The human side of enterprise was a management book written by frederick w. taylor.

Taylor, McGregor and me Marvin Weisbord

Future Search Network, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to make a case for the co-existence of Theories X and Y assumptions in everyone. The author does this by comparing the works of Douglas McGregor and Frederick W. Taylor, “the father of scientific management,” after having lived with their legacies for several decades as manager and consultant. The author shows how the striking similarities in their values diverged in practice and how the author learned to integrate their voices in himself.

Design/methodology/approach – Personal cases are used showing how the author learned to improve workplaces while tracing his roots from McGregor to Taylor and back, drawing on a few of more than 260 sources the author cited in Productive Workplaces (1987, 2004).

Findings – Putting theories into practice for the author involved not only devising new policies, procedures, and structures but also going on a never-ending journey of self-discovery. Second, theories X and Y may have originated in McGregor’s own projections on his father, just as Taylor’s scientific management may be understood as an expression of his Quaker roots. Third, the tension between X and Y in all of us is a reality to appreciate, not a battle requiring that we take sides.

Originality/value – The author offers this paper as a corrective to two popular myths from his years as a manager/consultant. One is that “Theory Y” managers are superior to “Theory X types” when they often may be the same people. Two is that Taylor is the boogey-man who corrupted workplaces by forcing people into mindless jobs. In fact his systems were eagerly embraced by countless others and paradoxically coexist today, even in workplaces whose managers believe passionately in human capability.

Keywords Taylorism, Work design, Industrial relations, Management styles, Management history

Paper type Viewpoint

The essence of [McGregor’s] message is that people react not to an objective world, but to a world fashioned out of their own perceptions, assumptions and theories about what the world is like[. . .]. Once we become aware we can choose – and it was the process of free choice that we believe was Doug’s ultimate value (Edgar Schein, quoted in McGregor et al., 1967, p. xii).

Regent standard forms – discovering theory Y (1959-1968) I first encountered Douglas McGregor’s remarkableTheHumanSide of Enterprisewhile working in a mail order printing company founded by my father in 1940. During Second World War, everyone needed business forms. By 1959, when I joined the company, it was growing 25 percent a year. The firm was an “adhocracy,” gotten too big for my father to manage alone. I agreed to help while working part-time as a magazine writer. I got into everything – marketing, distribution, and production. We had a dozen imprinting machines used to personalize standard forms with customer logos, names, and addresses. Each operator turned out up to 20 orders a day. My dad wanted people to go faster and asked me to investigate wage incentives. I turned to my friend Don Kirchhoffer, a compensation expert at RCA. “We have lots of plans,” said Don, “but I’ll tell you something. No matter what you offer, the workers decide how much to produce, and that’s all you’re going to get.”

“How,” I asked, “do they make that decision?” (My experience – graduate school, the Navy, Penn State instructor—was journalism. I had never read a management book.)

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Journal of Management History Vol. 17 No. 2, 2011

pp. 165-177 q Emerald Group Publishing Limited

1751-1348 DOI 10.1108/17511341111112578

“The factory floor is a social system,” Don said. “Workers level off production to maintain good relations. They have many needs besides money. But there’s a whole other way to think about this.” So saying, he handed me a copy of the book that would reshape my future. I sped through The Human Side of Enterprise in one sitting. I felt awe, empathy, support, challenge, anxiety, and excitement that I have got from no other non-fiction work. McGregor expressed ideas I did not know you were allowed to think. He told me that management’s assumptions about human nature shape employee behavior. He wrote that if you look closely at most workplaces you might conclude that managers assume their employees are lazy, irresponsible, passive, and dependent. Only money motivates. Only swift discipline deters bad behavior. Such assumptions McGregor called “Theory X.” If you look at the social research since Second World War, he went on, you could as easily assume that people enjoy work, care about jobs they like, wish to grow and achieve, and – under the right conditions – will take responsibility and do excellent work. Those assumptions he called “Theory Y.”

