Journal of Vocational Behavior 60, 437–450 (2002)

doi:10.1006/jvbe.2001.1839, available online at http://www.idealibrary.com on

Elton Mayo and Carl Rogers: A Tale of Two Techniques

Kevin T. Mahoney and David B. Baker

University of Akron

This article examines the simultaneous appearance of nonauthoritarian interviewing and

nondirective counseling, two highly similar methods introduced by two different peo-
ple, Elton Mayo and Carl Rogers. The similarities and differences between the methods
and their developers are evaluated against the historical context in which they appear.

C 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
Key Words: nondirective therapy; Carl Rogers; Elton Mayo; Fritz J. Roethlisberger; Jean
Piaget; Hawthorne studies; personnel counseling.

Consider the following list of interviewing guidelines and make your best guess
as to their origin: (a) listen to the speaker in a patient and friendly, but intelligently
critical, manner; (b) do not display any kind of authority or give advice or moral
admonition; (c) do not argue with the speaker; and (d) talk or ask questions only
under certain conditions. It is likely that the preceding passage puts one in mind of
the client-centered approach to counseling and psychotherapy advocated by Carl
Rogers; however, these are not Rogers’s guidelines. These interviewing guidelines
appeared a few years earlier, emerging from an independent intellectual tradition.
Known as “nonauthoritarian interviewing,” these guidelines were developed by
the social scientist Elton Mayo in 1929 and appeared in print a decade later in
Management and the Worker: An Account of a Research Program Conducted
by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago (Roethlisberger &
Dickson, 1939). Closely allied in time, Counseling and Psychotherapy: Newer
Concepts in Practice, Rogers’s definitive statement of the nondirective approach,
would appear 3 years later in 1942.
The joint emergence of two highly similar counseling approaches is a pe-
culiar note in history. It begs the question why: Why did two men from dif-
ferent backgrounds, in pursuit of different goals, happen upon highly similar
techniques at roughly the same time? This article examines this question by
comparing the development of the seldom-recognized method of nonauthoritarian
interviewing and its developer (Mayo) to nondirective counseling and its developer
(Rogers).

Address correspondence and reprint requests to Kevin T. Mahoney, Department of Psychology,

University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325-4301. E-mail: kevin20@uakron.edu.

437
0001-8791/02 $35.00

C 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)
All rights reserved.
438 MAHONEY AND BAKER

ELTON MAYO
Considered an important figure in the history of industrial psychology (Perrow,
1986), Mayo was born in Brisbane, Australia, on December 26, 1880. The second
of seven children, Mayo was born in an atmosphere of academic achievement.
After failing out of or leaving a number of medical schools, he never realized
his expectations for becoming a physician. Identifying with progressive politics
of the early 20th century and the plight of the working poor, Mayo later studied
philosophy and psychology at the University of Adelaide, from which he gradu-
ated in 1911. Joining the faculty of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, he
taught moral and mental philosophy. A year later, he met and married Dorothea
McConnel, a member of a prominent Australian family. In 1915, their first child
was born, an event that stirred Mayo’s curiosity in the growing psychoanalytic
movement. Intrigued by the works of Freud, Jung, and Janet, he looked to their
ideas for guidance in becoming a good father, introducing what he had learned
into his lectures. Soon Mayo himself was offering counseling and psychotherapy
to convalescing soldiers, family members, and acquaintances. From these encoun-
ters, Mayo came to believe that therapeutic results could be achieved through the
accurate tracking of a patient’s thought process in a relaxed atmosphere. According
to Mayo, such an atmosphere led to better control of mental processes, making it
more likely that the patient would discover the roots of his or her problems. The
progressive Mayo would look for the broader applications of these ideas, focusing
on personnel problems in industry (Trahair, 1984).
Citing research on soldier morale during World War I, Mayo argued that the
provision of relaxation was capable of increasing both morale and performance.
By analogy, increasing industrial “morale” should increase worker productivity.
Mayo also believed that the newly industrialized world had undermined communal
social ties that were necessary for healthy psychological adjustment. Mayo warned
that workers lacking social support would obsess about their problems, causing
fatigue, low morale, and a split consciousness that reduced job performance. To
combat fatigue, Mayo suggested that personnel counselors be trained to listen with
understanding to workers. Mayo saw this as a promising technology for social
control, one that could confront problems of industrial unrest and maladjustment
among individual workers (Gillespie, 1991; Trahair, 1984).
Seeking greater opportunity, Mayo traveled to the United States. His timing
was good. Two decades of powerful progressive legislators, intent on improving
the plight of the worker, had pursued antitrust legislation, passed workers’ com-
pensation laws, and passed other laws designed to protect women and children
in business. The power of unions was growing consistently, if not unilaterally.
It was a time when management sought to provide for workers without sacrific-
ing traditional management prerogatives, a policy known as “welfare capitalism”
(Gillespie, 1991). The emphasis on efficiency in production had also dramatically
altered the technical character of business. Fredrick Taylor’s scientific manage-
ment techniques turned many jobs into an incessant series of repetitive actions
over which workers had little control. In part, this contributed to the alarmingly
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 439

