ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Concern for the culture of the work group is not new. As we have seen, in the 1930s and 1940s,
Mayo was the eldest son of George Gibbes Mayo, draftsman and later civil engineer, and his wife Henrietta Mary, née Donaldson. Educated at Queen's School and the Collegiate School of St Peter, he lost interest in medicine at the University of Adelaide and, after 1901, at medical schools in Edinburgh and London. In 1903 he went to West Africa, and returned to London, writing articles for magazines and teaching English at the Working Men's College. He returned to Adelaide in 1905 to a partnership in the printing firm of J. H. Sherring & Co., but in 1907 he went back to the university to study philosophy and psychology under Sir William Mitchell. He won the Roby Fletcher prize in psychology and graduated with honours (B.A., 1910; M.A., 1926) and was named the David Murray research scholar. In 1911 he became foundation lecturer in mental and moral philosophy at the new University of Queensland and in 1919-23 held the first chair of philosophy there. He moved on to the University of Pennsylvania, but spent most of his career at Harvard Business School (1926–1947), where he was professor of industrial research.
In terms of his subsequent career, probably the two most important influences in Queensland were Mayo's friendship with the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski and his work with shell-shock cases returning from the First World War. Malinowski first met Mayo on his way to and from the Trobriand Islands; they became close friends and were regularly in touch until Malinowski's death in 1942. The work with shell-shock soldiers provided a focus for Mayo's interests in clinical psychology and developed his skills in psychotherapy. In this he was strongly influenced by the work on hysteria and obsession of the eminent French psychiatrist, Pierre Janet, an old adversary of Sigmund Freud. For the rest of his working life, Mayo was an active psychotherapist and this practical experience became an essential prop for his subsequent theoretical and methodological work in America.