CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Worker and Working: Theories and Reality

SINCE THE WRITINGS OF the human-relations school first came to the notice of managers around World War II, there has been a proliferation of books, papers, and studies on motivation and achievement, on industrial psychology and industrial sociology, on interpersonal relations at work and on worker satisfaction. Indeed, the literature on managing worker and working, in quantity at least, exceeds the literature in any other management field, including even the management sciences and the computer.

The most widely read and most often quoted of these books is probably Douglas McGregor’s The Human Side of Enterprise, with its Theory X and Theory Y. McGregor conducted no original research. He acknowledged freely in his book that he had developed no new ideas but had formulated the ideas of others. But his book fully deserves the wide attention it has received. McGregor powerfully presented fundamental choices for managing worker and working. His Theory X—the traditional approach to worker and working—assumes that people are lazy, dislike and shun work, have to be driven and need both carrot and stick. It assumes that most people are incapable of taking responsibility for themselves and have to be looked after. By contrast, Theory Y assumes that people have a psychological need to work and want achievement and responsibility. Theory X assumes immaturity. Theory Y assumes fundamentally that people want to be adults.

McGregor presented these two theories as alternatives and pretended to impartiality. Yet no reader ever doubted—or was meant to doubt—that McGregor himself believed wholeheartedly in Theory Y.

There is impressive evidence for Theory Y. On most jobs most workers, even those hostile to boss and organization, want to like their work and look for achievement. In most jobs even the most alienated workers manage to find something that gives them satisfaction.

This was first brought out in the late 1940s, when General Motors conducted a large-scale contest on “My Job and Why I Like It.” Almost 190,000 workers wrote in and discussed their jobs—by far the larger sample of worker attitudes we have ever obtained. Indeed the response was so overwhelming that the material could never be fully exploited; very few results have ever been published. Very few of the GM workers were uncritical. But even fewer did not find something that made them like the job, did not mention some challenge in it, some achievement and satisfaction, some true motivation.

Equally convincing are the extensive studies of Frederick Herzberg on knowledge workers. Herzberg produced example after example that knowledge workers want achievement and will indeed work only if there is achievement in their job. Otherwise they will at best go through the motions.

Yet things are far less simple than McGregor’s followers would make us and themselves—believe. In the first place, we have learned that Theory Y is not by itself adequate. When I first propounded what McGregor later formulated and popularized as Theory Y, I laid great stress on the fact that this was not “permissive.” On the contrary, I said that to manage worker and working by putting responsibility on the worker and by aiming at achievement made exceedingly high demands on both worker and manager. McGregor also saw this, though he did not stress it. (An oversight repaired in his posthumous The Professional Manager; McGraw-Hill, 1967.)

Maslow’s Criticism

An ardent enthusiast for Theory Y, the late Abraham H. Maslow, pointed out that the demands are actually much higher than even I had seen. Maslow spent one year working closely with a small company in Southern California which at the time tried to practice Theory Y. Maslow pointed out that the demand for responsibility and achievement may well go far beyond what any but the strong and healthy can take. He sharply criticized me and McGregor for “inhumanity” to the weak, the vulnerable, the damaged, who are unable to take on the responsibility and self-discipline which Theory Y demands. Even the strong and healthy, Maslow concluded, need the security of order and direction; and the weak need protection against the burden of responsibility. The world is not, Maslow concluded, peopled by adults. It has its full share of the permanently immature.

Maslow, although always a strong advocate of Theory Y, concluded that it is not enough to remove restraints. One has to replace the security of Theory X and the certainty it gives by another but different structure of security and certainty. There is need to provide by different means what commands and penalties do under Theory X. Theory Y, in other words, has to go far beyond Theory X. It cannot simply be substituted for it.

This is an important insight. And it is clearly proven by all our experience with Theory Y.

In fact, one of McGregor’s closest friends and disciples proved Maslow’s point. Warren Bennis, himself a distinguished industrial psychologist (and the editor of McGregor’s posthumous book, The Professional Manager) attempted in the late sixties to convert the University of Buffalo, in upstate New York, from an old, tired, and rundown school into a major, first-rate university. His approach and that of his colleagues was clearly based on Theory Y—but without giving structure, direction, and security. The result was tremendous excitement but also total failure. Instead of achievement, there was lack of direction, lack of objectives, lack of controls, and frustration—as Bennis (who later became president of the University of Cincinnati) himself recounts.