Seeing my workplace through fresh eyes, I found Theory X everywhere: time clocks, narrow work rules, jobs so fragmented even robots would be bored, grown people treated like children, expected to deliver in return for a $5 raise every six months, a turkey at Christmas, and, if they did not die of boredom, a license to supervise and treat others like children. I was living a self-fulfilling prophecy. On Monday morning, I told the supervisors that henceforth I hoped they would take more initiative and that I was open to ideas. They gave me puzzled looks and mumbled “okay.” In a few days, though, encouraged by my new accessibility, they came to my office with a radical request. They wanted a wall built down the center of the order-processing department, a 1,600 square feet open office where each specialized group had its cluster of desks. “The groups argue a lot about this and that,” they said. We supervisors get along, but the people distract each other. “Separate them so they won’t fight!”

Be careful what you wish for By now I was Theory Y all the way. If people wanted a wall, they would get a wall. I called the carpenters who built an eight-foot-high partition. The place was eerily quiet, people bent over their desks. The supervisors were waiting for me. “There’s a small detail,” one said. “We need pass-throughs so that work can go from one group to the other without anyone having to walk around.” So openings were cut in the wall below eye level to minimize contact. Figure 1 shows how the wall was meant to deter conflict.

For me the wall validated my new Theory Y-influenced behavior. It was the employees’ idea. People no longer fought openly. They just flashed hostile glances while passing each other in the hall. Tension in the office hung like smog. I had changed my management “style” by driving a sheetrock wedge between departments, my first (unconscious) lesson in the profound symbiosis of structure and behavior. What could I do next? Don now directed me toTheProfessionalManager (McGregor et al., 1967) for examples of Theory Y in action. I instantly resonated to the story of Non-Linear Systems, a California company where multi-skilled teams made electronic voltmeters and put their phone number in the box so a customer could call the shop floor if something went wrong.

Multiskilled teams Theory Y managers, I told myself, have multi-skilled work teams. Where better than the department with the wall? My problem was not conflict. We had solved

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that one. “Managers,” Rensis Likert would tell me a few years later, “manage what they can count” (Weisbord, 1970). We got up to 300 orders a day, mostly by mail. We filled them on an assembly line of narrow specialists – mail openers, sorters, editors, credit checkers, work order typists, and invoicers. Each function had perhaps five people who knew only a single job. Every function was a potential bottleneck. If any function had, say, two absentees, the system went down 40 percent with 90þ percent of the employees working! That was something I could count. If we had multi-skilled teams, a few absentees would not matter. Each person could do whatever job was needed, using their discretion to maximize through-put.

My friend Don, who helped conceive this scheme, became excited at the idea of implementing it. He joined us as operations manager, our first non-family executive. We charged ahead, declaring that despite changed jobs nobody would lose pay or benefits. We formed new teams of people who knew each specialty and gave them their own typewriters, telephones and 17,000 customers to care for. A few enthusiastic supervisors became floating coaches in support of the whole. Two reluctant supervisors chose to work together on a team. My instructions were succinct, summarizing what I knew about training. “Teach each other your jobs,” I said.

We soon had endless problems. Team A did not know what to do when Carrier B shipped to the wrong city. Team D misunderstood the production sequence. Each person was mired in minutiae, just like me. To remedy this, Don started cross-team meetings. My attitude was that talking was not the same as working. Large corporations Don assured me, made meetings part of the job. Each team would send one member to a weekly problem-solving session. The meetings dragged on and on. I could not believe that so many people knew so little about the business. I realized with a shock that the supervisors for years made every decision. Every one except all those they delegated upward to me. I contained my anxiety through four frustrating meetings. Reluctantly, I reverted to Theory X. Hourly employees did not have the brains

Figure 1.Source: Weisbord (2004, p. 6)

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or experience to navigate this stormy sea of problems. Don was disappointed as we held our fifth and, as I planned to reveal, final meeting. I would use today’s problem list to prove that self-managing work teams were not working:

“Okay,” I said, “Let’s have the problems!” Silence. I waited. “Well,” said one woman in a tiny voice, hating to disappoint me, “We don’t have any this week.” What do you mean you don’t have any? “Well,” said another, “we knew how to handle this week’s problems from all our other meetings.”

