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George Elton Mayo (1880-1949) was born in Adelaide, Australia. He was educated at Queen's School and the Collegiate School of St. Peter and began training in medicine. This was never completed and between 1903 and 1905 he spent time in West Africa and London where he taught English at the Working Men's College. In 1907 he returned to university in Adelaide, studying philosophy and psychology. He was appointed foundation lecturer in mental amd moral philosophy at the new University of Queensland in Brisbane and held its first Chair of Philosophy, 1919-1923.
Elton Mayo married Dorothea McConnel in 1913 and their daughters, Patricia and Gael were born in 1915 and 1921. Throughout their marriage they corresponded during their frequent and lengthy separations and a correpondence was also maintained with Patricia, while she was in England.
While at Brisbane, Mayo studied nervous breakdown and with T H Mathewson, and pioneered the treatment of shell-shock. Mayo's observation of the high level of industrial strife and political conflict in Australia led him to formulate an analogy between war neurosis and the psychological causes of industrial unrest. Arguing that the worker's morale depended on his perception of the social function of his work, Mayo believed that the solution to industrial unrest lay in sociological research and industrial management, not radical politics. Mayo travelled to the USA in 1922 where a Rockefeller grant enabled him as a research associate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School to investigate high labour turnover at a textile mill. The results of the work led to his appointment as associate professor at the Harvard School of Business Administration in 1926. Mayo became Professor of Industrial Research in 1929. While at Harvard Mayo was closely involved with the investigations into the personal and social factors determining work output at the Western Electric Company's Chicago Plant (the Hawthorne experiments). The results were groundbreaking studies in modern social research.
Mayo retired from Harvard in 1947 and retired to England were he died in 1949 in Guildford, Surrey.