Mayo, (George) Elton (1880–1949)

Australian-born psychologist. He is best remembered for his experimental studies at Western Electric's Hawthorne plant in Illinois, which he reported in The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization (1933). These studies determined productivity to be dependent on workers' morale. Mayo was born in Adelaide, Australia. He lectured on logic, ethics, and psychology in Australia before emigrating to the USA in 1922, where he taught at Harvard Business School (1926–47).