Classical organization theories focused on the inner working of an organization and sought to make it efficient. For the owners of firms, Taylorism/Scientific Management proved to be very profitable. The same workforce could now produce a lot more without a corresponding increase in worker pay. As a matter of fact, deskilling work lowered the wages of many occupations.

But for the workers, it was a different story. Work in the factories was often inhumane and degrading. The work on the assembly line had become so demanding and boring that by 1919, the turnover in Ford's factories was a massive 370%. Ford had to try to retain the workers by increasing their pay, but that didn't help much. Workers resisted Taylorism, organized themselves into unions, and demanded better working conditions.

Managers and management consultants/researchers had to confront this problem. The Human Relations school emerged in this soil,not as an alternative to scientific management, but as a way to manage the discontent produced by it. Read the part about Elton Mayo in Section 3.6 (The Human Relations Movement) from the textbook (https://openstax.org/books/principles-management/pages/3-6-human-relations-movement) which describes Mayo's experiments at the Hawthorne plant.

Critics of Mayo's work have highlighted the following: (a) Elton Mayo and colleagues produced a stream of research that sought to understand the psychology of the worker in the workplace, not to help the workers but to maximize the effort they could squeeze out of them. (b) At the time, workers were rebelling against the conditions of industrial work, particularly against Taylorism. Owners were concerned about the potential of a violent worker uprising.Mayo arrived in this climate, claiming to have an analysis to the problem anda solution. His critics think he was selling a con. (c) The data from the studies that Mayo and his colleagues conducted at the Hawthorne plant has proven to be inconclusive at best. Mayo's conclusions are not borne out by the facts.. (d) The point of Mayo's psychological research - and indeed of the whole school of Human Relations - is to figure out how to get workers to be productive without having to either increase their wages or improve their working conditions. In that sense, the discipline is fundamentally manipulative and deceitful because managers pretend to care about workers in order to soothe them when their real goal is to increase worker productivity and lower worker compensation. (e) Ever since Mayo's work, management theory has tried to understand how the human psyche works and how it can be harnessed for organizational purposes. An enormous amount of research has been and continues to be conducted on topics such as perception, personality, motivation, communication, leadership, decision making, organizational culture, etc. with the purpose of making the workplace efficient and profitable. Managerial insights gained from factory floors are used to shape organizational behavior at all levels of the managerial hierarchies, and the techniques are becoming increasingly refined and subtle in contemporary organizations.