Theory X and Theory Y Understanding team member motivation

 

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Theory X takes a cynical view.

What motivates employees to go to work each morning? Many people get great satisfaction from their work and take great pride in it; Others may view it as a burden, and simply work to survive.

This question of motivation has been studied by management theorists and social psychologists for decades, in attempts to identify successful approaches to management.

Social psychologist Douglas McGregor of MIT expounded two contrasting theories on human motivation and management in the 1960s: The X Theory and the Y Theory. McGregor promoted Theory Y as the basis of good management practice, pioneering the argument that workers are not merely cogs in the company machinery, as Theory X-Type organizations seemed to believe.

The theories look at how a manager's perceptions of what motivates his or her team members affects the way he or she behaves. By understanding how your assumptions about employees’ motivation can influence your management style, you can adapt your approach appropriately, and so manage people more effectively.

Understanding the Theories

Your management style is strongly influenced by your beliefs and assumptions about what motivates members of your team: If you believe that team members dislike work, you will tend towards an authoritarian style of management; On the other hand, if you assume that employees take pride in doing a good job, you will tend to adopt a more participative style.

Theory X

Theory X assumes that employees are naturally unmotivated and dislike working, and this encourages an authoritarian style of management. According to this view, management must actively intervene to get things done. This style of management assumes that workers:

• Dislike working.
• Avoid responsibility and need to be directed.
• Have to be controlled, forced, and threatened to deliver what's needed.
• Need to be supervised at every step, with controls put in place.
• Need to be enticed to produce results; otherwise they have no ambition or incentive to work.

X-Type organizations tend to be top heavy, with managers and supervisors required at every step to control workers. There is little delegation of authority and control remains firmly centralized.

McGregor recognized that X-Type workers are in fact usually the minority, and yet in mass organizations, such as large scale production environment, X Theory management may be required and can be unavoidable.

Theory Y

Theory Y expounds a participative style of management that is de-centralized. It assumes that employees are happy to work, are self-motivated and creative, and enjoy working with greater responsibility. It assumes that workers:

• Take responsibility and are motivated to fulfill the goals they are given.
• Seek and accept responsibility and do not need much direction.
• Consider work as a natural part of life and solve work problems imaginatively.

This more participative management style tends to be more widely applicable. In Y-Type organizations, people at lower levels of the organization are involved in decision making and have more responsibility.

Comparing Theory X and Theory Y

• Motivation
  Theory X assumes that people dislike work; they want to avoid it and do not want to take responsibility. Theory Y assumes that people are self-motivated, and thrive on responsibility.
• Management Style and Control
  In a Theory X organization, management is authoritarian, and centralized control is retained, whilst in Theory Y, the management style is participative: Management involves employees in decision making, but retains power to implement decisions.
• Work Organization
  Theory X employees tend to have specialized and often repetitive work. In Theory Y, the work tends to be organized around wider areas of skill or knowledge; Employees are also encouraged to develop expertise and make suggestions and improvements.
• Rewards and Appraisals
  Theory X organizations work on a ‘carrot and stick’ basis, and performance appraisal is part of the overall mechanisms of control and remuneration. In Theory Y organizations, appraisal is also regular and important, but is usually a separate mechanism from organizational controls. Theory Y organizations also give employees frequent opportunities for promotion.
• Application
  Although Theory X management style is widely accepted as inferior to others, it has its place in large scale production operation and unskilled production-line work. Many of the principles of Theory Y are widely adopted by types of organization that value and encourage participation. Theory Y-style management is suited to knowledge work and professional services. Professional service organizations naturally evolve Theory Y-type practices by the nature of their work; Even highly structure knowledge work, such as call center operations, can benefits from Theory Y principles to encourage knowledge sharing and continuous improvement.

Tip 1:
Enough theory. Which approach do you prefer?