From all the other meetings! Those long, unproductive, time-wasting meetings? I had a sudden flashback to the words of aviator Wolfgang Langewiesche (1944), whose advice comforted me when, as a fledgling pilot, I had convinced myself I would never master three-point landings. “When you really understand something,” he wrote, “a little spark jumps. Watch for it!” At that moment a little spark jumped for me. I understood, really understood, that effective workplaces are built on learning, not coercing and controlling. I saw then that learning took time, involved trial, error, and leaps into the unknown. You could get impatient, really anxious, and drive yourself crazy. Or you could consider each symptom a sign of learning. Was not that what McGregor was trying to tell me?

The way we ran our business was anti-learning. We had no tolerance for mistakes. I wanted everything right the first time. I leaped to solutions. Indeed, I thought work teams were just another fancy productivity solution. I had the values to be sure. I still needed the behavior. Team members had learned on their own to be self-correcting. They were way ahead of me. Instead of dropping the work teams, we decided to have meetings only when a team wanted to bring up something new. Within days, the teams called a meeting. “We want the wall taken down,” they said. “We don’t need it anymore. We like each other now.” Back came the carpenters; down came the wall. My management education had begun. I had got first-hand what McGregor meant by self-fulfilling prophecies. If you want new behavior, start with structure. That is something you actually can control. “Team Structure” (Figure 2) shows our layout with the wall gone. Team members tried on new jobs, hired new members, bought supplies, and planned with the information technology expert a new computer system. Everybody contributed, everybody learned.

What followed were measurable results. Absenteeism and turnover went to near zero. Productivity shot up 40 percent. Were we measuring output or job satisfaction? Teams with fewer orders on a given day loaned members to teams that had more. People celebrated birthdays during breaks. Former antagonists visited each other’s homes. I also learned a sobering lesson. You cannot change a work system without casualties. Two ex-supervisors lasted three months, complaining that “this new system won’t work.” On the day that they left, other teams were putting out more orders than any supervisor had ever coerced out of “their” people.

A new career After reading McGregor, I went on a learning trip that would catapult me into a new career. By1967, though I did not know it, I had pulled off one of maybe a dozen self-managed work team experiments in the world. I left the business forms company in the spring of 1968, after a dispute over growth with my father. I had by then written three books and many magazine articles. A writer friend invited me to join him in a consulting

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assignment at the Ford Foundation’s Division of Education and Research. I was surprised to find that I could transfer what I had learned about self-managed teams to other workplaces. By 1970, I was working full-time as an organization development (OD) consultant. I had two assets I attributed to my encounter with Douglas McGregor-clients who respected my hard-won experience, and an insatiable urge to learn. In 1974, I joined with Peter Block and Tony Petrella to form Block Petrella Weisbord (BPW), an OD consulting practice that we continued until 1995.

Bethlehem Steel Corporation from X to Y (1981-1983) In 1981, the Bethlehem Steel Corporation hired BPW to help lighten a crushing burden of labor/management antagonism. The company had 11 plants, 14 levels of management, 3,400 wage incentive plans, 400 industrial engineers timing jobs and setting rates, a workforce averaging 130 percent of base pay (earned by exceeding quotas), losses averaging $80 million a month, and an annual cost of quality estimated at nearly $1 billion. During our first week on the job an industrial relations manager sat us down to a slide show, replete with statistics, on the history of labor-management relations at Bethlehem. In 1898, the company had hired Frederick W. Taylor, “the father of scientific management,” to rationalize its work systems. Taylor, the world’s first consulting engineer, worked full-time at Bethlehem under a contract many consultants would envy: if people resisted his systems, he could have them fired. No surprise, then, that Taylor was forced out in 1901 by managers whose power he usurped during three tumultuous years on the bumpy road to higher output. His spirit lived on for a while in modern cost-accounting systems, doubled stamping mill production, materials handling costs cut by half, and hourly wages 60 percent higher than when he arrived. About 80 years later BPW was hired to help untangle a mess traceable in part to the mindless repetition of time

Figure 2.Source: Weisbord (2004, p. 15)

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and motion study long after the company had abandoned Taylor’s underlying principles. Not least of these was the “spirit of friendly cooperation” between workers and managers (Later, I learned that Taylor considered the stop watch and slide rule a small building block in his grand design for productivity.). Labor-management acrimony at Bethlehem, a chronic problem in Taylor’s day, had reached mythic proportions, threatening the company’s survival. BPW’s task was to devise a “Readiness” program to enable managers socialized in Theory X to shift gears and involve steelworkers in helping to save the firm.

