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Human Relations Movement

Decent Essays

In the first twenty-five years of 20th century owners and managers assumed that people came to work primarily because of economic needs which led to the development of classical management supported by Taylor and then to the scientific management of Fayol. However, by the 1930s, it has become a certainty, on the basis of research, that people have other needs primarily related not to financial fulfillment but to personal involvement. Since then, there were a lot of theorists that tried to explain what was that triggered and sustained human behaviour. As a result, the research of these “behavioural scientists” (kreitner 1999) became to what today is called the human relations movement. This study will be demonstrating the need for human …show more content…

As a result, he developed 14 principles designed to facilitate discipline and high productivity in a company. One of Fayol ’s principles was ‘Division of work’ which directed workers in completing certain tasks; other one was ‘Unity of direction’ which meant that all people in the organization had common goals such as making profit. Indeed, this code of principles is indispensable in organizations and seem to be of the utmost importance in the achievement of an effective organization. (113)
However, the major disadvantage of both Fayol and Taylor’s ideas was the lack of concern with the interaction between people. Both theorists aimed to analyze and control the activities of people but did not include the employee in the decision-making processes of the organization. Also, these methods neglected the importance of other rewards apart from financial incentives such as job satisfaction, recognition between team-workers and personal achievement. As a result, the human relations movement needed to appear. (77)
The notions of human relations movement and the social person, which gathered momentum through the 1950s, took shape in relation to the work of Elton Mayo. The theorist conducted the Hawthorne experiments which concerned the effects of scientific management on the worker in terms of absenteeism and fatigue (Cole). Therefore, Mayo did not exclude scientific management but wanted to help in improving the method. The experiment involved observing a group

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