Do you work most effectively when your boss controls every part of everything you do? Or would this drive you mad, so that you'd just do what he or she wanted (and nothing more), look for another job, and then leave? Or would you prefer a boss who helps you to do your best, increasingly trusts your judgment, allows you to use your creativity, and step-by-step gives you more control over your job?

Would you work more effectively for a Theory X or Theory Y manager?

Learn from this! As it is for you, it will be for many of the members of your team!

Tip 2:
That said, different members of your own team may have different attitudes. Many may thrive on Theory Y management, while others may need Theory X management. Still others may benefit from an altogether different approach.

Mix and match appropriately.

Using the Theories

Understanding your assumptions about employees motivation can help your learn to manage more effectively. In order to understand McGregor’s theories in more detail, we suggest the following reading:

• Douglas McGregor Revisited
  Published in 2000, this book looks at McGregor’s time-tested thinking on human motivation, and shows how his theories apply in today’s organizations.

You can learn 700 similar skills elsewhere on this site. Click here to see our full toolkit. If you like our approach, you can subscribe to our free newsletter, or become a member for just US$1.

Team Management Skills The Core Skills Needed to Manage Your Team

 

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Develop effective management skills.

So you've just got a new job as a manager. Congratulations! Or, maybe you've just been given the task of pulling a new team together. What a challenge!

Either way, whether your team exists already or it's your responsibility to create it, what do you do next?

This article looks at some of the key things that team managers need to do if their team is to thrive and succeed. These range from choosing the right people and deciding who does what, to communicating with, developing and motivating people. It also covers some of the most common pitfalls to be avoided.

First Things First

But before that, some definitions are useful. What is management, exactly? And how does it differ from leadership?

A good starting point is the Warren G Bennis quote that "Leaders are people who do the right things; managers are people who do things right." Leadership involves creating a compelling vision of the future, communicating that vision, and helping people understand and commit to it. Managers, on the other hand, are responsible for ensuring that the vision is implemented efficiently and successfully.

Of course, these two roles overlap – and, to be fully effective, you need to fulfill both roles. However, the focus of this article is on the specific skills and responsibilities of managers, and on the tools available to them. After all, there's no point energizing people to work towards a fabulous vision of the future, only to fall flat on your face when it comes to implementation.

The Importance of Delegation

The top priority for team managers is delegation. No matter how skilled you are, there's only so much that you can achieve working on your own. With a team behind you, you can achieve so much more: that's why it's so important that you delegate effectively!

Successful delegation starts with matching people and tasks, so you first need to explain what your team's role and goals are. A good way of doing this is to put together a team charter, which sets out the purpose of the team and how it will work. Not only does this help you get your team off to a great start, it can also be useful for bringing the team back on track if it's veering off course.

Only then will you be in a position to think about the skills, experience and competencies within your team, and start matching people to tasks. Read our article on task allocation for more on how to do this, and to find out how to deal with real-world challenges, such as managing the gaps between team members' skill sets.

Motivating Your Team

Another key duty you have as a manager is to motivate team members.

Our article on Theory X and Theory Y explains two very different approaches to motivation, which depend on the fundamental assumptions that you make about the people who work for you. If you believe that they're intrinsically lazy, you believe in Theory X, while if you believe that most are happy and willing to work, you'll tend towards Theory Y. Make sure that you fully understand these theories – they will fundamentally affect your success in motivating people.

You can find out much more about motivation with our quiz How Good Are Your Motivation Skills?

Whatever approach you prefer to adopt, you also need to bear in mind that different people have different needs when it comes to motivation. Some individuals are highly self-motivated, while others will under-perform without managerial input. Use our article on Pygmalion Motivation to understand how to manage these different groups of people.

Developing Your Team

Teams are made up of individuals who have different outlooks and abilities, and are at different stages of their careers. Some may find that the tasks you've allocated to them are challenging, and they may need support. Others may be "old hands" at what they're doing, and may be looking for opportunities to stretch their skills. Either way, it's your responsibility to develop all of your people.