Parallels between Taylor and McGregor Intrigued by this history, I got a paperback edition of Taylor’s (1911) magnum opus, The Principles of ScientificManagement. On the first page, I read a paragraph that could have come from todays newspaper. “We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; the end of our coal and our iron is in sight.” What Taylor was after, however, was for readers to wake up to the “larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient [. . .] ”.

Expecting an engineering treatise, I had stumbled on perhaps the first ever human resources management book! Management’s solemn obligation, Taylor wrote, was to meet “the demand for competent men” through goal setting, job design, selection, training, cooperation, accountability, and high monetary rewards. Taylor was talking systemic cultural change. “The first object of any good system,” he wrote, “is that of developing first class men. No great man can hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate” (pp. 6-7).

Where had I seen that before? On impulse – perhaps not by chance for the unconscious never sleeps – I picked up my dog-eared copy of McGregor (1960, pp. 3, 7-8, 187) and turned to this statement: “Management should have as a goal the development of the unique capacities and potentialities of each individual rather than common objectives for all participants”. Like a miner panning gold, I riffled back and forth between the books. “The best management is a true science,” Taylor cried out down the ages, “resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles [. . .] ” Echoed McGregor 50 years later, “Progress in any profession is associated with the ability to predict and control. To insist that management is an art is [. . .] a denial of the relevance of systematic, tested knowledge.”

Taylor: “The general adoption of scientific management would readily in the future double the productivity of the average man [. . .] ” (p. 42).

McGregor: “Many managers would agree that the effectiveness of their organizations would be at least doubled if they could discover how to tap the unrealized present in their human resources” (p. 4).

Taylor: “The time is fast going by for the great personal or individual achievement of any one man alone without the help of those around him” (p. 140).

McGregor: “We cannot hope much longer to operate the complex, collaborative, interdependent enterprise [. . .] on the completely unrealistic premise that it consists of individual relationships” (p. 242).

The Harvard psychologist and the world’s first industrial engineer were exorcising the same demons. Working in vastly different fields, they shared overlapping values. Taylor, true to his origins, believed in one best way to do every job, one best person

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to do it, one best pay scheme to motivate productivity, and one best expert – the industrial engineer – to figure out what, who, and how much. He believed every person was first class at something, that testing would reveal those able to do each repetitive job day-after-day at a pace that would reduce fatigue and increase output. (Indeed, Taylor showed that reducing the work day in some jobs led to more production.) Each person got a daily goal and earned a large bonus for exceeding it. Those who fell short despite coaching were retested for other jobs. Taylor wanted everybody well paid for working at their highest level, an aspiration psychologist Abraham Maslow of the famed needs hierarchy (Maslow and Murphy, 1954) would applaud.

In HR circles, Taylor later would be maligned as an ogre, the obsessive martinet who dehumanized work, using the stop watch and slide rule to bludgeon honest laborers. So fierce were the projections on Taylor that he became the focus in 1911 of acrimonious congressional hearings after workers struck against his system at the Watertown Arsenal (where an over-eager disciple forced change without showing workers, as Taylor did, how their jobs could be easier and more profitable). Taylor dug his own hole deeper by repeating the story of his interactions with “Schmidt,” a pig-iron loader he likened to a gorilla or an ox whose German accent he mimicked in print, revealing an unconscious xenophobia even as he praised the man’s prodigious output (Weisbord, 2004a, pp. 47-8). To this day “Speedy Taylor,” is vilified as the consultant who “invented a new way to make money” by telling businesses “how to do their work faster” (Lepore, 2009).

