Was There a Hawthorne Effect?

The “Hawthorne effect” has been an enduring legacy of the celebrated studies of workplace behavior conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at Western Electric’s Hawthorne Plant. This article examines the empirical evidence for the existence of Hawthorne effects using the original data from the Hawthorne Relay Assembly Tes Room. Allowing for a variety of other factors, the author assesses whether experimental changes, variously defined, had a common effect that could be regarded as a pure result of the experimentation. The main conclusion is that these data show slender or no evidence of a Hawthorne effect.