Harwood Manufacturing is a family textile company which became the site for a number of experiments in the behavioral sciences and workplace innovation, beginning in the late 1930s and extending over the next four decades.
[1][2] Shortly after Harwood Manufacturing had moved its operations from New England to Virginia the newly opened factory started to experience difficulties with recruiting skilled workers.
As a result of the moving the company had to train 300 inexperienced people from the Virginia mountains- to meet the high production standards of the industrialized areas of the North America.
[1][3][4] Despite the fact that inexperienced trainees (who were mainly woman) were eager to work, on the job their pace was slow, their output was too low and the turnover was enormously high.
[4] Constant changes in methods and jobs, which were considered necessary in order to beat a highly intense competition, were frequently resulting in low productivity, aggressive behavior towards management, a drop in output and absenteeism.
[5] In 1939 Kurt Lewin was invited by Alfred Marrow, the managing director of the factory, to discuss significant problems of labor with the staff of the Harwood Manufacturing Corporation.
The factory saw the core problem in employees’ lack of experience, however Kurt Lewin argued that the constant pressure and the way workers were treated could be a more important reason for people quitting their jobs.
The main idea was to draw supervisors’ attention to the way they treat their subordinates — to exclude the pressure and instead to find a way to make them believe that all the standards and goals are achievable.
The study began with Bavelas who was asked to plan and carry out a series of group experiments on human factors in factory management within the domain of action research in industry.
[3] The first experiment aimed to analyze the effect of giving workers a chance to take part in setting their own goals and control their output.
He had a small group of workers plan their own hourly pace and daily work level as long as they kept at or above the obligatory minimum quota.
Therefore, French introduced the idea of changing the style of management personal leadership in order to modify the forces that influence work group behavior.
The methods that were used the most were role playing, socio-drama, self-examination, feedback-sessions, group problem solving, and other action research techniques.
However this idea was not supported by management of all levels; they strongly believed that older employees would have difficulties meeting the factory’s requirements compared to the younger females.
[11][12] The result of the experiment was that the level of productivity and the amount of aggression expressed against management varied inversely with the degree of participation in the changes.
Clem Adelman highlighted that Lewin did not draw attention to power relations issue between superior workers and their subordinates.
[11] Mel Van Elteren (referring to the earlier work of Graebner) speculated on the question of whether the Lewin’s studies were exclusively democratic and did they contain the manipulative element.
[9] The "overcoming resistance to change" experiment performed Coch and French has been criticized over the years, mostly in relation to the management and methodology of their research.