One conclusion from Maslow’s work is that Theory Y is not permissive, as so many of its advocates believe. It is not freedom from restraint. It is not, as its critics contend, indulging or coddling the worker. It is a stern taskmaster, sterner in many ways than the Theory X which it replaces. It has to achieve what Theory X achieved, and then do a good deal more—or else it will prove too great a burden and will make demands human beings cannot meet.

It has now become clear that Theory X and Theory Y are not, as McGregor maintained, theories about human nature (a position never shared by me, by the way). Whether we will ever know enough about human nature to have any theories about it remains to be seen. But so far, the evidence is not at all conclusive.

Everybody knows that there are undoubtedly lazy people as there are undoubtedly energetic ones. Far more important, however, is that ordinary, everyday experience teaches us that the same people react quite differently to different circumstances. They may be lazy and resist work to the point of sabotaging it in one situation. They may be motivated to achievement in another one. It is clearly not human nature nor personality structure that is at issue. Or at the very least, there are different human natures which behave differently under different conditions.

Modern American slang talks of being “turned on” or “turned off” by an assignment, a teacher, a job, or a boss. These terms have been criticized as dehumanizing. They refer to people, it is being said, as if they were electrical appliances. But everyday experience shows that this is exactly how a great many people behave. They react rather than act. The motivation, the drive, the impulse lie outside of them.

But this is not compatible with either Theory X or Theory Y. It implies that it is not human nature but the structure of job and work that, in effect, determines how people will act and what management they will require.

We also now know that individuals can acquire the habit of achievement but can also acquire the habit of defeat. This again is not compatible with either the Theory X or the Theory Y of human nature.

The best-known work in this area has been done by David C. McClelland at Harvard. McClelland has taken the position that the desire to achieve is conditioned largely by culture and by experiences, both of which can be changed even in a nonachieving culture such as that of the Indian caste system. The most extensive study of actual worker behavior in large-scale industry, the work which the Canadian-English psychiatrist Elliott Jacques conducted for many years at the Glacier Metal Company in London (together with the company’s chief executive, Wilfred Brown), supports the same conclusion.

What Is the Manager’s Reality?

The debate over the scientific validity of Theory X versus Theory Y is, therefore, largely a sham battle. The question the manager needs to ask is not “which theory of human nature is right?” The question is “What is the reality of my situation and how can I discharge my task of managing worker and working in today’s situation?”

The basic fact—unpalatable but inescapable—is that the traditional Theory X approach to managing, that is, the carrot-and-stick way, no longer works. In developed countries, it does not even work for manual workers, and nowhere can it work for knowledge workers. The stick is no longer available to the manager, and the carrot is today becoming less and less of an incentive.

The stick of the traditional approach to managing worker and working was hunger and fear. Traditionally, all but a handful of people in every society lived at the very margin of subsistence and in imminent threat of starvation. One bad harvest was enough to force an Indian or Chinese peasant to sell his daughters into prostitution. One bad harvest was enough for him to lose the tiny plot of land which was all that stood between him and beggary. Now, even in only moderately affluent countries, there is an economic floor well above subsistence level, even for the very poor. Workers know today, in every developed country, that losing a job doesn’t mean starvation. Workers who suddenly become unemployed may have to do without a lot of things they would like to have, but they can survive.

Marx’s Lumpenproletariat, that is, the unemployables, still exist even in some very rich countries. But Marx’s proletariat has disappeared—and with it the stick of Theory X.

Even where fear exists, it has largely ceased to motivate. Instead of motivation, fear is becoming a demotivator. One reason for this is the spread of education, the other reason is the emergence of the society of organization. The spread of education makes people employable. It gives them a wider horizon. Even poorly educated people in today’s society now know of opportunities. In a society of organizations it is possible to gain access to a new job. In a society of organizations there is lateral mobility. Losing one’s job is still unpleasant. But it is no longer catastrophe.