A tale of two Taylors I visited the Taylor Library at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, Taylor’s alma mater (where he was the only student ever to get a degree on exams alone while working full time in a distant city). In Hoboken, I met another Taylor. Born into a pacifist Quaker family in 1858, he attended elite private schools and played tennis at the cricket club. In photos, letters, artifacts, and files, I found a devoted husband and dedicated family man who adopted and raised four children, a scion of wealth who apprenticed himself in a machine shop instead of becoming a Harvard lawyer like his father, an ex-foreman and plant manager who had empathy for workers and contempt for the capitalists who exploited them. The more I found out about Taylor, the more I identified with him. We were both Philadelphians. (My father, before starting a business, had worked 25 years in a Quaker-owned brokerage where he absorbed and passed to me values of modesty, thrift, and openness to all people. During my work-team years, I also had written a book on Quaker service projects (Weisbord, 1967).)

Many people mistakenly thought that Taylor, driven by Theory X assumptions, advocated authoritarian supervision and hierarchical management, quite the contrary. His overarching belief was that by giving people well-paid jobs tapping their highest capabilities, he could take the conflict out of labor-management relations and eliminate authoritarian supervision. People would want to do the jobs he designed. Unfortunately, his system had unintended consequences. He placed control and coordination with those who had no hands-on responsibility. Engineers designed the jobs, supervisors enforced discipline, and numerous new staff monitored costs, inventory, and output. People at the top had no idea what went on in the blast furnaces and finishing mills. They assumed that systems would do the job. As a result, employees and managers alike in “scientifically” rationalized workplaces would be forever ignorant of their own effect on the whole. As Fred Emery and Eric Trist would show years later, the way to get

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productivity was to have people coordinate and control their own work (Emery and Trist, 1960). Inspired by McGregor, I already had learned that lesson first hand in my own socio-technical experiment. It was McGregor’s insights into group dynamics and participative management that BPW brought to Bethlehem Steel, eventually involving thousands of steelworkers in a new culture of labor-management cooperation. Alas, the best we could do was help buy time. Newer plants in Brazil, Germany, Japan, and even the USA were making better steel at lower costs. In 2003, a century after Frederick Taylor refined scientific management there and 20 years after Theory Y got a foot in the door, the iconic company that fabricated the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building went broke, a footnote to twenty-first century business history (Weisbord, 2004b “Requiem”).

Writing productive workplaces In the early 1980s, I began work on what would become a book tracing my own journey from expert problem-solver to “getting everybody improving whole systems.” The book was a fugue of three themes:

(1) that people hunger for workplace community;

(2) the world is changing too fast for experts; and

(3) that Theories X and Y, far from polarized management styles, represent a dialogue, so to speak, between the Taylor and McGregor in each of us (Weisbord, 1987).

In writing it, I sought out McGregor again. I learned that he was born into a strict Scotch Presbyterian family in Detroit, MI, in 1906, the year that Taylor, President of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, got an honorary doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. McGregor’s grandfather had organized McGregor Institute, a shelter for homeless laborers. McGregor’s father, a Bible scholar and lay preacher, became director in 1915. Young Doug worked in the office after school. McGregor had a strong, optimistic mother who believed in the redemptive power of productive work. His father, by contrast, was weighed down by the social pathology of the men he sought to save. McGregor got a doctorate in psychology and worked as a consultant and researcher in business firms. Except for six years as President of Antioch College in the 1950s, he taught at MIT from 1937 until his death in 1964.

The origins of Theories X and Y For years McGregor and his father exchanged letters on their philosophies of life. Compassionate men both, one argued the essential sinfulness and the other the potential goodness and strength of every person (Bennis, 1966). No wonder, I had found McGregor’s contrasting of Theories X and Y so liberating in the 1960s. The McGregors’ dialogue was one I had carried on with my own father as I advocated self-managing work teams. Though he trusted me, he remained skeptical that the employees were up to the task. Despite measurable results, he never changed his mind. The emotional hook in me was a wish to stand on my own feet and confirm my faith in human nature. I also heard an inner voice whispering, “Suppose the old man is right?” So I was not surprised when my mentor and friend Eric Trist told me that McGregor once had confided that he thought Theory Y might be “an avoidance mechanism” for his own rebellion. Whatever its source, McGregor put into an organizational context the age-old tension between

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authority/dependency, master/servant, father/son, converting a philosophical, and at bottom a religious, quest into a metaphor for managing. In so doing, he reached an audience hungry for alternatives to bureaucracy, authoritarianism, and alienation institutionalized in the industrial revolution.