high rates of worker turnover, as high as 300% in some factories. A new type
of efficiency expert emerged: the personnel manager. Personnel managers would
look to social science for answers in the search for maintaining an effective and
stable workforce (Gillespie, 1991).
With little more than a letter of introduction, Mayo visited the most important
academic institutions in the country, meeting some of the most influential leaders
in psychology. From Stanford to Harvard universities, he interacted with notables
such as Lewis Terman, John Dewey, James McKeen Cattell, Beardsley Ruml,
E. L. Thorndike, and Raymond Dodge (Trahair, 1984). A gifted presenter, he
enjoyed lecturing on the use of psychiatric methods and social science research for
understanding industry problems. His style and message impressed Joseph Willits,
a professor of industrial research in the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce
at the University of Pennsylvania. With Willits’s support and the personal financial
backing of John Rockefeller, Jr. (facilitated by Beardsley Ruml), Mayo secured a
short-term research position working in Penn’s Department of Industrial Research
(Gillespie, 1991; Trahair, 1984).
For the next several years, Mayo created a broad network of people in industry,
finance, education, and psychiatry who approved of him. He was able to conduct
research with several companies with sporadic success. His ideas about fatigue
and rest schedules met with the approval of Wallace Donham, dean of the Harvard
Business School, and in September 1926, Mayo moved to Harvard to become an as-
sociate professor and head of the Department of Industrial Research at the Harvard
Business School. In October 1927, Mayo presented a talk to a group of industrial
leaders. In attendance was T. K. Stevenson, the personnel director of Western Elec-
tric Company. Stevenson, favorably impressed by what he heard, asked Mayo to
review some research reports conducted at the company’s Hawthorne Works in
Chicago. This would begin a long and successful relationship between Mayo and
Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT & T (Gillespie, 1991; Trahair, 1984).

MAYO AND ROETHLISBERGER

Mayo’s most famous student was Fritz Roethlisberger, the son of a New York
cheese manufacturer, who had only learned to speak English during his youth.
After college at Columbia University and MIT, Roethlisberger worked for a year
as an industrial psychologist. Dissatisfied with the work, he enrolled at Harvard for
a philosophy degree. Apparently in need of guidance, the young Roethlisberger
was directed to Mayo (Roethlisberger, 1977). The two would establish a stormy,
but highly productive, relationship that would last until Mayo’s death (Cruikshank,
1987).
As he would do with many of his protégés, Mayo began his relationship with
Roethlisberger as his counselor. Through this, Roethlisberger was introduced to
Mayo’s many ideas. Roethlisberger (1977) later reflected, “For the next few years,
I sat at Mayo’s feet, spellbound by his knowledgability, creative imagination, and
clinical insight” (p. 29). Roethlisberger would model what he learned from Mayo
in his own experiences counseling students at Harvard.
440 MAHONEY AND BAKER

HAWTHORNE STUDIES
What exactly was done at Hawthorne has long been the topic of investigation,
speculation, and controversy. Yet a brief synopsis explains the reason for and the
development of interviewing. Simply put, the “Hawthorne studies” were a col-
lection of experiments conducted under the auspices of the National Research
Council, and with the financial support of big business, designed to discover what
workplace factors could be altered to increase production. The famed lighting
experiment (supported by electric suppliers such as General Electric) sought to
measure whether different levels of lighting could increase productivity. What
was found, of course, was that the attention paid to the workers far outweighed the
effects of illumination in increasing productivity, the oft-cited “Hawthorne effect.”
The interviewing program would grow out of another set of experiments involving
the relay assembly test room. As in the lighting studies, researchers sought more
conclusive ways to increase production. This involved observing 6 women assem-
ble electromagnetic switches in an isolated test room while production, working
conditions, health, and social interactions were recorded. A part of this program
involved an examination of workers’ attitudes. From these questions evolved the
interviewing program, which provided the setting for the introduction of Mayo’s
interviewing method (Gillespie, 1991; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

