Traditional Management Th eory Th rust Forward 101
Th eory X Assumptions
- Th e average person dislikes work and will try to avoid it.
- Most people need to be coerced, controlled, directed, and threatened
with punishment to get them to work toward organizational goals. - Th e average person wants to be directed, shuns responsibility, has little
ambition, and seeks security above all.
Th eory Y Assumptions
- Most people do not inherently dislike work; the physical eff ort and the
mental eff ort involved are as natural as play or rest. - People will exercise self-direction and self-control to reach goals to
which they are committed; external control and the threat of punish-
ment are not the only means for ensuring eff ort toward goals. - Commitment to goals is a function of the rewards available, particu-
larly rewards that satisfy esteem and self-actualization needs. - When conditions are favorable, the average person learns not only to
accept but also to seek responsibility. - Many people have the capacity to exercise a high degree of creativity
and innovation in solving organizational problems. - Th e intellectual potential of most individuals is only partially used in
most organizations.
Following these assumptions, Th eory X managers emphasize elaborate con-
trols and oversight, and they motivate by economic incentives. Th eory Y manag-
ers seek to integrate individual and organizational goals and to emphasize latitude
in performing tasks; they seek to make work interesting and thereby encourage
creativity.
It is important to point out that the work of Chester Barnard, the Hawthorne
experiments, and McGregor was behavioral, which is to say that it was based on
fi eld research. Th e earlier work of Taylor and others, though it was called scien-
tifi c management, was less a result of nonsystematic observations and more a
result of deductive logic.
One important and diff erent approach to management theory in the evolution
of public administration is the sociology of Max Weber (1952), who founded the
formal study of the large-scale complex organizations he labeled “bureaucracy.”
Although he did his work in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
it was not generally available to Americans until aft er World War II. Weber’s
purpose was to describe the salient characteristics of enduring large-scale orga-
nizations, which he labeled “ideal types,” ideal meaning “commonly found” or
“generally characteristic.” He was particularly interested in rationality, or collec-
tive goal-oriented behavior, as in the rational organization. He was opposed to
the class distinctions characteristic of Europe in the early twentieth century and