McGREGOR: THEORY X, THEORY Y
McGregor in the late
1950's was dissatisfied both with the industry practices
that emphasize management as control and direction and with
the Human Relations school that de-emphasized the role of
the manager.
He believed that the
manger's (and scholarly writing's) assumptions about the
nature of people was wrong. The way managers perceive humans
at work drove the way that management was conceptualized and
performed.
There are two ways of
perceiving people at work:
Theory X:
- The average human being has an
inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can...
-
Because of this human
characteristic of dislike of work, most people must be
coerced, controlled, directed, threatened with
punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort
toward the achievement of organizational objectives...
-
The average human being
prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility,
has relatively little ambition, wants security above
all.
Theory Y:
- The expenditure of ...effort in work
is as natural as play or rest. The human being does not
inherently dislike work...
-
External control and the
threat of punishment are not the means for bringing
about effort... . Man will exercise self-direction and
self-control in the service of objectives to which he is
committed.
-
Commitment to objectives
is a function of the rewards associated with their
achievement. The most significant of such rewards, e.g.,
the satisfaction of ego and self-actualization... .
-
The average human being
learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but
to seek responsibility. ...
-
The capacity to exercise
a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and
creativity in the solution of organizational problems is
widely ...distributed... .
-
(T)he intellectual
potentialities of the average human being are only
partially utilized.
If business managers
challenged their own preconceptions and accepted a Theory Y
perspective, he thought that it would be easier for the
organization to achieve worker acceptance of organizational
goals and improve performance.,
