Fredrick Taylor focused on incentives to motivate workers to give greater effort at work. He stressed performance based bonuses and pay raises for consistently exceeding quotas. It was called scientific because it was very numbers driven and lacked any personal touch except to provide training so that workers can increase performance.

The Hawthorne studies helped in identifying the importance of the informal organization and the human touch. The big takeaway from them was that researchers and managers were around the employees all of the time asking questions and observing. They found that the more attention was paid to the workers, the better they performed.

The researchers also discovered the informal organization, that is the social structure the employees had among themselves, and that it was an important area for management awareness.