Eiton Mayo, a professor at Harvard, once did a five-year study at the Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Chicago to find out what effect fatigue and monotony had on productivity. He stumbled onto a motivation principle that revolutionized the theory and practice of management. Mayo took five workers off the assembly line and put them under the watchful eye of a friendly supervisor. Then he started to make frequent changes in their work conditions. But he always discussed th…