INTERVIEWING AT HAWTHORNE
The interviewing program was an extension of the test room interviewing. The
goal was to provide researchers with knowledge about the attitudes of all workers
throughout the factory; as such, the program was originally an indepth survey. Re-
searchers thought that the interviews could identify problems between employees
and supervisors, assess workers’ likes and dislikes, and evaluate worker morale.
The initial interviewing procedure involved the interviewer asking a supervisor
to select workers to be interviewed. The interviewer would take each worker to a
private area, explain the program, ensure confidentiality, and encourage the worker
to express honest opinions about his or her work. Worker comments were organized
into categories and reviewed by plant supervisors (Roethlisberger & Dickson,
1939).
The interviewing program began with five interviewers interviewing 1,600
workers at the inspection plant. The project was extended in January 1929 to the
main manufacturing wing of Hawthorne, the operating branch where there were
12,000 workers. Research was coordinated by the Industrial Research Division,
which had two departments devoted to the interviewing program: the Employee
Relations Department (directed by H. A. Wright) that performed the interviews
and the Industrial Development Department that analyzed the interview content
(Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).
Mayo began to change the conduct of the interview during the early months of
1929. While the interviews had initially been meant to provide an overall quanti-
tative picture of worker attitudes, Mayo became more interested in qualitative in-
formation about the workers as individuals. Introducing what he called the “Piaget
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 441

method,” Mayo presented an interviewing method that stressed listening closely,

without interruption, to worker comments (Gillespie, 1991).

NONAUTHORITARIAN INTERVIEWING
There are several influences that can be identified in the development of Mayo’s
interviewing technique and counseling philosophy. As noted earlier, Mayo came
to psychoanalysis as a way of understanding the development of his own children.
Developmental themes can be seen throughout his work. Influenced by French so-
ciologist Emil Durkheim and his followers, Mayo speculated on analogies between
primitive cultures and industrial workers. Mayo reasoned that primitive peoples
were akin to children and that the same techniques needed to understand the in-
tellect of children would also be needed to understand the thoughts of workers.
This led to the most proximate influence on Mayo’s development of nonauthor-
itarian interviewing, the work of Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget
(Gillespie, 1991; Trahair, 1984).
Piaget had constructed techniques to understand the development of children’s
intellect through speaking with them. He developed these methods while working
with Theophile Simon at the Paris laboratory of Alfred Binet (Ginsburg & Opper,
1979).
In assessing children, Piaget was far more fascinated by incorrect responses
than by correct responses. He found, for example, that the same incorrect answers
seemed to occur in children who were close in age. Eschewing standardized testing
procedures, he sought less structured methods and came upon the technique of
letting children’s responses determine the course of questioning. According to
Piaget (1929), “The skill of the practitioner consists not in making [the client]
answer questions but in making him talk freely and thus encouraging the flow of
his spontaneous tendencies instead of diverting it into the artificial channels of set
questions and answers” (p. 4). Piaget used this method to help children become
more self-aware, allowing them to reach a new “synthesis” with their environment
(Ginsburg & Opper, 1979). Drawing from this, Mayo assumed that interviewing
workers would increase their self-awareness, allowing them to focus more on their
jobs and thereby increasing productivity. Indeed, Mayo would rely on Piaget’s
thoughts in the development of nonauthoritarian interviewing. The comparisons
are obvious, as seen in Table 1 comparing Piaget’s (1929) theories as presented in
The Child’s Conception of the World to Mayo’s nonauthoritarian interviewing as
presented in Management and the Worker (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

MANAGEMENT AND THE WORKER

The task of fleshing out the details of Mayo’s interviewing approach was left
to Roethlisberger, who Mayo sent to Cicero in the summer of 1930 (Gillespie,
1991). The interviewing program and supervisor training initially expanded to
include more of the Hawthorne Works. However, early growth was quickly tem-
pered when layoffs from the depression led to the end of the program in 1931.
Roethlisberger and William Dickson (an assistant to Wright, Dickson was jointly
442 MAHONEY AND BAKER

