George Elton Mayo was the second child of a respected colonial family: his father was a civil engineer and his mother Henrietta Mary neé Donaldson was devoted to her children's education and success. Mayo was expected to follow his grandfather into medicine, but failed at university studies and was sent to Britain. Here he turned to writing, wrote on Australian politics for the Pall Mall Gazette and taught at the Working Men's College in London. He then returned to Australia to work in an Adelaide publishing business where his radical management practices were not appreciated.
Mayo returned to university, studied under the philosopher Sir William Mitchell, won prizes for scholarship and in 1912 was appointed a foundation lecturer in philosophy and education at the newly established university in Queensland. Here he married Dorothea McConnel, who had been educated in landscape art at the Sorbonne and frequently visited Europe. They had two daughters, Patricia Elton Mayo, who would follow her father's management thinking and had an interesting sociological career, and Ruth, who became a British artist and novelist and took the name Gael Elton Mayo.
Mayo taught philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, economics, education and the new psychology of Freud, Jung and especially Pierre Janet. From the beginning he trained himself in public speaking, and became an outstanding lecturer. He spoke at Worker's Education Association classes and tutorials, and addressed unions and professional bodies. During the First World War he served on government bodies, advised on the organization of work for the war effort, wrote and lectured on industrial and political psychology and psychoanalysis, and contributed a lively piece to Lady Galway's Belgium Book (1916). He was made a professor of philosophy in his university's reorganization after the war.
Mayo applied unsuccessfully for a directorship of adult education at the University of Melbourne, and went there to lecture on psychoanalysis before taking sabbatical leave to Britain in 1922. En route to Britain he stopped in San Francisco where he was a popular speaker. When his university refused to extend Mayo's unpaid sabbatical leave he resigned and accepted an income for six months by the philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, and a temporary post at the University of Pennsylvania in 1923. He then accepted a research professorship in the recently invigorated Harvard Business School, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He also collaborated with the researchers at the Hawthorne Works in Chicago. On retiring he did not return to Australia but chose to live in England.