Taylor and McGregor – two peas, same pod McGregor refined his ideas between 1937 and 1949. He was perhaps the first psychologist to emphasize the strategic importance of integrating personnel policies, values, procedures, systems, and training, a whole-system song Taylor had sung many years earlier. McGregor, however, had the benefit of new social-psychological research into personal needs and group norms. Taylor opposed unions because he did not know they met human needs for solidarity, emotional support, and self-esteem in an impersonal industrial world. (After Taylor’s death, unions made a deal with the devil. They embraced narrow jobs, time study, and work measurement as ways to raise wages and protect employment without, however, the spirit of “friendly cooperation” he intended.)

Taylor’s (1911, p. 36) assumptions were by no means Theory X. He believed in workers’ initiative, “their hard work, their good will, and their ingenuity” if they were treated fairly. Close control was needed, said Taylor, not because workers were lazy but because they and managers alike were ignorant of the best methods. Taylor’s “teamwork” was a siloed division of labor among staff experts, managers, and workers, in narrow jobs defined by engineers. In the hands of people less scrupulous than he, Taylor’s methods led to conditions he deplored: alienation of labor from management, staff from line, and workers from work itself. It was inconceivable to Taylor that higher productivity might one day be had by reintegrating the jobs he had fragmented (Weisbord, 2004a).

Taylorism proved McGregor’s self-fulfilling prophecy. Assuming everybody’s ignorance, scientific managers accepted systems certain to keep them that way. Before First World War, industrial engineers wrested job content and selection from line managers and Taylorism spread around the world. After that war, a new breed of “employment managers” rose up to steal them away from engineering. By 1920, there were more than 4,000 personnel professionals. McGregor argued that control of work by personnel or engineering was a mistake. He wanted a return to pre-Taylor practices, e.g. giving first-line supervisors, now armed with human relations skills, the responsibility to select, train, and evaluate workers.

McGregor’s thinking matured at a time of rapid innovation in the social and behavioral sciences. He was committed to implementing Abraham Maslow’s “needs hierarchy” (Maslow and Murphy, 1954) and Frederick Herzberg’s (1959) concept that “satisfiers” like security and safety do not assure output the way “motivators” like recognition and responsibility do. McGregor concluded, contrary to Taylor, that there is no one best way to manage. No particular style has proved universally satisfactory. Flexible managers involve and delegate on some days, and decide and direct on others. They need both capabilities the same way a carpenter needs a hammer and a saw. McGregor also made a compelling case for a form of teamwork contrary to Taylor’s. No social science discovery has threatened managers more than group dynamics, the study of which upended a sacred American myth: the heroic visionary executive single-handedly cutting costs, innovating, and motivating.

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Most management “teams,” McGregor observed 50 years ago, were just individuals vying for the boss’s favor. Effective teamwork required mutual goals, informal give and take, frank criticism, self-examination, and shared responsibility. These skills were best learned, he thought, through team building, the central OD modality from the 1960s on. McGregor rejected fitting people to jobs. He thought the best strategy was “a heterogeneous supply of human resources from which individuals can be selected to fill a variety of unpredictable needs” (McGregor, 1966, p. 76). Therefore, he encouraged diversity and giving people control over their own development. For me, what most differentiates Taylor from McGregor was the bugaboo of control. Taylor, who as a youth invented a sleeping harness to prevent his nightmares, designed external systems to motivate output. McGregor considered self-control – supported by goals, information, and mutual respect – the best control system of all.