The English tenant farmer, no matter how accomplished or industrious, who was evicted by his landlord became a “sturdy beggar.” There was no other employment for him, except an occasional day of work as a casual laborer helping out with the harvest. Losing one’s job was more than a life sentence; it usually condemned one’s children and grandchildren. It made an unemployed person an outcast. Now anyone who loses a job registers with the employment exchange for another one. Even at the depth of a serious depression today,—e.g., the American recession of 1974–1976—long term unemployment, that is, unemployment beyond the term of unemployment insurance payments, was quite rare for adult male heads of households.

In addition there is rising employment security which protects people in their jobs. It takes many forms. In Sweden a three-partite board guarantees another job and provides for training and support between jobs for anyone who loses a job. In most European (and Latin American) countries, there are legal restrictions on firing. There are seniority provisions which make job security into a right. In the United States, increasingly, income, if not employment, is maintained for long periods through such contractual provisions as supplemental employment compensation.

All developed countries are moving toward the system of the modern university, where a faculty member after a few years of service acquires tenure, which all but completely commits the university to a job for the teacher. At the same time, the faculty member has unlimited mobility and can freely move from one university position to another.

Japan has lifetime employment, which binds both employer and worker. Fear of being fired, therefore, does not exist in Japan, at least not in the “modern” sector. This is a major factor in Japan’s economic achievement.

The Japanese example also shows that the more fear disappears as a stick, the more counterproductive remnants of fear become. The Japanese worker knows that he is tied to an employer and is unlikely to find other employment if he loses his present job. This makes him dedicated to the welfare of the organization that employs him. But it also makes him resent bitterly any stuctural change in the economy that might threaten the industry or occupation that employs him—the reason, for instance, for the extremely bad labor relations on the Japanese Railroads. The Japanese worker’s inability to move also makes him defenseless against the pressure to conform exerted by the organization. This is increasingly unacceptable to the young educated people. Indeed, while still expecting the security of lifetime employment, they increasingly demand for themselves the right to move to another employer. Rousseau pointed out two hundred years ago that the “right to emigrate” is the ultimate safeguard of personal liberty.

Japan, it is reasonable to predict, will move toward a system under which the worker has guarantees of income and job, but also mobility.

Modern behavioral psychology has demonstrated that great fear coerces, while remnants of fear cause only resentment and resistance. Fear in all developed countries has lost its coercive power. The lesser fears that still remain do not motivate. They destroy motivation—precisely because they lack full power and full credibility.

“Big Fear” and “Little Fears”

The “big fear” still motivates where it is truly credible, as is shown by the quite unexpected success which a new approach to “curing” alcoholism has had. Everybody has “known” that the true alcoholics cannot stop drinking until they are completely down and out, if then. But a good many employers are now finding that a very large percentage of alcoholic workers do indeed stop drinking— permanently—if told in unequivocal language that they will otherwise be fired and that potential new employers will be told of their problem, so that they are unlikely to find another job.

But, save in such exceptional cases as the alcoholics who know that they are rapidly becoming unemployable, the big stick, the horrible fear which drove workers yesterday, is no longer available to today’s manager in the developed countries, whether the manager likes it or not. It is extremely foolish to try to depend on “little sticks,” that is, whatever remnants of fear are still available. To be sure, any organization needs disciplinary devices, but their role and purpose is to take care of marginal friction. They cannot provide the drive. If misused to drive, disciplinary devices can cause only resentment and resistance. They can only demotivate.

The Overly Potent Carrot

The carrot of material rewards has not, like the stick of fear, lost its potency. On the contrary, it has become so potent that it must be used with great caution. It has become too potent to be a dependable tool.

The Sunday issue of every newspaper these days contains an article by a learned sociologist or philosopher reporting that people are turning away from material satisfactions. On the front page of the same paper, Sundays and weekdays, there is then always a story that this or that group of workers— teachers or electricians, newspaper reporters or fire-fighters, salesclerks or stevedores—have presented the biggest wage demand ever or have obtained the biggest wage raise ever.

When the youthful rebels against material civilization half a century ago went back to nature, all they needed was a tent or a sleeping bag. These days, turning one’s back on material civilization seems to require an $8,000 camper-truck. The youthful rebels of the 1920s played their back-to-nature songs on a ukulele; today we need an electronic guitar to express our rejection of technology. The same European intellectuals who so vocally inveigh against American materialism use the fees they get for their lectures and articles for such nonmaterial satisfactions as a sports car, an airplane trip to a plush resort, or the purchase of a villa on a Mediterranean beach.

