George Elton Mayo (1880-1949) was born on December 26 1880 in Adelaide, Australia. He died on September 7 1949.
He was a psychologist and sociologist and lectured at the University of Queensland from 1919 to 1923. He then moved to the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1926 to 1947 he was professor of industrial research at Harvard Business School.
He is well known for his research including the Hawthorne Studies, and his book The Human Problems of an Industrialised Civilisation (1933). He concluded that people's work performance is dependent on both social issues and job content. He suggested a tension between workers' 'logic of sentiment' and managers' 'logic of cost and efficiency' which could lead to conflict within organisations