Worldwide acclaim The Human Side of Enterprise, like Taylor’s magnum opus 45 years earlier, enjoyed worldwide acclaim. Criticism came mainly from fellow academics, grumbling that McGregor. . .uh. . .er. . .harrumph. . . did not cite specific research to support his ideas. His experience and examples represented “anecdotal” evidence that would not hold up in a court of (social) science. A variety of charges bedeviled HSE. The hard-nosed school said Theory X came closer to human nature than Y, and a combination of paying well and “kicking ass” was the only sensible way to motivate people, a view so regressive even Taylor would have cringed. Another school craved a Theory Y world but saw it as idealistic, impractical, and futile. Notable among these was Maslow (1965), who during his year as a scholarly gadfly in residence at Non-Linear Systems (the firm on which I modeled my work teams in the 1960s), had many caveats for Theory Y. There was too little evidence for McGregor’s view of human potential, he wrote. It required rare, self-motivated people, buttressed by “good conditions, good luck and good fortune.” Like McGregor’s father, Maslow doubted that the darker forces of human nature could be overcome.

Another sympathetic critic saw too much zero-sum conflict, too few shared goals, and too many power differences negating Theory Y assumptions. “In sum,” he wrote, “there do not appear to be enough influential advocates for the redesign of work according to ’Theory Y’ principles to stimulate the allocation of scarce resources to this goal” (Nord, 1978, p. 65). I might accept this but for contrary evidence from countless projects, some well researched and detailed in my own and others’ books, to which corporations, medical centers, hospitals, and government agencies had allocated enormous resources. There were and are many executives out there aching to express their better selves.

A new look at X and Y: four selves in each of US I have my own perspective on Theories X and Y. From Jungian psychology comes a profound hypothesis that you will not find in McGregor. Years ago in Sweden, I met social psychologist Janssen (1982) who had devised a powerful group exercise to surface our projections on one another (A projection is imagining in others else traits we admire or deny in ourselves.). He created a 22-item yes/no questionnaire, sorting responders into “yes-answerers” and “no-answerers” based on where they put their checkmarks. Sample question: “Do you remember your dreams?” He then asked each group to brainstorm adjectives about themselves and the other group. Groups produced a composite chart like Figure 3, a result I have repeated around the world.

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“Yes-answerers” see themselves through a Theory Y lens – optimistic, creative, and independent. They attribute to “no-answerers” Theory X traits – repressive, authoritarian, and fearful. “No-answerers,” by contrast, dub themselves dependable, loyal, and cooperative, calling “Yes-answerers” confused, anxious, and self-centered. That is how easy it is to evoke stereotypes and polarize groups!

Janssen’s theory is that what we disown in ourselves – the “shadow” – appears on the minus side of both yes and no lists, along with the traits in us we most admire on the plus side. Each of us has all the parts. We acknowledge traits we like and project onto “them” the ones we do not. McGregor, I imagine, was tuned into the negative aspects of his personal “No-answerer,” his father’s voice, and to the positive side of his “Yes-answerer” self that made him an optimistic psychologist. Thus, you can read Theories X and Y as a dialogue McGregor was having with himself, Yes þ confronting No 2 .

Edwin C. Nevis, an applier of Gestalt theories to organizations, found that on average 5,000 managers he surveyed in the 1970s opted for 56 percent of Theory X and 67 percent of Theory Y statements (personal memo to author, January 1987). I was impelled to initiate change in the 1960s because of my urgent need for relief from the daily incongruities in my workplace. I tilted at the windmill of company policies and procedures. I soon learned that the hardest jousting would be with myself. I had got on a lifetime quest to integrate both sides of my nature, to hear my inner dialogue as a creative and not always harmonious discourse on self-discovery.

Figure 3. Source: Weisbord (2004, p. 147)

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Values over techniques Taylor lamented that managers divorced his values and married his techniques. He considered time and motion study a tiny part of his grand design. He was furious with greedy employers who raised quotas instead of sharing gains and with ignorant consultants who put in systems without proving their worth to workers. McGregor hated that some managers thought he wrote a Theory Y cookbook when his intent was more ambitious, to show how assumptions shape behavior. Both Taylor and McGregor shared a core mission much grander than their techniques. Both sought passionately to bring the spirit of inquiry – the heart and soul of science – into the workplace.

What are the implications of my story for managers today? I have three thoughts. First, I believe there are no technological alternatives to people coordinating and controlling their own work. The world changes too fast for experts to stay on top of things. As a consultant I saw many workplaces improve output and cut costs 20-40 percent consistently when workers got to design their own work (Weisbord, 2004a).

