behaviour more strongly than monetary incentives (Homans, 1941). This anthropological and sociological insight about the workings of organisations points to informal patterns, shared norms and conflicts (e.g. between, and among, managers and workers/employees), thereby laying the foundation for future studies on organisational culture. As Homans concludes, the increase in the output rate that could be observed among a group of women in one of the experiments could not be related to changes made in the physical working conditions; it could, however, be related to ‘what can only be spoken of as the development of an organized social group in a peculiar and effective relation with its supervision’ (1941: 90). The role of supervision or observation has led to the Hawthorne effect being known also as the observer effect.
These events (a steady increase in output regardless of changes to the physical working condition) led the researchers to conclude that they were not simply investigating the effects of changing physical conditions on productivity. One explanation was that employees had been made to feel special by being the focus of so much attention. These feelings increased their morale, which in turn led to higher productivity. The researchers considered that,
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inadvertently, they had investigated employee attitudes, values, and norms generated by the experiments themselves – the ‘Hawthorne effect’. (Johnson
& Gill, 1993: 50)
I will dwell more on the disciplinary force of observation in the subsection about power in organisation. At this point I would like to highlight that, as with the conclusion drawn in the quote above, many of the insights derived from the Hawthorne experiments happened to be at odds with some core assumptions in scientific management and, indeed, the rational model approach to organisation.
There was little correlation between economic incentives and productivity, and it became clear that people also derive a source of need satisfaction at work; for example, a sense of belonging to a group. So, the scientific management view of people as socially isolated and economically rational beings was, for a while, replaced by the belief that human beings are basically social animals who gain a sense of identity from social relationships. I write ‘for a while’ for two reasons. One is that scientific management principles are still in use in contemporary organisation. An example of this is the idea that hiring managers can identify best-fit candidates through universal, objective and neutral standards of measure (Christensen & Muhr, 2019). The other reason is that the two conflicting views of organisations, as either production or social systems, have been synthesised over the years as the field of organisation studies was formed (Scott, 2004). The two views would, as such, turn into a dynamic duality, thereby acknowledging that organisations are both production systems and social systems. This was necessary since both views are equally universalistic.
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With reference to McGregor’s (1966) theories X and Y, we can say that we have:
on the one hand, scientific management, which assumes that the average worker has little ambition, dislikes work, avoids responsibility and requires close supervision (theory X) and, therefore, is in need of extrinsic motivation such as economic incentives; and on the other hand, the human relations perspective, which assumes that workers can exercise self-direction, desire responsibility and like to work (i.e.
hold an intrinsic motivation) (theory Y). McGregor argues that to the extent that workers show behaviour corresponding with theory X, this behaviour should not be taken as an expression of some inherent human nature, nor as a trait or characteristic of workers in general. Human behaviour in organisation is ‘a consequence rather of the nature of industrial organizations, of management philosophy, policy, and practice. The conventional approach of Theory X is based on mistaken notions of what is cause and what is effect’ (McGregor, 1966: 109).
McGregor (1966) is arguing that scientific management has become performative in creating the kind of organisational behaviour that it is said to describe (a similar point is made by many critical scholars about the use of diversity management in organisations – a point that I return to). Simply put, workers become lazy and selfish because they are treated as such through management practices that cater exclusively to those features. In simplistic terms, we may say that since laziness and selfishness are the two characteristics recognised by scientific management, they also become the only characteristics that are rewarded. It is not difficult to imagine that workers, deskilled, in accordance with scientific management, to handle monotonous routine work, over time will exhibit little joy, let alone continue doing their work tasks, if not for the extrinsically induced motivation. Along the same lines, Johnson and Gill (1993: 47) note that ‘scientific management can become a
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self-fulfilling prophecy: if people are expected to be recalcitrant and economically rational, they are likely to behave in such a fashion’.
MacGregor (1966: 109) finds what he calls the ‘conventional’ view of scientific management to be inadequate in terms of explaining the human side to organisation.
