Supervisors

Origins of Supervisor Research

The origins of the sociology of work and the supervisor research can be traced to the monumental series of experiments conducted by Elton Mayo and his Harvard colleagues at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in the 1920s. Mayo and his collaborators interpreted their results from experiments in terms of the group relations that had been established both among the workers themselves and between the workers and their supervisors. They found that relations of trust, support, and friendship had been established between workers to such a degree that, in practice, there was no longer any need to supervise them, no place for the supervisor. Expressed in a different way, the confidence, enthusiasm, and discipline of these workers had improved as soon as they were no longer coerced or interrupted in order to do something by using supervisor's threats, and, on the other hand, the group of workers had begun to produce more. The way was now open for the study of supervision.

The “human relations” approach, originated in the Hawthorne studies, continued in the interest about the effects on employees of informal group membership and supervisory practices during the following decades until the late 1950s. The test room gave them the opportunity to analyze organizations with highly increased horizontal contacts or free communication between supervisor and workers in the group. This major change in the structure of supervisory patterns and interaction increased productivity. At the same time, the mainstream from the tradition of “scientific management” was focused on the logical methods of layout and job design and its uncritical emphasis on payment-by-result incentive plans in the supervision process. Following the tradition of Kurt Lewin's experiments of democratic leadership in small groups, many researchers studied the impact of differential supervisory styles on employee performance and satisfaction. Typically, these studies centered their interests on the increase of participation of employees in work unit decisions, in opposition to more traditional supervisory styles focused on performing tasks.

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