The History of the Human Relations Movement

By Victor Hoang · Updated Oct 24, 2026

In the 1920s American factories were large and specialized. They were measured to the second. Scientific management had made output something a manager could count. It had left a gap where the worker's own view of the job should have been. Employers tried welfare programs. Social scientists asked what, besides pay and conditions, shaped how hard people worked.

The human relations movement took shape between 1924 and 1939. Harvard's Elton Mayo and his colleagues turned the Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric into an argument that workers are social beings, not just units of labor. The throughline is a repeated swing between two claims: that how people are treated changes how organizations perform, and that this claim has to survive audits.

The idea is older than the name. Robert Owen ran a Scottish mill village on that belief in the 1810s, and Mary Parker Follett was writing about power and groups in 1918. The movement grew out of the factory puzzle above, and by the 1950s it had split into several research schools that disagreed with each other.

This article follows the movement from its precursors to the present. For the school of thought as managers use the term, read our explainer on human relations theory. For the wider map, start with the history of management.

Timeline at a Glance

Before the Name (1813-1924)

Owen, welfare employers and Follett prepare the ground

New Lanark stood by the falls of the Clyde, where a spinning mill needed water power and a workforce that did not exist. Owen's own 1813 account says the mill's founder, David Dale, started it in 1784 and had to collect a new population: a house holding about five hundred children brought mainly from workhouses and charities in Edinburgh, and a village for families willing to work there. By Owen's reckoning, thirteen years of what he called persevering kindness changed the village, which held upwards of two thousand people.

The 1813 book is a precursor, not the movement itself, and it is Owen's report of his own results. But the documented changes are specific. He wrote that the apprentice system drawing children from public charities was abolished, that the hiring of children aged six, seven and eight was prevented, and that parents were advised to keep them out of the mills until ten. A fund fed by one sixtieth of each worker's wages supported the sick, the injured and the aged, and children were taught in the village school from five to ten at no cost to their parents. His central claim was that character is formed by circumstances, which is why changing the surroundings changes the person.

A century later employers reached for a version of this idea, for different reasons. Harvard's Baker Library describes welfare capitalism as managers attending to employee well-being to build loyalty, reduce turnover and discourage unionization. Western Electric offered pensions, sick pay, stock purchase plans, recreation, evening classes and safety equipment. These programs were a precursor too. They treated workers kindly without asking what workers thought.

The most careful early thinker on that question was Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933), whose dates appear in the library record for The New State. That 1918 book argued for group organization as the solution to popular government. Her 1924 book, Creative Experience, went further. It separated "power-over" from "power-with," and said power-with is what democracy should mean in politics or industry. It also asked that people find "the law of the situation in the situation" instead of obeying a rule or a person. After her death, her papers on constructive conflict, the giving of orders and the relation of leader and expert were collected as Dynamic Administration (1940). Follett wrote before and outside Hawthorne. The movement later borrowed her vocabulary more than her method.

What it means for teams today: Owen shows that better conditions can pay for themselves, and Follett shows why they work only when people share in decisions. A perk handed down is not the same as a voice.

The Hawthorne Years (1924-1939)

Mayo's Harvard turns a factory test into a doctrine

The setting was Cicero, Illinois, and then Cambridge, Massachusetts. Elton Mayo was born in Adelaide in 1880, tested shell-shock victims at the University of Queensland, and in 1923 became a research associate at Wharton, studying how fatigue affected employee turnover. Wallace Donham, dean of Harvard Business School, took notice. In 1925 he told Harvard's president that human relations in industry was "one of the most important things in the whole field of business", and Harvard's archive says he began shifting the school's focus from scientific management and applied economics toward human relations. Mayo's 1935 course covered physiology, psychopathology, anthropology and the theories of Vilfredo Pareto, and he worked alongside L. J. Henderson, whose Fatigue Laboratory sat in the basement of the business school.

Hawthorne itself is told in full in our history of the Hawthorne studies. In short, Mayo reached the Western Electric plant in 1928, when a lighting test and a relay test room were already running, and his team added an interviewing program of more than 21,000 interviews and a bank wiring observation room. What matters here is what Harvard made of it. Mayo's 1933 book The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization argued that modern society had destroyed "the belief of the individual in his social function" and that an administrative elite would need to improve worker morale. In 1938 the Harvard professor T. N. Whitehead published The Industrial Worker, subtitled a statistical study of human relations in a group of manual workers. In 1939 Fritz Roethlisberger, William Dickson and Harold Wright published Management and the Worker, a 600-page best-seller by Harvard's count. A 1946 feature in Fortune praised Mayo's studies and carried the message to executives.

