Human Relations Leadership and the Association of Morale and Efficiency in Work Groups: A Controlled Study with Small Military Units

H T ow are the factors of supervisory behavior, morale, and productivity related in work organizations? Man works, it was once believed, that he may be happy. Whether the connection between work and happiness was viewed as intrinsic, in line with the Protestant ethic, or instrumental, as proclaimed by the Utilitarians, this underlying hypothesis remained unchallenged in our society from the days of Increase Mather to those of Francis Winslow Taylor. For reasons outside the scope of this paper, a rival conception of the human meaning of work has all but swept the field in recent years: the conception, namely that man works, not in order to be happy, but when he is happy. This belief, espoused empirically by personnel managers and adherents of the social work tradition, was raised to the status of scientific theory chiefly through the studies of Elton Mayo and his successors. Mayo's view of man's relation to his work gave rise in turn to a new conception of leadership in work situations, which will be identified here as the Mayo theory. According to that theory, the modern work leader or administrator must concern himself explicitly and continuously with the maintenance of morale in the work situations for which he has responsibility. The modern administrator must above all aim at achieving the spontaneous-i.e. voluntary-cooperation of his followers; to do this, he must think of communication with his followers in much broader terms than those of logical self-interest and rational understanding. He must recognize nonlogical (and irrational) elements or premises of communication -most importantly, those premises arising out of men's need to be continuously associated at work with their fellows, and their need to evolve and to maintain established routines of social relationship at work.' When these needs are recognized and satisfied through leader-follower communication, the Mayo thesis continues, an equilibrium highly resistant to outside pressures, and expressive of high morale, will result in the work group.2 Finally, through the establishment of such an equilibrium, a sustained increase in productivity may be expected to follow, all other factors (e.g. technical skills of the leader) being equal.3 The Mayo theory, be it noted, does not hold that a one to one relationship exists between increased morale of work groups and increased productivity, or between anything else for that matter. Rather, it would be more correct to say that increased productivity is viewed as a by-product of a total situation of work, one characteristic of which must be a stable situation expressive of high morale as defined above. More conventionally stated for purposes of summary, the Mayo theory holds that human relations leadership (i.e., leadership of the "modern" administrator) increases the morale of work groups, which in turn is a factor necessary to bring about sustained increase in productivity, or efficiency, of those groups. It is the purpose of this paper, not to criticize the Mayo theory as such, but rather to show one way in which it needs to be supplemented in order to account more adequately for the facts of work experience. For the Mayo theory overlooks the possibility of reciprocal effects upon morale of work efficiency in an organization. The precise reason or reasons for this reciprocal effect are not in question here, but the attempt to prove its existence, and to show its implications for a theory of the relation of leadership, efficiency, and morale in work situations, are very much in ques-