TABLE 1
A Comparison of Piaget and Mayo

Piaget a Mayob

“The skill of the practitioner consists not in
making [the client] answer questions but
in making him talk freely and thus
encouraging the flow of his spontaneous
tendencies instead of diverting it into the
artificial channels of set questions and
answers” (p. 4)
“But the clinical examination is also
dependent on direct observation, in the
sense that the good practitioner lets
himself be led, though always in control,
and takes account of the whole of the
mental context, instead of being the victim
of ‘systematic error’ as so often happens
to the pure experimenter” (p. 8)
“The golden rule is to avoid suggestion,
that is, to try to avoid dictating a particular
answer among all possible answers” (p. 13)
“In psychology, as in physics, there are no
pure ‘facts”’ (p. 23)
“An attempt must be made to strip the
answers of their verbal element. . . . The
important thing is the attitude rather than
the formula, the direction of the thought
rather than the answer given” (p. 27)
a From Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
b From Roethlisberger, F. J., & Dickson, W. J. (1939). Management and the worker: An account
of the research program conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
“An indirect type of interviewing was
preferable if the spontaneous convictions
of the workers were to be obtained, and
these could only be obtained by not
asking too many questions and by
following rather than leading the
interviewee” (p. 271)
“[The interviewer] had to guard against
having fixed and preconceived ideas
which would prevent him from catching
anything new” (p. 271)
“Many of the common errors of
interpretation arise from treating nonfacts
as facts. . . . As a result, what is being said is
taken out of its mental context, an
irrelevant contest is substituted, and
irrelevant questions are asked by the
interviewer of the material elicited” (p. 275)
“The interviewer must not suggest or
imply judgments of value or morals
concerning the worker’s overt or verbal
behavior” (p. 288)
“The majority of statements made in the
interviewing program at Western Electric
Company were, strictly speaking, neither
facts nor errors. They were more in the
nature of nonfacts” (p. 274)
“The meaning to be assigned to the
speaker’s remarks depends upon
interpreting his responses in the light of
the psycological context in which they
occur” (p. 276)

paid by Western Electric and Mayo’s Rockefeller grant) returned to Harvard, bring-
ing with them much of the data from the Hawthorne studies that served as the basis
for Management and the Worker.
Roethlisberger claimed to write the book because he wanted Mayo to have some-
thing to show for his efforts (Roethlisberger, 1977). However, Mayo’s biography
suggests that Mayo himself would have written the book if he had not been stricken
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 443

with glaucoma (Trahair, 1984). Roethlisberger wrote the chapters on the inter-
viewing program, while Dickson concentrated on the chapters dealing with the
test room. Management and the Worker ended when, in praise of the interview-
ing program, the authors suggested a new organizational role, that of personnel
counselor (Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).

CARL ROGERS AND THE EMERGENCE

OF NONDIRECTIVE COUNSELING
In 1939, the clinical psychologist Rogers wrote his first book, The Clinical
Treatment of the Problem Child. The book covered the many different options
available for treating children with behavioral problems, with Rogers supplying
his opinion on the strengths and weakness of each. Rogers, working at the time at
the Rochester Child Guidance Clinic, was an advocate of environmental therapies;
that is, he saw remediation in the provision of a nurturing, orderly, and stable
environment. His description of a healthy foster home included a foster parent
with “an attitude of intelligent understanding. . . , a consistency of viewpoint and
discipline . . ., an attitude of interested affection, [and] . . . satisfaction in the child’s
developing abilities” (Rogers, 1939, p. 74). For Rogers, a problem child treated
with freedom and integrity had a good chance for improvement. It followed that
a good therapist was one capable of respect for the individual. Rogers asserted,
“There must be a willingness to accept the child as he is, on his own level of
adjustment, and to give him some freedom to work out his own solutions to his
problems” (p. 282). Clearly, Rogers believed that a good counseling situation
resembled a good environment for a child.
The prevailing psychoanalytic concepts of personality and functioning did not
offer much to Rogers. Rejecting Freudian orthodoxy, Rogers did find congruence
with one of Freud’s disinherited disciples, Otto Rank. An advocate of the “drive for
health,” Rank’s influence on Rogers was rather specific. According to DeCarvalho
(1999), Rogers was impressed “by a psychotherapy that relied on human qualities,
was noninvasive and passive, and emphasizes listening to the feelings behind a
client’s words so the therapist may reflect them back to the patient” (p. 138).
Directive interviewing techniques, common to American counseling and guid-
ance at the time, were also an anathema to Rogers, who viewed them as a form of
manipulation, producing more harm than help. He began to adopt the perspective
that “it is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go, what problems
are crucial, what experiences have been deeply buried” (Rogers, 1967, p. 359).
Rogers seemed to be in the right place at the right time. His approach to counsel-
ing anticipated the need for a national workforce of mental health professionals,
and he was sought out by the academic community. In 1940, shortly after The
Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child appeared, Rogers accepted a position as
full professor at Ohio State University (Rogers, 1967). Rogers’s impact was imme-
diate. His teaching necessitated that he more fully develop his counseling views.
He was popular with students who enjoyed a departure from laboratory training
and who pressed for more intensive training to become psychotherapists. Rogers
444 MAHONEY AND BAKER