Second, I know deep in my bones that “systems” do not care how we use them. Why for example do so many banks, health providers, and other companies ask you to key in your account number “for faster service,” when you will be asked to repeat it twice more to the people who are serving you? That is a symptom of Taylorism run rampant, a misplaced faith in technology unjustified by human experience. These may seem like trivial examples. Consider, though, that the underlying systems represent untold resources invested to produce unwanted consequences. What assumptions about human nature do they embody? Neither Taylor nor McGregor created these systems. Yet both would recognize how far short they fall of their designers’ aspirations. Neither of my protagonists can be praised or blamed for the workplaces we find ourselves in today. They are wholly the expressions of those who finance, manage, and work in them. Third, I believe, therefore, that the relentless march of technology makes self-understanding for managers a greater imperative than ever. Years ago his friend Warren Bennis observed that McGregor’s conception of Theory Y created an intolerable burden for leaders – accepting responsibility for the growth, nurturance, and success of others. “When,” asked Bennis, “do the boss’s needs, growth, defenses, distortions, ’hang-ups,’ disappointments, narcissism, sufferings, come into play?” (1972, p. 142). Only by accepting a continuum of good/bad X and good/bad Y in ourselves, do we become fully human. Taylorism today coexists with more enlightened practices everywhere. That is the kind of species we are. We cannot distance ourselves from technology and economics. Our organizations embody, for good or ill, our “human side” in action. Indeed, that is all there is. I comfort myself with the hypothesis that both Taylor and McGregor, who both live in me, would agree that seeking the best that is in oneself and one’s systems every day is the best anyone can do.

Author’s note: For this special issue I have reframed ideas from many of my articles, talks and books over the last 25 years, in particular several chapters of Productive Workplaces Revisited (2004).

References

Bennis, W.G. (1972), “Chairman MAC in perspective”, Harvard Business Review, Vol. 50 No. 5, pp. 139-43.

Bennis, W.G. and Schein, E.H. (Eds) (1966), Leadership and Motivation: Essays of Douglas McGregor, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.

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Emery, F.E. and Trist, E.L. (1960), “Socio-technical systems”, in Churchman, C.W. and others (Eds), Management Sciences, Models and Techniques, Pergamon, London.

Herzberg, F., Mausner, B. and Snyderman, B. (1959), The Motivation to Work, 2nd ed., Wiley, New York, NY.

Janssen, C. (1982), Personlig Dialektik, 2nd ed., Liber, Stockholm.

Langewiesche, W. (1944), Stick and Rudder, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

Lepore, J. (2009), “Not so fast”, The New Yorker, October 12, pp. 114-22.

McGregor, D. (1960), The Human Side of Enterprise, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.

McGregor, D. (1967) in Bennis, W.G. and McGregor, C. (Eds), The Professional Manager, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY, p. xii.

Maslow, A.H. and Murphy, G. (Eds) (1954), Motivation and Personality, Harper & Row, New York, NY.

Maslow, A.H. (1965), Eupsychian Management, Irwin, Homewood, IL.

Nord, W. (1978), “Theory Y assumptions in a non-theory Y world”, Interfaces, Vol. 8 No. 2, pp. 61-6.

Taylor, F.W. (1911), The Principles of Scientific Management, Harper & Row, New York, NY, Paperback edition (1967) Norton Library, W.W., Norton, New York, NY.

Weisbord, M.R. (1967), Some Form of Peace, Viking Press, New York, NY.

Weisbord, M.R. (1970), “Management in crisis: an interview with Rensis Likert”, The Conference Board Record, Vol. VII No. 2, pp. 10-18.

Weisbord, M.R. (1987), Productive Workplaces, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Weisbord, M.R. (2004a), Productive Workplaces Revisited, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, CA.

Weisbord, M.R. (2004b), “Requiem for Bethlehem”, Performance Improvement, Vol. 43 No. 5, pp. 7-12.

Corresponding author Marvin Weisbord can be contacted at: mweisbord@futuresearch.net

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