Why Is It Called “Industrial,” Anyway?
After my inaugural post covering the basics of I/O Psychology, a reader asked a question I hadn’t fully answered: why is it called Industrial psychology? While I explained what the “I” covers today, I did not address where it came from or why it matters. So let’s go back to the beginning.
Industrial psychologists haven’t always been focused on employee satisfaction and other humanistic aspects of work. In fact, the field traces its roots to increasing military prowess with WWI solders and factory output at the turn of the 20th century — and the workers, frankly, were an afterthought.
From the Factory Floor
The early field reflected the priorities of its time. Thinkers like Frederick Taylor championed scientific management — time and motion studies, standardized tools, financial incentives for higher output — and efficiency became the organizing principle of the era. But by the 1920s, that relentless focus on productivity had come at a cost: the dehumanization of the very workers driving it.
The Hawthorne Effect
Western Electric’s Hawthorne plant was about to change all of that. In 1924, the National Academy of Sciences launched an experiment to determine how lighting affected worker efficiency. The findings were baffling: productivity improved not just for workers whose lighting was increased, but also for those whose lighting stayed the same — and even for those whose lighting was turned down. Something else was going on.
These inconclusive results led to deeper research into worker attitudes, and crucially, workers were actually consulted about changes to their routines. What emerged is now known as the Hawthorne Effect: the phenomenon where people modify their behavior — typically by improving their performance — simply because they know they’re being observed or feel they’re receiving special attention.
The Hawthorne Studies
A fascinating 14-minute 1973 film on the Hawthorne Studies brings this to life beautifully. The subsequent research by leaders at the Hawthorne plant and academics at Harvard led to the first-ever employee interviewing program — a structured effort to let workers share their feelings about their jobs, supervisors, and working conditions. As the film puts it, the studies led researchers to begin regarding business organizations as social systems, and for the first time, worker satisfaction could be examined in direct relationship to output and productivity.
The result was a new participative management mindset — one that gave workers a genuine voice in how operations were run. The outcomes were striking: dramatic improvements in productivity, quality, and ultimately profitability. Turns out, people perform better when they feel seen.
Lessons for the AI Revolution
Today, we’re living through another revolution built on the promise of increasing organizational output — and once again, the worker is getting lost in the rush. As I listen to friends and colleagues and scroll through disheartening posts on LinkedIn about layoffs and restructurings, one line from the film landed hard: “Somewhere along the assembly line the workers got lost in the rush of production. Considered an extension of the machinery, the industrial man was often less important than his output.”
Sound familiar?
In the race to adopt AI, organizations are once again dehumanizing workers in pursuit of efficiency gains. That may produce results in the short run. But without motivated workers, creativity erodes, institutional knowledge walks out the door, and the organizational gains rarely materialize the way the models promised. Leaders are skipping the fundamentals — job analysis, employee feedback, basic dignity — and jumping straight to transformation. You can’t get to the exciting “organizational” work if you’re neglecting the “industrial” foundation beneath it.
The Hawthorne Studies are a powerful reminder of what becomes possible when you choose to prioritize people alongside — not instead of — productivity. I encourage you to give the film a watch. It’s 14 minutes well spent.