In the same year as Whitehead's book, an executive published from the other side of the desk. Chester Barnard spent nearly forty years at AT&T and ended as president of New Jersey Bell. The Harvard University Press description of his book says he was not directly involved in the Hawthorne experiments, though his association with Mayo and his Harvard colleagues shaped his most original ideas. The Functions of the Executive was published by Harvard University Press in December 1938. A scholarly chapter on Barnard's theory quotes him defining authority as "a character of a communication in a formal organization", and sorting orders into those clearly refused, those on the borderline and those unquestionably acceptable, the last of which lie within the "zone of indifference". The point for the movement: a leader's authority depends on whether people accept the order.

The Hawthorne years gave management a new subject and a school to teach it. They also left a problem. The movement's founding argument rested on one plant, a small number of observed workers and an interpretation that went past what the experiments could carry. The explainer on the schools of management thought shows where this school sits against scientific management and the others.

What it means for teams today: Barnard's test still works as a quick check on your own orders. If you cannot say why a reasonable person would accept an instruction, expect it to be obeyed only inside the zone where people do not mind.

The Group Years (1939-1949)

Lewin moves the experiment from the worker to the group

This era overlaps with the last one, as Lewin's work began in Iowa while Mayo's was still publishing.

In May 1939 Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt and Ralph White published "Patterns of Aggressive Behavior in Experimentally Created 'Social Climates'" in the Journal of Social Psychology. Lewin had come to America in 1933 and established himself at the University of Iowa from 1935, according to a University of Michigan psychology department history. The study set out to create different social climates on purpose and compare what followed. Our explainer on Lewin's leadership styles covers the design and the findings. What mattered for the movement was the method: leadership behavior was something you could create on purpose and measure.

After the war MIT offered Lewin the chance to build a center for group study. The same department history says he founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics there in 1945, bringing research support of almost $300,000, much of it from the Office of Naval Research. In 1946 he organized a workshop in New Britain, Connecticut, at the request of the Connecticut Interracial Commission, to teach community leaders skills in small group effectiveness. Participants asked to join the staff's evening meetings, and the feedback sessions that followed became the T-group. In an essay published in 1947 in the first volume of Human Relations, Lewin described action research as a route to social change. He died that year, before the first summer session at Bethel, Maine, where the National Training Laboratories began.

Two institutions opened in 1947. The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations was founded in London to provide a base for organizational consultancy, group relations and research, and it launched the journal Human Relations the same year. A 2007 article in that journal describes it as a transatlantic collaboration between Tavistock and Lewin's MIT center.

What it means for teams today: Lewin's contribution was a habit: change the group's climate, then measure what happened. If you are about to restructure a team, decide first what you will measure.

Two Schools, Michigan and Tavistock (1948-1961)

Surveys and coal mines carry the idea into organization design

After Lewin's death his center moved. The same Michigan history says that by the middle of 1948 Dorwin Cartwright's group was at Ann Arbor, and on February 1, 1949 it merged with Rensis Likert's Survey Research Center to form the Institute for Social Research. Likert, whose 1932 dissertation produced the attitude scale that bears his name, was its founding director until 1970. His 1961 book New Patterns of Management argued for participative management, and our explainer on Likert's four systems shows the model. The same history says he applied participative management and conflict resolution in running the institute itself.

In Britain a different school grew from a physical setting. In February 1951 Eric Trist and Ken Bamforth published a study of the longwall method of coal-getting in Human Relations. The Tavistock Institute's own account of the work says it ran in the coalfields in the 1950s and that its principle is that the social and technical parts of a work system must be jointly designed, so that neither is improved at the expense of the other. Mayo had argued that the social side matters. Trist and Bamforth argued that you cannot design the machine without designing the team.

Chris Argyris came at the problem from structure. He joined Yale in 1951, and his 1957 book Personality and Organization, published by Harper, examined, in the words of Yale's memorial notice, how formal structures, control systems and management affect individuals and how people adapt. Douglas McGregor's 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise turned the question toward managers themselves and the assumptions they hold about people. His full story is told in our history of Theory X and Theory Y. The motivation research that grew alongside, from Maslow to Herzberg, has its own article on the history of motivation theories.

The era ended with a split that still runs through the field. One camp measured attitudes and asked leaders to share decisions, the other redesigned work. Both started from the same belief, that the group is the unit that matters.

What it means for teams today: Michigan asks how your people feel, and Tavistock asks how the work is built. A team survey with no change to the work design usually fixes only half of the problem.