established the first course where supervised therapy was carried on in a university
setting. The uniqueness of his developing views dawned on him on December 20,
1940, when he presented his ideas at the University of Minnesota (Kirschenbaum,
1979). Minnesota was a bastion of directive counseling techniques whose staunch
advocate, E. G. Williamson, would challenge Rogers and his nondirective approach
with vigor. Of his experience in Minnesota, Rogers would later write,
I was totally unprepared for the furor the talk aroused. I was criticized, I was praised, I was
attacked, I was looked on with puzzlement. By the end of my stay in Minneapolis, it really
struck me that perhaps I was saying something new that came from me. . . . It was shortly after
that I decided I would work toward a book presenting my point of view. (Rogers, 1961, p. 13)

Rogers (1942) spent the summer and fall of 1941 writing Counseling and Psy-
chotherapy, the definitive statement of his nondirective approach. Rogers described
the counselor’s role as creating a comfortable atmosphere for the client by accept-
ing feelings, regardless of their content. The counselor was to provide reflective
statements to help the client organize his or her thoughts and, in so doing, to clarify
the roots of the problem, provide emotional release (catharsis), and help achieve
insight. Once insight was achieved, the client could independently initiate steps to
solve the problem. The counselor was never to rush this process by providing pre-
mature interpretation. In fact, Rogers considered any type of advice or suggestion
as dangerous. It could engender resistance and provide only temporary change.
Rogers believed in a creative will to address problems and viewed the counselor
as a facilitator to the process.
The notion of the counselee as a “client” was also an innovation. This suggested
a cooperative and equal relationship between the counselor and the client, in con-
trast to the more prescriptive hierarchical relationship implied by a “doctor” and
“patient” relationship.
Rogers grounded his methods in science and used research to highlight the dif-
ference between directive methods (e.g., asking highly specific questions, explain-
ing, discussing, giving information) and nondirective methods (e.g., recognizing
the client’s feelings or attitudes). His results showed that nondirective techniques
were more likely to lead to insight (Kirschenbaum, 1979). The last part of Coun-
seling and Psychotherapy included a verbatim transcript of a session with one
of Rogers’s clients, Herbert Ryan. This transcript accomplished many things. It
removed the veil of secrecy from the therapeutic hour, and it allowed readers to
see the power of Rogers’s seemingly superficial “accept and clarify” system. Fur-
thermore, the transcript allowed readers to first cover up the coming responses and
to generate their own nondirective responses and then compare them to Rogers’s
responses.
His popularity and visibility rising, Rogers became more involved in profes-
sional activities. He was an associate editor of the Journal of Consulting Psychology
and held a similar position for Applied Psychology Monographs. He served as vice
president of the Orthopsychiatric Association in 1942 and was actively involved in
the American Association for Applied Psychology, first serving as chair of the clini-
cal division and later serving as president of the association (Kirschenbaum, 1979).
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 445