Your skills in this aspect of management will define your long-term success as a manager. If you can help team members to become better at what they do, you'll be a manager who people aspire to work for, and you'll make a great contribution to your organization, too.

The most effective way of developing your people is to ensure that you give regular feedback to members of your team. Many of us are nervous of giving feedback, especially when it has to be negative. However, if you give and receive feedback regularly, everyone's performance will improve.

Beyond this, our article on Understanding Developmental Needs will help you develop individual team members, so that they can perform at their best.

Tip:
If you have to bring a substantial number of new people into your team, read our article on forming, storming, norming and performing to learn about the stages you can expect your team to go through. You can do a lot to help your people through this process!

Communicating and Working
With Your Team – and With Others

Communication skills are essential for success in almost any role, but there are particular skills and techniques that you'll use more as a manager than you did as a regular worker. These fall under two headings: communicating with team members, and communicating with people outside your team. We'll look at each in turn.

Communicating With People in Your Team

As a team manager, you're likely to be chairing regular sessions as well as one-off meetings. Meeting of all kinds, and regular ones in particular, are notorious for wasting people's time, so it's well worth mastering the skill of running effective meetings.

Many meetings include brainstorming sessions. As a team manager, you'll often have to facilitate these, so you'll need to be comfortable with doing this. There's more to this than simply coming up with creative ideas, as you do when you're just a regular participant in such a session: read our article to find out how to run brainstorming sessions. Make sure that you understand where they can go wrong, and what you can do to avoid this.

Active listening is another important skill for managers – and others – to master. When you're in charge, it can be easy to think that you know what others are going to say, or that listening is less important, because you've thought of a solution anyway.

Don't fall into this trap. Most good managers are active listeners: it helps them detect problems early (while they're still easy to deal with), avoid costly misunderstandings, and build trust within their teams.

Communicating With People Outside Your Team

Your boss is probably the most important person you need to communicate with. Take time to understand fully what your boss wants from you and your team – if you know exactly what she likes, and how she prefers this to be delivered, you'll be better able to meet with her approval.

Don't be afraid to ask your boss to coach or mentor you: you can usually learn a lot from him, but he may not be proactive about offering this. If you're approaching your boss for advice, make sure you've thought things through as far as you can. Introduce the subject with a summary of your thinking, and then say where you need help.

Also, as a manager, part of your job is to look after your team and protect it from unreasonable pressure. Learn skills like assertiveness and win-win negotiation, so that you can either turn work away, or negotiate additional resources.

Another part of your job is to manage the way that your team interacts with other groups. Use stakeholder analysis to identify the groups that you need to deal with. Then talk to these people to find out what they want from you, and what they can do to help you.

Managing Discipline

However much you hope that you won't have to do it, there comes a time in most managers' careers when they have to discipline an employee. Discipline may be subtly different from basic feedback, because it doesn't always relate specifically to the employee's work. You can give feedback on their phone manner, for example, but handling problems with timekeeping or personal grooming can need a different approach.

Obvious breaches of the law or of company policy are easy to identify and deal with. But what of other situations? On one hand you don't want to seem petty. On the other hand, you can't let things go that should be dealt with.

Use these rules-of-thumb to decide whether you need to take action. If the answer to any is yes, then you need to arrange a time to speak to the employee in private.

1. Does the issue affect the quality of the employee's deliverable to the client (internal or external)?
2. "A graphic designer regularly gets in to work late, although he stays late to make up for this. Customers are sometimes frustrated by not being able to get through to him at the start of the day, particularly when he's working on rush jobs."

2. Does the issue adversely impact the cohesiveness of the team?
3. "Individual designers tend to work on their own projects, with few meetings between design team members, so cohesiveness is not impacted. However people are noticing his lack of punctuality, and other people's timekeeping is beginning to slip."

3. Does the issue unnecessarily undermine the interests of other individuals in the team?
4. "The designer sitting next to the latecomer is unhappy that she has to field calls from clients before he reaches the office, and is unable to give a firm answer to the question 'When will he be in?'"

