Every management act in our organizations stems from a core belief about human nature.
Can workers be trusted to do the work that needs to be done? Are they ambitious? Do they seek responsibility? Do they have ideas about how to improve things? Do they enjoy the idea of contributing to the success of the organization?
What about yourself?
Of course, some (many?) of us will have to ask ourselves these questions apart from our current job because the conditions that surround us have a tendency to make our work environment trend toward the disengageable, which is exactly the point Douglas McGregor makes in his seminal book "The Human Side of Enterprise" where he introduces the concept of Theory X and Theory Y.
What McGregor argues is that if a worker (i.e., you, me, our colleagues) is disengaging from the work, it is as a result of how the organization is managed and not because of some sort of fault in our human nature.
What's sad and difficult and a very central reason why it's a trudge to work in so many organizations is that most of the organizations we work in rely on a Theory X approach when Theory X people wouldn't even exist if organizations hadn't spawned them.
That is, until an organization's environment (or: the experience of working in prior organizations) makes us feel otherwise, we're ambitious, we seek responsibility, we can be trusted to do the required work, we have ideas for how to improve things, and we generally enjoy the idea of making a contribution to the organization's output through our hard work.
If you've ever worked for an organization (or for a boss) that has taken advantage of your time, talent, and energy or treated you in ways inconsistent with your true professionalism, you know those experiences change how you think and how you work, and unfortunately, have a tendency to stick with you into the future.
(Given the number of job dissatisfaction conversations I’ve had with healthcare pros over the years, we're all Theory Y people—and I’m inclined to believe, (mostly) working in Theory X organizations, at least for elements of our jobs.)
Comparing Theory X and Theory Y
Think of Theory X as a carrot-and-stick understanding of human nature: that workers need to be incentivized for good performance and punished when expectations are not met.
Theory Y is whatever is the opposite of that.
Theory Y embraces the idea that, as McGregor writes, "If employees are lazy, indifferent, unwilling to take responsibility, intransigent, uncreative, uncooperative, Theory Y implies that the causes lie in management's methods of organization and control."
He continues, "... when people respond to managerial decisions in undesired ways, the normal response is to blame them. It is their stupidity, or their cooperativeness, or their laziness which is seized on as the explanation of what happened, not management's failure to select appropriate means for control.
"Theory X offers management an easy rationalization for ineffective organizational performance: It is due to the nature of the human resources [employees] with which we must work."
Instead: "Theory Y ... places the problems squarely in the lap of management."
"Every managerial decision has behavioral consequences," writes McGregor. "Every managerial act rests on assumptions, generalizations, and hypotheses, that is to say—theory. Our assumptions are frequently implicit, sometimes quite unconscious, often conflicting; nevertheless, they determine our predictions that if we do a, b will occur. Theory and practice are inseparable."
To connect the dots: If your manager’s theory of human nature is Theory X, they're going to get Theory X behavior because of their Theory X methods.
To state the obvious: If your manager’s theory of human nature is Theory Y, they're going to get Theory Y behavior because of their Theory Y methods.
Theory X negativity has a way of creeping into the organization’s day-to-day approach without much notice. For instance, if your boss’s boss or that boss’s boss have Theory X perspectives, Theory X patterns can trickle down to your boss—even if your boss happens to be a most passionate Theory Y believer. Beyond that, Theory X beliefs from, for example, committees with decision-making authority, unaware support department administrators, and executives from long, long ago have a way of being made permanent in an organization’s design—the reporting structure, budgeting system, compensation policy, etc. that guide how things are done around there.
Here’s how McGregor contrasts Theory X and Theory Y in his own words:
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 physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest.
- Man will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which he is committed.
- 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, not narrowly, distributed in the population.
- Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partially utilized.
Reflecting on our own assumptions
What makes it oh-so-much-worse is that McGregor rightly calls out the fact that very few of us have ever thought deeply about our own assumptions! We've implicitly accepted things as they are and instead of challenging what we might have wrong about our theories of human behavior to improve our outlook at the workplace, we're too busy with to do lists or resigned to commiserating at happy hour.
Since so much of our work experience is shaped by arbiters of authority—be it a boss, a policy, or accepted workplace practices, it’s helpful to probe the theoretical (meaning Theory X or Theory Y) motivations behind their intentions and adjust accordingly.
Because, as McGregor indicates, it’s the difference between being engaged and not: "Many of our (organization’s) attempts to control behavior, far from representing selective adaptations, are in direct violation of human nature. They consist in trying to make people behave as we wish without concern for natural law."
And that’s where job dissatisfaction emerges.
There is hope: "Human behavior is predictable, but, as in physical science, accurate prediction hinges on the correctness of underlying theoretical assumptions."
It requires introspection: "Only as we examine and test our theoretical assumptions can we hope to make them more adequate, to remove inconsistencies, and thus to improve our ability to predict."
Here is our task, no matter where we sit on the org chart: "The real need is for new theory, changed assumptions, more understanding of the nature of human behavior in organizational settings."
In other words: it's to our collective benefit to move toward a Theory Y understanding of human nature. "These assumptions involve sharply different implications for managerial strategy than do those of Theory X,” writes McGregor, “They are dynamic rather than static: They indicate the possibility of human growth and development; they stress the necessity for selective adaptation rather than for a single absolute form of control. They are not framed in terms of the least common denominator of the factory hand, but in terms of a resource (us!) which has substantial potentialities."
Workers with substantial potentialities. Yep, that's it.
