the hawthorne experiments of the 1930s had provided the first major empirical challenge to the scientific management notion that the worker was primarily an economic animal who would work solely for money the hawthorne experiments were undertaken at the hawthorne works of the western electric company near chicago this study one of the most famous management experiments ever reported was conducted by elton mayo and his associates from the harvard business school the decade -long series of experiments started out as traditional scienfic management examinations of the relationship between work environment and productivity but the experiments because they were initially unable to explain the results of their findings literally stumbled on a finding that today seems so obvious-that factories and other work situations are first of all social situations the workers as mary Parker follett had suggested a decade earlier were more responsive to peer pressure than to management controls the hawthorne studies are generally considered to be the genesis of the human relations school of management thought providing the first major empirical challenge to the scientific management notion that the worker wsa primarily an economic animal who would work solely for money