There is not one shred of evidence for the alleged turning away from material rewards. On the contrary, affluence means that everybody believes that material rewards are and should be within easy reach. Samuel Gompers, the long-time head of the American labor movement, used to define the aims of a labor union in one word: “more.” He would surely have to change this today to “much more.” Antimaterialism is a myth, no matter how much it is extolled. So far, at least, the reality is tremendous and steadily rising material expectations, i.e., expectations for more goods and services.

This is not confined to the capitalist world. It has become the massive reality of communist societies as well. In the thirties Stalin did not hesitate to cut back drastically on the people’s diet when Russia had a bad harvest. His successors, in 1972, faced by a much less poor harvest, instead dipped deeply into Russia’s strategic gold reserves to buy grain from the archenemy, the United States. Mao, in the years of the Great Cultural Revolution in the sixties, thundered against “economism,” i.e., against material incentives and rewards. By the early seventies the emphasis in China had shifted to heavy stress on such “capitalist” incentives as bicycles and sewing machines as rewards for performance.

The demand for much more is obviously going to run ultimately into the finite limitations of the earth’s resources and the need to preserve the environment. What we experience today may therefore indeed be the final frenzied agony of the “material civilization.” But, at least for the foreseeable future, this will mean above all an even faster shift from goods to services as carriers of satisfaction, and with it, from material-intensive to labor-intensive (and especially knowledge-labor-intensive) wants and purchases. It is most unlikely, for the foreseeable future, to alter the basic characteristics. On the contrary; that rising raw-material prices and ecology costs will push up the cost of goods is almost certain to add fuel to the fire of demands for more, much more, monetary rewards.

It is precisely the rising level of material expectations that makes the carrot of material rewards less and less effective as a motivating force and as a managerial tool.

The increment of material rewards capable of motivating people to work has to become larger. As people get more they do not become more satisfied with a little more, let alone with less. They expect much more. This is, of course, one of the major causes of the relentless inflationary pressures that besiege every major economy today. Whereas a 5 percent wage boost was, a short few years ago, a major satisfaction, the teamsters—or the teachers or the physicians—now demand 40 percent and expect 20 percent.

This may be a manifestation of Maslow’s rule that the closer a need comes to being satisfied, the larger an increment of additional gratification will be required to produce the same satisfaction. But the demand for more and much more of material satisfaction has also been accompanied by a change in values that does not fit Maslow’s scheme at all. Economic incentives are becoming rights rather than rewards. Merit raises are always introduced as rewards for exceptional performance. In no time at all they become a right. To deny a merit raise or to grant only a small one becomes punishment. The same is true of Japan’s semiannual bonus.

But whatever the explanation, the result of the increasing demand for material rewards is rapidly destroying their usefulness as incentives and managerial tools. The manager must try to deemphasize the role of material rewards rather than use them as a carrot. If only very large—and steadily larger—increments have an incentive effect, then using material incentives becomes self-defeating. The expected result in terms of motivation will be obtained, but the cost will be so high as to exceed the benefits. The cost will eat up the additional productivity. This is, of course, what has been happening with respect to material incentives for managers (e.g., stock options or extra compensation plans) as well as with respect to material incentives for all other classes of workers.

That inflation has become the central problem of the developed economies is, in terms of traditional or Keynesian economic theory, pure paradox. Inflation should not occur under conditions of high productive capacity and high productivity. Instead it is the norm. The reason is the totally unexpected size of economic appetities, the totally unexpected potency of material rewards. The result, however, is that to enable the economy, society, and enterprise to survive, managers must try to curb and to contain economic incentives rather than rely on them. The economic incentive that has a true carrot effect is “too much.” Only economic rewards that fall well below the threshold of motivational effectiveness are likely to be defensible economically and in terms of productivity and contribution.

