"Theory X" and "Theory Y"

The following report is a survey of McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y: their origins, their content and assumptions, their origins and place in broader human psychology, and their effect on practical supervision in the workplace. It will be argued that attitudes towards McGregor's concept of Theory X and Theory Y  and indeed, towards the problem of motivation in general  have varied with broader social and economic trends. In general, however, Theory X and Theory Y have played relatively little practical role in effecting workplace attitudes and relations.

I. Traditional Attitudes Towards Work. One sometimes sees a bumper sticker  most often on the back of a pickup truck  which proclaims that "I owe, I owe, so off to work I go." The owner of a vehicle with such a bumper sticker is likely to be a

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view, the prevailing one in the economic world: the view which management held of workers, and which, reflexively, workers tended to hold of themselves. The basic tenet was, as already noted, that people dislike worked and sought to avoid it. To secondary tenets followed from this. One was that 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 (McGregor, 1960, p. 34). Thus, the large role of carrot and stick in personnel management policies  particularly stick, perhaps, since the carrot had to be paid for in the form of higher compensation. Another secondary tenet of Theory X supported the same outlook: The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, wants security above all (McGregor, 1960, p. 34). In accordance with this last proposition, great effort was put into "work simplification," partly because "simplified" jobs were easier to rate in terms of performance, and partly because essentially indifferent but docile workers were presumed to be bettersuited to and more willing t
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Approximate Word count = 2912
Approximate Pages = 12 (250 words per page)

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