Like the contributions of many psychologists of his day, Rogers’s contributions

to the war effort helped to advance his career. Under the supervision of Rensis
Likert, he interviewed gunners upon their return from battle missions. The data he
gathered were used to generate recommendations that would help gunners adjust to
civilian life, an accomplishment that apparently made a favorable impression, for
shortly thereafter he accepted a 1-year position as director of counseling services
with the United Service Organization (USO). At the USO, Rogers developed a
teaching program whereby workers could be trained to provide nondirective coun-
seling to returning veterans. It was successful for many reasons; it was safe, it
could be taught easily, and it worked (Kirschenbaum, 1979).
Returning to civilian life, Rogers moved to the University of Chicago, where
he established the counseling center. It was a productive time, both for attracting
students to study the Rogerian way and for doing research. His popularity most
certainly in place, he was involved in the reorganization of the American Psycho-
logical Association and later served as its president in 1946 (Rogers, 1967).

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

The nondirective counseling approach of Rogers and the nonauthoritarian inter-
viewing of Mayo share striking similarities, as can be seen in Table 2. The actual
procedures for conducting an interview are virtually identical. Both techniques
required the interviewer to speak infrequently and avoid any type of authority
or advice. Both sought to create a comfortable atmosphere whereby any feeling,
positive or negative, could be expressed and accepted.

TABLE 2
A Comparison of Mayo and Rogers

Rogersa Mayob

“The counseling relationship represents a “The interview is quite different from an

quality of social bond which differs from
any the client has heretofore experienced”
(p. 86)
“The counselor encourages free expression
of feelings in regard to his problem. To
some extent, this is brought about by the
counselor’s friendly, interested, receptive
attitude” (p. 35)
“It seems to the writer that the counselor
cannot maintain a counseling relationship
with the client and at the same time have
authority over him” (p. 109)
ordinary social conversation or discussion.
Moreover, the social personality of the
interviewer, if he follows the rules as
prescribed, is quite different from that to
which the interviewee is generally
accustomed” (pp. 284–285)
“The interviewer should listen to the speaker
in a patient and friendly manner, but [an]
intelligently critical manner” (p. 287)
“The interviewer should not display any
kind of authority” (p. 287)
446 MAHONEY AND BAKER

TABLE 2—Continued

Rogers a Mayob

“The second quality of the counseling “The interviewer should not give advice or
relationship is its permissiveness in regard moral admonition” (p. 287)
to expression of feeling. . . . By the counselor’s
acceptance of his statements, by the
complete lack of any moralistic or
judgmental attitude which pervades the
counseling interview, the client comes to
recognize that all feelings and attitudes
may be expressed” (p. 88)
“The skillful counsellor refrains from “The interviewer should not argue with the
intruding his own wishes, his own reactions speaker” (p. 287)
or biases, into the therapeutic situations” (p. 89)
“The counselor accepts and recognizes the
positive feelings which are expressed, in
the same manner in which he has accepted
and recognized the negative feelings” (p. 40)
“The best techniques for interviewing are “The interviewer should talk or ask
those which encourage the client to express questions only under certain conditions”
himself as freely as possible, with the (p. 287)
counselor consciously endeavoring to
refrain from any activity or any response
which would guide the direction of the
interview or the content brought forth” (p. 132)
“The good counselor . . . will do better to face “The only way in which the interviewer can
openly the fact that to some extent he is guard against having his own sentiments
himself emotionally involved, but that this acted upon is not by denying their
involvement must be strictly limited for the existence but by admitting and
good of the patient” (p. 87) understanding them” (p. 286)
“Frequently the counselor verbally clarifies “No attempt should be made at first to
these feelings, not trying to interpret their modify . . . opinions or by suggestion or
cause or argue in regard to their utility—simply coercion. In fact, it is often a good plan to
recognizing that they exist and that go in the opposite direction and to restate
he accepts them” (p. 38) the speaker’s position even more strongly
than he has done himself” (p. 288)
a From Roethlisberger, F. J., & Dickson, W. J. (1939). Management and the worker: An account

of the research program conducted by the Western Electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
b From Rogers, C. (1942). Counseling and psychotherapy: Newer concepts in practice. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin.