This also means that the social side effects of the carrot are reaching toxic proportions. A potent medicine always has side effects; and the larger the dosage, the greater the side effects. Material incentives and rewards is a very strong medicine indeed, and becoming more potent. It therefore is bound to have potent side effects, which become more pronounced and more dangerous as the dosage required for effectiveness increases. In particular the more total income goes up, the more powerful does dissatisfaction over relative compensation become. As all our studies show—beginning with the GM contest “My Job” in the late forties—there is no more powerful disincentive, no more effective bar to motivation, than dissatisfaction over one’s own pay compared to that of one’s peers. Once people’s incomes rise above the subsistence level, dissatisfaction with relative incomes is a far more powerful sentiment than dissatisfaction with one’s absolute income. The “sense of injustice,” as Edmond Cahn, the American legal philosopher, convincingly argued, is deeply ingrained in people. Nothing is as likely to offend the sense of injustice as dissatisfaction with relative economic rewards in an organization. An organization is a redistributive economy; relative economic rewards are therefore power and status decisions on the worth of a person or a group.

Reliance on the carrot of economic rewards therefore runs the risk of alienating both the recipient and all others. It runs the risk of dividing the group against itself while uniting it against the system, i.e., against the employing institution and its management.

Clearly no deemphasis of material rewards is likely. Managers face instead the tremendous challenge of finding some means to relate the growing emphasis on “much more” to economic reality, i.e., to productivity and profitability. Material rewards are too potent to be relied on as the main positive motivator. This can only mean growing inflationary pressures—and growing dissatisfaction.

This applies to managers as well as to blue-collar workers. There is little doubt that managerial carrots have grown into seven-course Victorian meals, e.g., from small bonuses to massive stock option plans. With respect to managerial incentives, we are moving from more to much more. At the same time there is growing evidence that inequalities in managerial incentives—real or fancied—are more demotivating than the rewards themselves satisfy and motivate.

The limitations of the effectiveness of carrot and stick apply with particular force to two groups in the work force: the new breed of manual workers, and knowledge workers. In managing manual workers, the manager in the developed country more and more has to deal with men (and to a lesser extent with women) who start out as “losers,” feel rejected, feel already defeated. These are people who have been driven all their lives and yet have not achieved. But losers always learn one thing, and that to perfection: resistance against being driven. They may not be able to achieve, but they know how to sabotage.

The best text on this is not a learned study by a professor of psychology but a best-selling humorous novel of the twenties, The Good Soldier Schweik, by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hasek. Schweik, one of the world’s defeated, the archetypal dropout, single-handedly stultifies and frustrates the whole Theory X apparatus of the mighty army of a great power, pre-World War I Austria-Hungary. He does nothing overt. He knows how to sabotage.

To drive the new breed of manual workers therefore will not be successful. Hunger and fear no longer dominate them as they did their grandparents. But their very failure has made them impervious to pressures.

The knowledge worker will not produce if managed under Theory X. Knowledge has to be self-directed and has to take responsibility.

Fear is altogether incompatible with the production of knowledge. It may produce efforts and anxieties. It will not produce results. And fear inhibits learning, a basic finding of modern behavioral psychology. Rewards and reaffirmation will produce learning. In anything that has to do with knowledge, fear will produce only resistance.

Theory X assumes a “master.” But in a society of organizations there are no masters. The manager is not a master. The manager is at the same time a superior, and a fellow employee. For the first time in history there is a society which lacks masters.

This is not the case in communist societies, which have assiduously worked at replacing the old masters with new masters. The role of the Communist party in a communist state is to be a master. It is in crisis precisely because even under communism a modern society becomes a society of organizations and as such requires managers and cannot tolerate masters.

The manager, not being a master, lacks both the master’s authority and the master’s credibility. The master’s power is independent of the support he receives, either from his servants or from society around him. One can kill a master, but one cannot oust him. But, as the sixties amply showed, e.g., in the case of countless university presidents, even the chief executive of an organization can be ousted, precisely because he is a fellow employee. The authority he exercises is not his own, and cannot survive a challenge. Even in communist societies where managers have much more power and much more income as a rule, they are no longer “masters.” That role is being played by the Communist party, its functionaries, secretaries, and commissars.

In terms of the ancient law of master and servant, the chief executive officer of the largest corporation is a fellow servant. Others may be subordinate in rank, but they are equal in law. They are not the chief executive’s servants, they are his fellow workers.

