What is a major difference between the theory x and theory y views of management?

Sometimes employees make the managers exhausted than the physical works. One of these exhausting issues is motivating the employees. And one of the most important responsibilities of a manager is to motivate the people who report to him/her. But how? What kind of things motivates employees? Which of these motivators would be important for employees in their choice of a job? On this subject, there are some studies made by the Psychologists.

Theory X and Theory Y

The statements above can be separated into two groups reflecting two very different ways in which employers can treat their employees. Douglas McGregor, an American expert on the psychology of work summarized these two approaches and named them Theory X and Theory Y. 

 In The Human Side of Enterprise, Douglas McGregor outlined two opposing theories of work and motivation. 

What he calls Theory X is the rather pessimistic approach to workers and working which assumes 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-motivated by the satisfaction of doing a good job. Theory Y is probably more applicable to skilled professionals 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 fulfilment) that can be pursued if basic needs are satisfied. 

McGregor is widely considered to have laid the foundations for the modern people-centred 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 a little self-discipline, who need security and certainty and protection against the burden of responsibility, so it is impossible to simply replace the 'authoritarian' Theory X with the 'progressive' Theory Y. 

'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.

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. They 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 an industry can seriously claim to be the best. 

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