Consider the comments of Irwin Berg, a psychologist who trained in both tech-
niques:
One of the skills I acquired at Western Electric as the result of the training is what
Roethlisberger and Dickson call non-authoritarian interviewing. It was Rogerian non-directive
or client-centered counseling but almost five years ahead of Rogers in a sense of a for-
mal statement. Rogers worked out his conceptual framework much more completely that
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 447

Roethlisberger and Dickson had, and he provided the historical background of the procedure.
But the method and the rationale were about the same, and in 1937 the Western Electric
personnel counselors used a privately printed version of what became Chapter XVIII, “The
Interviewing Method,” in the 1939 book Management and the Worker. (Berg, 1972, p. 49)

Rogers and Roethlisberger were quite aware of one another. Rogers had read
at least portions of Management and the Worker before he wrote Counseling and
Psychotherapy. In fact, Rogers explicitly recognized the technique at Hawthorne as
embodying a counseling process like his own. He believed that nonauthoritarian in-
terviewing was a process that legitimized his approach in a different setting. Rogers
included Mayo’s interviewing rules in Counseling and Psychotherapy, noting,
It will be very evident that these rules with their stress on the absence of advice, persuasion, and
argument, and with their clear emphasis on the fact that the interview is the client’s, providing
him with an opportunity to talk freely, are in harmony with the non-directive approach, as
factually delineated, and quite opposed to most of the characteristic techniques of the directive
approach. (Rogers, 1939, p. 125)

Roethlisberger read Counseling and Psychotherapy and saw its merits. Although
he would insist on the uniqueness of his own approach, Roethlisberger admitted
that Rogers had done a far more thorough job working out a nondirective counsel-
ing theory, going so far as to adopt Rogers’s book, Client-Centered Therapy, for
teaching his human relations classes at Harvard Business School (Roethlisberger,
1977). Personnel counselors at Western Electric would be trained as much from
Rogers’s writings as from Roethlisberger. The two also knew one another. Rogers
taught during the summer of 1948 at Harvard, where he could easily have met
Roethlisberger. The two presented together in 1951 at the Centennial Conference
on Communication held at Northwestern University, coauthoring a paper based on
their talk for the Harvard Educational Review (Rogers & Roethlisberger, 1951).

THE FATE OF MAYO AND HIS METHOD

Throughout the 1930s, Mayo popularized the results of the Hawthorne experi-
ments, speaking across the United States and on periodic summer visits to England.
He wrote The Human Problems of Industrial Civilization in 1933, which included
much from the Hawthorne studies. Always championing his cause, he may have
exaggerated claims about what his techniques could do. Organizations however,
were open to his message, and Mayo’s input was instrumental in Western Elec-
tric’s decision to institute the personnel counseling program at Hawthorne Works.
Soon affiliates of AT&T and other large companies were developing personnel
counseling programs of their own.
By 1942, it appeared that Mayo’s better days were behind him. With diminishing
visibility and support, he left the United States and in 1947 returned to England,
where he would die 2 years later in 1949. With his death, he left his friend and
associate Roethlisberger to deal with a flurry of virulent critics of the Hawthorne
experiments. Mayo’s wandering across disciplines had left many feeling that their
territory had been trespassed, and they were quick to attack Mayo and his ideas
(Landsberger, 1958).
448 MAHONEY AND BAKER

Roethlisberger, like Mayo, was a popular speaker and became a central

spokesperson for the human relations movement. He was also able to incorporate
Mayo’s ideas (including the interviewing technique) into the curriculum of the
Harvard Business School. Roethlisberger would continue to stress the importance
of communication as a means of making organizations run more smoothly and
became more sociological in his approach. He contributed to the founding of orga-
nizational behavior (Roethlisberger claimed he was the first to use this term) and
the development of the systems view of the organization (Roethlisberger, 1977).

CONCLUSION
In the end, the differences in the two approaches appear to outweigh the sim-
ilarities. When examining the settings, roles, and goals associated with the two
techniques, it becomes easier to see why Rogers’s method would rise to ascen-
dancy while Mayo’s would fall into relative obscurity.
Mayo’s interviewing program took place within the factory and was conducted
by interviewers hired by management. Asking workers to trust management with
personal problems and concerns certainly could be viewed with suspicion. The
personnel counseling program, the descendent of Mayo’s interviewing approach,
would suffer from this conflict. Personnel counselors were often placed in a
situation where they had to choose between the needs of the workers and the
needs of management (Dickson & Roethlisberger, 1966). The tendency (at least at
Hawthorne) for counselors to identify with workers may have assured counselors
the trust of the employees, but it made it harder to secure management support
(Highhouse, 1999). Interestingly, the philosophical and political debates over the
relationship between worker and management brought criticism from sociologists
who saw personal counseling as a management ploy to diffuse workers’ concerns
before they reached the level of a union grievance. According to Wilensky and
Wilensky (1951),
Counseling has helped protect management’s freedom to promote, downgrade, transfer, train,
discipline, lay off, apply a variety of rewards, and sanctions (with a minimum of interference
from a relatively cooperative union); in short, it has helped the company retain its control
over the worker. (p. 279)