This is much more than a semantic shift. It means that neither stick nor carrot will actually work if used by a manager, no matter how well they used to work for the master of old.

Can We Replace Carrot and Stick?

Can we replace the carrot of monetary rewards and the stick of fear with a new carrot and a new stick appropriate to the new managerial reality?

After all, carrot and stick have worked for an amazingly long time. One does not lightly toss out the tradition of the ages. Over the millennia during which worker and working have been managed, society has changed fundamentally. Yet managing worker and working has shown amazing continuity. The Theory X principles that were applied to managing worker and working in the building of the great pyramids of Egypt still inform the organization of worker and working in the modern mass-production plant.

Henry Ford’s best-known epigram is “History is bunk.” Ford was a bold innovator in organizing work, in marketing, and in economics, but when it came to managing worker and working he was completely the prisoner of history and a traditionalist.

The traditional way of managing working and worker cuts across all of man’s cultures. There is no great difference between West and East, between pagan antiquity and Christendom, between China and the Occident, between Inca Peru and Mogul India. Nor does the organization of society itself seem to make much difference.

In that respect the Marxist analysis has altogether failed. The factory and office in Soviet Russia or in the Soviet satellites in Europe are organized no differently from the wicked capitalist West. Nor, all evidence clearly shows, is the worker any more achieving or the bosses any less the bosses. The same applies to the far more imaginative Yugoslav experiment of direct worker control of individual businesses, to direct worker ownership, to ownership by a cooperative, and so on.

We therefore know Theory X management. What to put in its place is—or so it seems—largely guesswork and speculation. Surely it would be the better part of wisdom to try to maintain the essence of Theory X by substituting “modern” drives for the old driving force of fear and money. What we need, one might argue, is to find the organizational equivalent to the gasoline engine which replaced the horse—but to keep the wheeled vehicle.

Not only managers ask this question. The labor unions are perhaps even more eager to keep the Theory X structure. The unions, after all, have a stake in the coercive relationship between master and servant of Theory X; if there were no master, what, indeed, would the union’s role be? Also labor leaders derive their pride and sense of mission from opposition to Theory X, know how to behave under it, and have its rhetoric down pat.

When the younger workers in some General Motors plants began to talk about humanizing the assembly line, the greatest resistance did not come from General Motors management. It came from the United Automobile Workers’ leadership, which insisted on talking about money, pensions, hours off, coffee breaks—and so on. The UAW leaders, in other words, insisted, against their own members, on maintaining and even strengthening a Theory X management on the part of the company.

To look for a new set of drives to take the place of the old carrot and stick seems not only rational but tempting. Such replacement drives are indeed being offered managers in the form of a new “enlightened psychological despotism.”

Most, if not all, of the recent writers on industrial psychology profess allegiance to Theory Y. They use terms like “self-fulfillment,” “creativity,” and “the whole person.” But what they talk and write about is control through psychological manipulation. They are led to this by their basic assumptions, which are precisely the Theory X assumptions: people are weak, sick and incapable of looking after themselves. They are full of fears anxieties, neuroses, inhibitions. Essentially people do not want to achieve but want to fail. They therefore want to be controlled—not by fear of hunger and incentive of material rewards but through their fear of psychological alienation and the incentive of “psychological security.”

I know that I am oversimplifying. I know that I am lumping under one heading half a dozen different approaches. But they all share the same basic assumptions, those of Theory X, and they all lead to the same conclusions. Psychological control by the superior, the manager, is “unselfish” and in the worker’s own interest. By becoming the workers’ psychological servant, however, the manager retains control as their “boss.”

This is “enlightened” whereas the old carrot-and-stick approach may be condemned as crassly coercive (and is condemned as such by the psychologists). But it is despotism nonetheless. Under this new psychological dispensation, persuasion replaces command. Those unconvinced by persuasion would presumably be deemed sick, immature, or in need of psychotherapy to become adjusted. Psychological manipulation replaces the carrot of financial rewards; and empathy, i.e., the exploitation of individual fears, anxieties, and personality needs, replaces the old fear of being punished or of losing one’s job. This is strikingly similar to the eighteenth-century philosopher’s theory of the enlightened despot. As in modern organization today, affluence and education—in this case, the affluence and rising education of the middle class—threatened to deprive the sovereign of his carrot and stick. The philosopher’s enlightened despot was going to maintain absolutism by replacing the old means with persuasion, reason, and enlightenment—all in the interest of the subjects, of course.

