Douglas McGregor introduced two theories that are still commonly used for motivation and management today. They are Theory X and Theory Y. He was influenced by Dr Abraham Maslow’s Humanistic School of Psychology and based his researches on Dr Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, namely psychological, safety, love, esteem and self actualisation. He saw these two theories (X & Y) as two quite separate attitudes.
He was a forerunner for seeing the need of values-based leadership. These’s values are from one’s belief, assumptions about what seems to cause what, and fundamental attitudes. McGregor’s goal was to introduce a framework that provides ways of liberating the employees from authoritarian leadership and management with a good balance of soft and hard management styles.
Managements that are hard or strong had an environment of command and control involving close supervision, tight controls and limited flexibilities as opposed to soft management which involve satisfying employees’ demands, seeks harmony and being permissive with more flexibility which employees will cooperate in return. Having said these, hard and soft management are not the best management styles. The hard approach resulted in hostility, low-output, and extreme union demands and the soft approach resulted in increasing desire for greater reward in exchange for diminishing work output.
The characteristic of McGregor’s Theory X is much of a top-down approach of decision making. It is a conventional authoritarian management style which had the believe that employees had little ambition at work, prefer to work as little as possible, find great comfort with security above everything., dislike responsibilities and prefer to be led. Motivation is managed through fears, threats, punishments and occasional rewards and as a result, employees have no initiative to move forward voluntarily. Subordinates do