HumanRelationBewegung

The HumanRelationBewegung, in English the Human Relations Movement, is a school of management thought that emphasizes the role of social factors in the workplace. It arose in the 1920s and 1930s as a response to classical scientific management, which prioritized task optimization and efficiency over worker experience. The movement drew heavily on research conducted at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company, where Elton Mayo and colleagues observed that productivity appeared to rise not solely because of physical conditions but also because workers received attention, formed informal groups, and believed their supervisors valued them.

Key ideas include the importance of leadership style, communication, group norms, job satisfaction, and the motivation arising from social belonging rather than purely monetary incentives. The movement promoted involving workers in decision making, improving supervisor–subordinate relations, and attending to morale and welfare as routes to performance gains.

The influence of the Human Relation movement contributed to the rise of human resource management, organizational development, and behavioral approaches in business schools. It also laid groundwork for later theories of motivation and organizational culture. Criticisms focus on methodological limits of the Hawthorne experiments, the tendency to overstate social needs at the expense of economic and technical factors, and the risk of neglecting structural constraints and power dynamics within organizations.

Today, elements of the HumanRelationBewegung persist in modern management through emphasis on employee engagement, leadership development, teamwork, and informal networks, though often integrated with broader systems theories and evidence-based practices.