In this situation, the design team manager decides to speak to the latecomer because of the impact on his co-worker. They agree that coming in to work late is not a problem (he has a long commute, with heavy traffic en route) but that he will commit to being in by 9.30 a.m. every day to reduce the number of calls his co-worker has to field, and also give her a fixed time to give clients. He will work late to make up time, and will take on a task she doesn't like to make up for her extra phone handling.

When you are faced with a potential discipline issue, take time to gather information about the situation, decide what you're going to do, and act. Discipline issues rarely go away of their own accord, and they usually get worse, often causing considerable resentment amongst other team members.

Traps to Avoid

There are a number of common mistakes that new managers tend to make. Take care to avoid them!

These are:

• Thinking that you can rely on your existing job knowledge and technical skills to succeed as a manager. It is essential that you take the time to develop good management and people skills as well – these can be more important than your technical skills!
• Failing to consult regularly with your boss, in a misguided attempt to show that you can cope on your own.
• Approaching your boss without having thought a problem through, and without having considered how the problem could be solved.
• Embarrassing your boss, or letting her get a nasty surprise. Follow the "no surprises" rule.
• Doing anything that requires your boss to defend you to others. This can cause your boss to "lose face" with his peers and superiors, and it makes it look as if his team is out of control.
• Failing to talk to your customers (whether internal or external) about what they want from yourself and your team.
• Using your authority inappropriately – make sure that everything you ask people to do is in the interests of the organization.

Many of these points sound obvious, however it's incredibly easy to make these mistakes in the rush of everyday managerial life.

Key Points

When you move from being a worker to a line manager, you need to develop a new set of skills, and make use of new tools and techniques. These will help you with the key management activities of organizing, motivating, developing and communicating with your team.

Above all, learn how to delegate effectively. However, also learn how to motivate people, develop team members, communicate effectively with people inside and outside your team, and manage discipline effectively.

And make sure that you avoid the mistakes that many new managers make!

You can learn 700 similar skills elsewhere on this site. Click here to see our full toolkit. If you like our approach, you can subscribe to our free newsletter, or become a member for just US$1.

Mintzberg's Management Roles Identifying the Roles Managers Play

 

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Which roles do you play most often?

As a manager, you probably fulfill many different roles every day.

For instance, as well as leading your team, you might find yourself resolving a conflict, negotiating new contracts, representing your department at a board meeting, or approving a request for a new computer system.

Put simply, you're constantly switching roles as tasks, situations, and expectations change.

Management expert and professor, Henry Mintzberg, recognized this. He argued that there are ten primary roles or behaviors that can be used to categorize a manager's different functions. In this article we'll examine these roles, and we'll see how you can use your understanding of them to improve your management skills.

The Roles

Mintzberg published his Ten Management Roles in his book, "Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organizations," in 1990.

The ten roles are:

1. Figurehead.
2. Leader.
3. Liaison.
4. Monitor.
5. Disseminator.
6. Spokesperson.
7. Entrepreneur.
8. Disturbance Handler.
9. Resource Allocator.
10. Negotiator.

The 10 roles are then divided up into three categories, as follows:

Category	Role
Interpersonal	Figurehead Leader Liaison
Informational	Monitor Disseminator Spokesperson
Decisional	Entrepreneur Disturbance Handler Resource Allocator Negotiator

Let's look at each of the ten roles in greater detail.

Interpersonal Category

The roles in this category involve providing information and ideas.

1. Figurehead - As a manager, you have social, ceremonial and legal responsibilities. You're expected to be a source of inspiration. People look up to you as a person with authority, and as a figurehead.
2. Leader - This is where you provide leadership for your team, your department or perhaps your entire organization; and it's where you manage the performance and responsibilities of everyone in the group.
3. Liaison - Managers must communicate with internal and external contacts. You need to be able to network effectively on behalf of your organization.

Informational Category

The roles in this category involve processing information.