The Backlash (1956-2008)

Sociologists and statisticians question the founding story

Criticism arrived almost as soon as the movement succeeded. In 1956 the sociologist Reinhard Bendix published Work and Authority in Industry, subtitled ideologies of management in the course of industrialization, whose subtitle frames managerial thinking as ideology. In June 1967 Alex Carey's "The Hawthorne Studies: A Radical Criticism" appeared in American Sociological Review. In 1971 the Academy of Management Journal printed Shepard's response to Carey, and a further comment followed that September. In 1978 Franke and Kaul published a statistical reanalysis of the relay room data, and later scholars including Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Richard Gillespie reexamined the experiments. The details of those arguments are in the Hawthorne history.

There were two kinds of objection. One was about evidence: replaced workers, a changed pay plan and the Depression could explain the relay room's results without any special attention. The other was about purpose. Franke and Kaul closed with the conclusion that "humanitarian procedures must provide their own justification", which means that if morale work does not raise output, it needs a different reason to exist. Harvard's archive summarizes the defense: the Hawthorne work, Sonnenfeld notes, brought to light ideas about motivation, job satisfaction, group norms, participation and leadership, instead of treating workers as "an appendage to 'the machine'."

The practical effect of the backlash was to demote "human relations" as a slogan and to promote the more careful research that came after. The label faded from textbooks. The research programs it had started continued under other names.

What it means for teams today: If a program for your people also happens to raise output, the output should not be the only reason you run it. Staff can tell the difference between interest and extraction.

The Mainstream (1990-present)

Human relations is renamed engagement, behavior and design

By the end of the century the movement's questions were absorbed into other fields. Harvard's archive says Harvard's role in the Hawthorne experiments laid the foundation for the human relations movement and for organizational behavior, the study of organizations as social systems pioneered by George Lombard, Paul Lawrence and others. In December 1990 William Kahn published a paper on the psychological conditions of personal engagement and disengagement at work in the Academy of Management Journal, which put the older concern for morale into a vocabulary researchers could test.

Meanwhile the evidence has been re-examined with the original numbers. The economists Steven Levitt and John List recovered the lighting data and reported in 2011 that the familiar story of productivity jumping with every change is not in them, calling the published descriptions of those patterns entirely fictional and finding only subtler signs of a possible Hawthorne effect. The movement's lasting claim is therefore smaller and more careful than the legend: groups set norms, supervision matters, and the design of work and the treatment of people interact.

The Tavistock Institute now applies its socio-technical lens to new tools. It says it is developing an evaluation framework for human-AI systems as part of a European research program. Whenever a team adds software agents to its workflow, the old question applies again: who decides, who is accountable, and does the design leave room for people to shape their own work. Our guide to participative leadership is a practical starting point for that conversation.

What it means for teams today: The movement did not prove that happy workers are productive workers. It showed that you cannot design work, structure or technology without designing for the people inside it.

Key People

Key Facts

Key Facts: The Human Relations Movement

• Robert Owen's 1813 account reports that children aged six to eight were kept out of the mills and that parents were advised to wait until ten.
• Harvard's archive says the movement's founding text, Management and the Worker, ran to 600 pages.
• Lewin founded the Research Center for Group Dynamics at MIT in 1945, and it merged into Michigan's Institute for Social Research on February 1, 1949.
• The Tavistock Institute of Human Relations and the journal Human Relations were both founded in 1947.
• Barnard's book names the "zone of indifference" for orders people accept without question.
• Trist and Bamforth's longwall study appeared in Human Relations in February 1951.

The Pattern Behind the History

The movement repeats four moves. We call this the Instinct, Method, System, Audit pattern. It is our own synthesis, not a research finding.

1. Instinct. A reformer or executive senses that people are more than labor. Owen and the welfare employers acted on it, and Follett gave it a vocabulary.
2. Method. Researchers give the instinct a method. Mayo's Harvard used interviews and observation, and Lewin used experiments.
3. System. The method moves from the individual to the group and then to the whole design of work. Likert measured organizations, and Trist and Bamforth designed work.
4. Audit. Critics test the claim against the evidence and the motive. A narrower version survives and is renamed.

What It Teaches Teams Today

• Treat the group as the unit of change. Every school in this history, from Follett to Tavistock, found the team more important than the individual.
• Ask why an order would be accepted. Barnard's zone of indifference is a practical check on whether an instruction will be followed.
• Redesign the work alongside the survey. Michigan's attitudes and Tavistock's work design are two halves of the same job.
• Share decisions, not only perks. Owen's welfare fund and Follett's power-with differ in who gets a say.
• Audit your own favorite finding. The movement's founding story was tested by sociologists, statisticians and economists, and it held up in a smaller form.

If you want to place this story among the others, read how scientific management set the stage, and the ordered map in the schools of management thought.