Human Relations Movement

The human relations movement is a significant shift in societal attitudes and managerial thinking about the role of employees in organizations and how to best engage their efforts to improve performance and enhance their overall satisfaction in the workplace. While the importance of human behavior in the workplace was recognized in the first decades of the 20th century, it was not until the 1930s that this thinking received widespread recognition through the Hawthorne studies. These studies laid the foundation for the modern fields of organizational behavior, human resources management, and organizational development, which guide management thinking on human relations in the workplace today.

Thinking about the role of workers in industrial firms in the early decades of the 20th century was dominated by Fredrick W. Taylor’s ...