4. Monitor - In this role, you regularly seek out information related to your organization and industry, looking for relevant changes in the environment. You also monitor your team, in terms of both their productivity, and their well-being.
5. Disseminator - This is where you communicate potentially useful information to your colleagues and your team.
6. Spokesperson - Managers represent and speak for their organization. In this role you're responsible for transmitting information about your organization and its goals to the people outside it.

Decisional Category

The roles in this category involve using information.

7. Entrepreneur - As a manager, you create and control change within the organization. This means solving problems, generating new ideas, and implementing them.
8. Disturbance Handler - When an organization or team hits an unexpected roadblock, it's the manager who must take charge. You also need to help mediate disputes within it.
9. Resource Allocator - You'll also need to determine where organizational resources are best applied. This involves allocating funding, as well as assigning staff and other organizational resources.
10. Negotiator - You may be needed to take part in, and direct, important negotiations within your team, department, or organization.

Applying the Model

You can use Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model as a frame of reference when you're thinking about developing your own skills and knowledge. (This includes developing yourself in areas that you consciously or unconsciously shy away from.)

First, examine how much time you currently spend on each role. Do you spend most of your day leading? Managing conflict? Disseminating information? This will help you decide which areas to work on first.

Next, get a piece of paper and write out all ten roles. Score yourself from 1-5 on each one, with 1 being "Very skilled" to 5 being "Not skilled at all."

Once you've identified your weak areas, use the following resources to start improving your abilities in each role.

Figurehead

Figureheads represent their teams. If you need to improve or build confidence in this area, start with your image, behavior, and reputation. Cultivate humility and empathy, learn how to set a good example at work, and think about how to be a good role model.

Leader

This is the role you probably spend most of your time fulfilling. To improve here, start by taking our quiz, How Good Are Your Leadership Skills? This will give you a thorough understanding of your current abilities.

Next, learn how to be an authentic leader, so your team will respect you. Also, focus on improving your emotional intelligence - this is an important skill for being an effective leader.

Liaison

To improve your liaison skills, work on your professional networking techniques. You may also like to take our Bite-Sized Training course on Networking Skills.

Monitor

To improve here, learn how to gather information effectively and overcome information overload. Also, use effective reading strategies, so that you can process material quickly and thoroughly, and learn how to keep up-to-date with industry news.

Disseminator

To be a good disseminator you need to know how to share information and outside views effectively, which means that good communication skills are vital.

Learn how to share organizational information with Team Briefings. Next, focus on improving your writing skills. You might also want to take our communication skills quiz, to find out where else you can improve.

Spokesperson

To be effective in this role, make sure that you know how to represent your organization at a conference. You may also want to read our articles on delivering great presentations and working with the media (if applicable to your role).

Entrepreneur

To improve here, build on your change management skills, and learn what not to do when implementing change in your organization. You'll also need to work on your problem solving and creativity skills, so that you can come up with new ideas, and implement them successfully.

Disturbance Handler

In this role, you need to excel at conflict resolution and know how to handle team conflict. It's also helpful to be able to manage emotion in your team.

Resource Allocator

To improve as a resource allocator, learn how to manage a budget, cut costs, and prioritize, so that you can make the best use of your resources. You can also use VRIO Analysis to learn how to get the best results from the resources available to you.

Negotiator

Improve your negotiation skills by learning about Win-Win Negotiation and Distributive Bargaining.

You might also want to read our article on role-playing - this technique can help you prepare for difficult negotiations.

Key Points

Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model sets out the essential roles that managers play. These are:

1. Figurehead.
2. Leader.
3. Liaison.
4. Monitor.
5. Disseminator.
6. Spokesperson.
7. Entrepreneur.
8. Disturbance Handler.
9. Resource Allocator.
10. Negotiator.

You can apply Mintzberg's 10 Management Roles model by using it as a frame of reference when you want to develop your management skills. Work on the roles that you fulfill most often as a priority, but remember that you won't necessarily fulfill every role as part of your job.