He refers to Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs (often depicted as a pyramid) to describe how lower-order needs (i.e. physiological and safety needs) are met externally, whereas higher-order needs (i.e. social, esteem and self-actualisation needs) are met internally. Once the basic needs are satisfied, they no longer motivate, which leads McGregor (1966: 111) to deduce that ‘the carrot and stick theory (i.e. the extrinsic motivation of scientific management) does not work at all once man has reached an adequate subsistence level and is motivated primarily by higher order needs’. Here, it is worth noting that the upper level among higher-order needs may never be satisfied fully and thus continues to motivate. In a work organisational context, the levels from bottom to top of the pyramid could translate into levels of sustenance in the form of a base salary and stability delivered through a pension plan. These two factors – pay and pension – would go a long way in terms of satisfying the two lower-order basic needs. As regards the first level of the higher-order needs, the Hawthorne experiments teach us that, for example, friendship among colleagues in a work group may satisfy the social need for belonging. Self-esteem could be fulfilled through the status associated with a given job title, while self-actualisation could be a matter of achievements made in a job that never ceases to bring new challenges.
The implication of Maslow’s (1943) pyramid is that external needs motivate only up to a certain point, at which they are satisfied and after which motivation happens
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in relation to internal needs. However, the view remains that a need is either satisfied or dissatisfied, which comes with the assumption that satisfaction and dissatisfaction are two sides of the same coin. Herzberg’s (1987) two-factor theory complicates this view and, in fact, replaces it with one of satisfaction and dissatisfaction working according to their own spectra. That is, one can be satisfied or not; and one can be dissatisfied or not. Not to be dissatisfied is not the same as being satisfied; you are just not dissatisfied. To clarify this point, Herzberg’s theory explains that ‘certain things (motivators) lead to job satisfaction, whereas others (hygiene factors) prevent dissatisfaction but cannot engender satisfaction’ (Johnson
& Gill, 1993: 62). Motivators roughly correspond with Maslow’s (1943) higher-order needs, which means that extrinsic (environmental) motivation such as economic incentives only motivate up to a certain level until that need is basically covered. This is why Herzberg would not categorise pay, for example, as a motivator. Rather, he would categorise it as a hygiene factor: when the pay is right, it is not that workers are not satisfied – they are just not dissatisfied. What creates satisfaction are the internal (psychological) motivation factors such as achievement, recognition and responsibility that workers derive from the work itself as meaningful occupation – that which they, strictly speaking, are deprived of in scientific management.
At this point, a recap is appropriate. Organisation studies have evolved from a view of organisations as means with which to achieve predetermined ends, to one of organisations as social systems with internal and informal workings. The turn to human relations, which was concerned with organisational members’ social interaction within work groups, also saw a turn to neo-human relations, which emphasised the individual (Johnson & Gill, 1993). In fact, different portraits of human beings had been painted, from the economic ‘high-priced man’ found in
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scientific management to the gregarious view in human relations and, finally, the self-actualising individual found in neo-human relations. Importantly, all of these perspectives have taken a keen interest in the issue of motivation, which in work organisations refers to ‘the processes by which people are enabled and induced to choose to behave in particular ways’ (Johnson & Gill, 1993: 39) that are aligned with the attainment of organisational goals. There is, however, a significant difference to be found in the motive for the interest in motivation. Whereas the rational model of organisation seeks to improve management’s control through an understanding of human motivation, the human relations approach aims at humanising work by getting rid of needlessly restrictive managerial practices (Thygesen & Tangkjær, 2008). It is possible to observe a similar difference in the motive for the interst in managing diversity between mainstream and critical scholars. I will pick up on this trail when reaching the seventh subheading. For now, let me point to a commonality between the rational and human relation models: their treatment of organisations as closed systems in the sense that the external factors presented by the environment were not taken into consideration. An organisation was regarded as a closed system functioning in isolation of its surroundings. This was about to change.