Psychological despotism, whether enlightened or not, is gross misuse of psychology. The main purpose of psychology is to acquire insight into, and mastery of, oneself. Not for nothing were what we now call the behavioral sciences originally called the moral sciences and “Know thyself” their main precept. To use psychology to control, dominate, and manipulate others is self-destructive abuse of knowledge. It is also a particularly repugnant form of tyranny. The master of old was content to control the slave’s body.

We are concerned, however, here neither with the proper use of psychology nor with morality. But can the Theory X structure be maintained through psychological despotism? Can psychological despotism work?

Psychological despotism should have tremendous attraction for managers. It promises them that they can continue to behave as they have always done. All they need is to acquire a new vocabulary. It flatters them. And yet managers, while avidly reading the psychology books and attending psychological workshops, are shying away from trying the new psychological Theory X.

Managers show sound instincts in being leery. Psychological despotism cannot work any more than enlightened despotism worked in the political sphere two hundred years ago—and for the same reason. It requires universal genius on the part of the ruler. Managers, if one listens to the psychologists, will have to have insight into all kinds of people. They will have to be in command of all kinds of psychological techniques. They will have to have empathy for all their subordinates. They will have to understand an infinity of individual personality structures, individual psychological needs, and individual psychological problems. They will, in other words, have to be omniscient. But most managers find it hard enough to know all they need to know about their own immediate area of expertise, be it heat-treating or cost accounting or scheduling.

And to expect any large number of people to have “charisma”—whatever the term might mean—is an absurdity. This particular quality is reserved for the very few.

Managers should indeed know more about human beings. They should at least know that human beings behave like human beings, and what that implies. Above all, like most of us, managers need to know much more about themselves than they do; for most managers are action-focused rather than introspective. And yet, any manager, no matter how many psychology seminars he or she has attended, who attempts to put psychological despotism into practice will very rapidly become its first casualty. This manager will immediately blunder. This manager will impair performance.

The work relationship has to be based on mutual respect. Psychological despotism is basically contemptuous—far more contemptuous than the traditional Theory X. It does not assume that people are lazy and resist work, but it assumes that the manager is healthy while everybody else is sick. It assumes that the manager is strong while everybody else is weak. It assumes that the manager knows while everybody else is ignorant. It assumes that the manager is right, whereas everybody else is stupid. These are the assumptions of foolish arrogance.

Above all, the manager-psychologists will undermine their own authority. There is, to be sure, need for psychological insight, help, counsel. There is need for the healer of souls and the comforter of the afflicted. But the relationship of healer and patient and that of superior to subordinate are different relationships and mutually exclusive. They both have their own integrity. The integrity of the healers is in their subordination to a patient’s welfare. The integrity of the managers is in their subordination to the requirements of a common task. In both relationships there is need for authority; but each has a different ground of authority. A manager who pretends that the personal needs of the subordinate for, e.g., affection, rather than the objective needs of the task, determine what should be done, would not only be a poor manager; no one would—or should— believe that manager. All that managers like this do is destroy the integrity of the relationship and with it the respect for their person and their function.

Enlightened psychological despotism with its call for an unlimited supply of universal geniuses for managerial positions and its confusion between the healer’s and the manager’s authority and role is not going to deliver what it promises: to maintain Theory X while pretending to replace it.

But what then can work?

It is not simply McGregor’s Theory X. The manager must indeed assume with Theory Y that there are at least a substantial number of people in the work force who want to achieve. Otherwise there is little hope. Fortunately the evidence strongly supports this assumption. Managers must further accept it as their job to make worker and working achieving. They must be willing, as a result, to accept high demands on themselves, their seriousness, and their competence. But managers cannot assume, as Theory Y does, that people will work to achieve if only they are given the opportunity to do so. More is needed—much more—to make even the strong and healthy accept the burden of responsibility. The structure we need cannot depend on driving the worker; neither carrot nor stick is dependable any more. But the structure must also provide substitutes to the weak—and not only to them—for Theory X’s security of command and of being looked after.