The Hawthorne defect - By Berkeley Rice

What?  The Hawthorne effect is wrong:

As the recent attempts to re-evaluate the Hawthorne experiment demonstrate, the studies continue to serve as a kind of Rorschach test for managers and industrial psychologists, enabling them to find evidence to support many different and often conflicting theories of how to motivate the modern industrial worker.  (One recent analysis suggested that the increased output at Hawthorne was really caused by the deepening economic depression at the time, and the women’s resulting need for more money.) This confusion may not be all bad.  For whatever the flaws, in the conduct and subsequent interpretations of the Hawthorne studies, they did spur effort to humanize the workplace, to find more sensitive ways to mobilize workers, rather than regarding them as assembly line robots that could be kept producing by fear and discipline.  The promise was that social engineering, supported by enlightened management and cooperative workers, could usher in a new era of industrial peace and prosperity.  If this hope has since proven somewhat naïve, it was at least well intentioned.