[简答题]

Our modern understanding of the importance of workplace group dynamics dates to a series of experiments conducted in the 1920s and 1930s at a telephone-equipment plant in Cicero, IL. The Hawthorne studies, overseen by Harvard Business School professor Elton Mayo and named after the factory where they took place, set out to examine the relationship between working conditions—the amount of light in a room, say—and productivity. In one experiment, six women from the shop floor were put into a group and then observed while Mayo’s researchers adjusted such variables as the number of rest breaks and their meals. Any change, it seemed, led to increased productivity, feeding the theory of the Hawthorne effect—that what really mattered was change itself and the experimenters’ attention.
But Mayo later wrote about the six women and offered a more nuanced explanation, things changed when the women started thinking about one another and not about the bos