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Analysis Of George Elton Mayo And His Work Essay

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Early insights around employee engagement originated with George Elton Mayo and his work at Hawthorne Works (a General Electric Company) in the 1920s. In studying human behavior, Mayo’s research challenged Taylor’s principles of scientific management by providing alternative motivation theories outside of self interest (Mayo, 1933). This opened the door for additional research on employee motivation with future work by Argyris and Likert continuing to drive understandings of the relationship between environment and worker productivity. While the book First Break All the Rules (Buckingham & Coffman, 1999), helped popularize the concept of employee engagement, the first real mention of employee engagement appeared in a 1990 Academy of Management Journal article by William Kahn. Basing his initial work on Goffman, Kahn looked to further develop the concept around varying individual role attachment by extending the concept to fit organizational life (Kahn, 1990). Specifically, Kahn (1990), utilized an ethnographic, grounded theory method to better understand how experiences with various work variables including manager satisfaction, role clarity and availability of resources influenced an individual’s experience and involvement with work tasks. Kahn looked to build upon prior work by Hackman & Oldham (1980) and Alderfer (1972) to enhance or undermine the individual’s motivation and sense of meaning at work (Kahn, 1990). The research premise was that 1) individual

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