1. Introduction Human Relations is a term often used to describe the ways in which managers interact with their subordinates.

When the personnel management stimulates the production of more and better work, we have good human relations in the organization. When the morale and efficiency deteriorate, human relations are deficient. To create good human relationships, managers need to know why employees act like they do and what social and psychological factors motivate them. 2. Hawthorne experiments A famous series of studies on human behavior in work was done in the Western Electric Company between 1924 and 1933. Over time they became known as the Hawthorne Studies, because many of them took place in the Hawthorne plant of the Electric Westerri near Chicago studies intended to investigate the relationship between the level of lighting in the place of labor and employee productivity: the type of issue that would have addressed Frederick Taylor and his colleagues. In some earlier studies, researchers at the Western Electric personnel divided into experimental groups that were subjected to deliberate changes of lighting and control groups, whose lighting remained constant during the experiments. The results were ambiguous. When were improved lighting conditions of the experimental groups, productivity tended to increase as planned, although the increases were not uniform. But productivity tended to be further increased when lighting conditions worsened, and to complicate matters further, the output of the control groups also tended to improve when they changed their lighting conditions, while no changes were made in lighting controls. It was clear that something else besides the lighting was influencing the performance of workers. In a new set of experiments, a small group of workers was placed in a separate room and some variables were altered: the salaries were increased, were introduced rest periods of varying length, the day and work week were shortened. The researchers, who acted as supervisors now also allowed the groups to choose your rest periods and comment on other proposed changes. And again the results were ambiguous. The performance tended to increase with time, but rose and fell unevenly. While completing this series of experiments was counted with the participation of Elton Mayo (1880-1949) and some colleagues at Harvard University, including J. Fritz Roethlisberger and William J. Dickson. In these experiments, and in later May and his colleagues decided that financial incentives, when offered, are not a cause of increases in productivity. They thought that a complex chain of these increases had affected attitudes. As had been selected for special attention, the experimental and control groups acquired a group pride that motivated them to improve their job performance. The sympathetic supervision had been strengthened further enhancing their motivation. The researchers drew the conclusion that the employees would put more effort into the job if they think management cares about their welfare and supervisors provide them special attention. This phenomenon was later called Hawthorne effect.

The researchers also concluded that informal working groups (the social environment of staff) have great influence on productivity. Many of the employees saw their work as boring and meaningless. But their relationship and friendship with co-workers, sometimes influenced by the common antagonism against the bosses gave him some sense of their working life, providing a partial average protection management. For these reasons, peer pressure, not the demands of the latter, often had the greatest influence on productivity. So, for May the concept of social man (motivated by social needs, in search of work relationships and responding more to the pressures of the working group that the administrative control) had to replace the old concept of rational man motivated by personal financial needs. 3. Contributions and limitations of the human relations Contributions. By highlighting the social, the human relations movement improved the classical view that productivity almost exclusively considered as an engineering problem. In a way, Mayo rediscovered the old maxim whereby Robert Owen, a genuine concern for workers, vital machines as Owen used to call them, would pay dividends. In addition, these researchers stressed the importance of the managers style and thus revolutionized the training of administrators. The attention was increasingly focused on teaching management skills, as opposed to technical skills. Finally, his work revived interest in group dynamics. Administrators began to think in terms of processes and group awards to complement his previous approach on the individual. Limitations. Hawthorne experiments, although profoundly influenced the way managers conceived of their work and how research was conducted after the administration, had many flaws in the design, analysis and interpretation. The consistency of the findings of Mayo and his colleagues with the data is still the subject of many debates and much confusion. The concept of social man was an important counterweight to unilateral model of rational economic man, but not fully described the individuals in the workplace. Many directors and writers assumed that the employee satisfaction would be more productive. However, attempts made to increase production in the 1950s, to improve working conditions and staff satisfaction, provided no impressive improvement in productivity that had been hoped. Apparently, the social environment of the workplace is just one of the interacting factors that influence productivity. Here are others: wage levels, the degree of interest in the work, culture and organizational structure, relations between employees and managers. In conclusion, the issue of productivity and employee satisfaction has been a problem more complex than initially thought. 4. Human relations approach of behavioral science Mayo and his colleagues were the first to apply the scientific method in their studies of people in the work environment. Investigators later had a more rigorous training in the social sciences (psychology, sociology and anthropology), also using more sophisticated methods of investigation. Hence the latter have been termed behavioral scientists, and not relations theorists human.

May and human relations theorists introduced the concept of social man motivated by a desire to establish relationships with others. Some students of behavior, including Argyris, Maslow and McGregor, argued that the concept of self-actualizing man who more accurately explained the motivation of man. According to Abraham Maslow, the needs that we are motivated to satisfy fall into a hierarchy. At the bottom of this, there are the physical and security needs. At the top are the needs of the ego (the need for respect, for example) and of self (which shall include the need for meaning and personal growth). In general, lower level needs must be met before an examination of the upper level. Since many of these have been met in the modern world, almost everyone is motivated, at least in part by ego and self-actualization. The manager is aware of these needs is able to use different ways to motivate their subordinates. Some psychologists thought years later that even this model is inadequate to explain properly what motivates the employee. They argue that not all happen in a predictable way from one level to another in the hierarchy of needs. For some, work is only a means to satisfy their lower needs. Others were just glad to see covered higher-order needs and sometimes opt for jobs that threaten their security with such exclusive accomplish goals. For these behavioral scientists, the most realistic model of human motivation is the complex man. The good manager knows that no two people are exactly alike and adapts its attempts to influence people attending to their individual needs