Rogers’s approach was practiced in the confines of a private office or university-

based counseling center. The counselor was a free agent and not responsible for
any particular end other than the realization of self by the client. Clearly, Rogers’s
intent was to create a setting that would encourage trust and confidentiality, a
situation whereby the counselor would be viewed as an ally and advocate.
For Rogers, the goal of nondirective counseling was self-awareness. By listen-
ing with understanding, a counselor freed the creative will of the individual to
confront and resolve his or her own problems. By contrast, there was ambiguity
about the goals of Mayo’s interviewing program. Throughout its existence, the
interviewing program remained an information-gathering venture seeking to fer-
ret out employees’ views on their work, supervisors, and plant policies. To the
 A TALE OF TWO TECHNIQUES 449

extent that speaking about a problem was therapeutic, nonauthoritarian interview-

ing could be seen as fostering self-improvement. Yet in many instances, employees
were complaining about a real problem in the organization, a problem they were
essentially powerless to change.
Perhaps as Highhouse (1999) has suggested, personnel counseling simply did
not work. Counselors were never able to provide evidence that counseling reduced
turnover, absenteeism, or the number of grievances employees made. Indeed, it
was unclear whether counseling did anything to improve adjustment.
The differences in the settings, roles, and goals are informative in elucidating the
reasons why Mayo’s nonauthoritarian interviewing failed, while Rogers’s nondi-
rective counseling flourished; however, it is not sufficient. To fully understand why
these two techniques, so similar and contiguous, would meet different fates can
be viewed from the vantage point of the larger social forces operating on each. In
America, Mayo’s notion of applying psychiatric methods to industry initially met
with a favorable response. It promised to improve relations between management
and labor, and it supported the progressive notion of increased production (and
profit) through improved efficiency. The path that Mayo was on was largely finan-
cial, and that road would to come to an end with the stock market crash of 1929.
Mayo’s audience remained, but it was small and populated largely by industrial
management still looking to improve operations but without the resources to do
much. Rogers’s audience in 1939 was significantly larger. Publication of the The
Clinical Treatment of the Problem Child in 1939 offered something new to anyone
interested in children and families. Rogers’s prescriptions for producing mentally
fit children seemed reasonable, straightforward, and accessible. The elaboration
of these ideas into nondirective counseling offered a set of techniques that could
be easily isolated, identified, and taught. Voice recordings and transcripts of the
counseling hour replaced the mystery of the analytic hour. The window on the
once private world of psychotherapy revealed that with a good heart, good listen-
ing skills, and a belief in the power of the individual to seek growth, it was possible
for the client to turn pathology into adjustment.
In contrast to the determinism of the Freudians and behaviorists, nondirective
counseling showed faith in the average person’s ability to identify and resolve
obstacles to living a satisfying life. The timing could not have been better, for
the prewar years of the late 1930s and early 1940s revealed a nation alarmed at
the incidence of mental illness. Rogers’s ideas came of age just at the time when a
national program of mental hygiene was being planned. Epidemiological reports,
psychiatric rejections among inductees, and the anticipated psychiatric casualties
from the approaching World War II resulted in a massive plan of recruitment and
training of mental health professionals (Baker & Benjamin, 2000). Nondirective
counseling fit the bill, and Rogers was an able and effective spokesperson in
promoting the nondirective method.
Some six decades after the introduction of similar methods, Rogers and his
brand of counseling seem ubiquitous, while Mayo appears reflexively linked to
the Hawthorne effect. In the end, while we might not recognize nonauthoritarian
450 MAHONEY AND BAKER

interviewing, we would do well to remember those occasions in history when simi-

lar ideas have emerged and collided into social consciousness, their fate determined
more by context than by personality.

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Received July 10, 2001; published online December 19, 2001