A Field Is Born

In the 1920s, in order to understand the relationship between productivity and job satisfaction, Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo and research assistant (and later HBS professor) Fritz J. Roethlisberger studied worker behavior at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Works plant outside Chicago. Over a five-year period, they tracked the performance of six women assembling relays in a room separate from the main assembly hall. The workers’ productivity rose, which led Mayo to conclude: “The six individuals became a team.”