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Texts_Work and Motivation

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21 views

Texts_Work and Motivation

Uploaded by

jenn
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Reading 1: Theory X and Theory Y

In The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor outlined two opposing theories of work and mo-
tivation. What he calls Theory X is the rather pessimistic approach to workers and working which as-
sumes that people are lazy and will avoid work and responsibility if they can. Consequently, workers
have to be closely supervised and controlled and told what to do. They have to be both threatened,
for example with losing their job, and rewarded with incentives probably monetary ones such as a
pay rise or bonuses. Theory X assumes that most people are incapable of taking responsibility for
themselves and have to be looked after. It has traditionally been applied, for example, by managers
of factory workers in large scale manufacturing.

Theory Y, on the contrary, assumes that most people have a psychological need to work, and given
the right conditions – job security, financial rewards – they will be creative, ambitious and self-moti-
vated by the satisfaction of doing a good job. Theory Y is probably more applicable to skilled profes-
sionals and what Peter Drucker called ‘knowledge workers’ – managers, specialists, programmers,
scientists, engineers – than people in unskilled jobs.

McGregor's two theories are


based on Abraham Maslow's
famous ‘hierarchy of needs’.
Theory X relates to the basic,
‘lower order’ needs at the
bottom of the hierarchy, such as
financial security, while Theory Y
relates to ‘higher order’ needs
such as esteem (achievement,
status and responsibility) and
self-actualization (personal
growth and fulfillment) that can
be pursued if basic needs are satisfied.

McGregor is widely considered to have laid the foundations for the modern people-centered view of
management. However, Maslow spent a year studying a Californian company that used Theory Y,
and concluded that there are many people who are not looking for responsibility and achievement at
work. There will always be people with little self-discipline, who need security and certainty and pro-
tection against the burden of responsibility, so it is impossible to simply replace the ‘authoritarian’
Theory X with the ‘progressive’ Theory Y.

1
Reading 2: ‘Satisfiers’ and ‘motivators’
Another well-known theorist of the psychology of work, Frederick Herzberg, has argued
that good working conditions are not sufficient to motivate people. Read the text and find
out why.
It is logical to suppose that things like good labour relations, good working conditions, job
security, good wages, and benefits such as sick pay, paid holidays and a pension are incentives
that motivate workers. But in The Motivation to Work Frederick Herzberg argued that such
conditions – or ‘hygiene factors’ – do not in fact motivate workers. There are merely ‘satisfiers’
– or more importantly, ‘dissatisfiers’ where they do not exist. Workers who have them take
them for granted. As Herzberg put it, ‘A reward once given becomes a right.’ ‘Motivators’, on
the contrary, include things such as having a challenging and interesting job, recognition and
responsibility, promotion, and so on. Unless people are motivated and want to do a good job,
they will not perform well.

However, there are and always will be plenty of boring repetitive and mechanical jobs and lots
of unskilled workers who have to do them. How can managers motivate people in such jobs?
One solution is to give them some responsibilities not as individuals but as part of a team. For
example, some supermarkets combine office staff, the people who fill the shelves, and the
people who work on the checkout tills into a team and let them decide what product lines to
stock, how to display them and so on.

Other employers encourage job rotation, as doing four different repetitive jobs a day is better
than doing only one. Many people now talk about the importance of a company's shared
values or corporate culture with which all the staff can identify: for example being the best
hotel chain or hamburger restaurant chain or airline or making the best, safest, most user-
friendly, most ecological or most reliable products in a particular field. Unfortunately, not all
the competing companies in industry can seriously claim to be the best.

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