Complete this activity after studying the presentation, Turning Your Review of the Literature into a Draft Answer and its accompanying discussion questions.
For this activity, you will evaluate a sample response to the discussion question with which you worked earlier. Please read the sample response below and then follow the directions to evaluate the response.
For your convenience, here is the discussion question to which the sample response is an answer:
Within the emergence of Management Science, two of the first systematic theories that addressed worker motivation from the perspective of management were Theory X and Theory Y. Discuss the change that Theory X and Theory Y brought, and how this affected management science's way of understanding motivation in the workplace. Also, address the ways in which Theory X and Theory Y asked questions and conducted research, and analyze how the approaches differed from those that preceded X and Y. Provide at least one seminal reference and two peer-reviewed articles to support your ideas.
In this response, there will be four main points. First, the change that Theory X and Y brought; second, how that change affected management science’s understanding of human nature; third, ways Theory X and Y asked questions and conducted research; and fourth, how those methods differed from previous research approaches.
Douglas McGregor, considered the founder of Theory X and Theory Y, wrote in 1960 that he found it necessary to address the role of motivation in the productivity of a workforce—even if it meant taking serious intellectual risks—an untested attitude, namely, to view workers as responding to management in terms of the conditions that would increase productivity in the most effective and efficient manner. He wrote that it was time for management science to concern itself with understanding what motivated human beings to work more effectively and efficiently and therefore increase productivity. He advocated a key change in management’s view of science—as he had advocated in his The Human Side of Enterprise (1960)—management should be concerned with the basic nature of human beings in terms of what drives them to accomplish goals.
In Theory X, McGregor acknowledges the assumption that humans inherently dislike work and will avoid work if given the opportunity. Therefore, management must use negative reinforcement to accomplish the objectives of the organization, including threat, punishment, hierarchical chain-of-command, and tight social controls. In Theory Y, McGregor offered the antithesis of this assumption by positing that humans inherently wish to do well and are motivated to accomplish goals and be successful, which brings an inherent satisfaction in accomplishment. These ideas formed the central core of Theory X and Y, and fundamentally changed how management viewed the workforce. Until this time, scholars and practitioners had focused on functionally specialized organizational structures, particular between management and labor. Management science would present a perspective that management could influence the workforce via motivational techniques. This went beyond the “principles of scientific management and time-motion” studies of Frederick Taylor (1911) and the “social desirability effect” discovered in the Hawthorne studies (Franke and Kaul, 1978).
How did these theories affect management science’s understanding of human nature? By introducing a behavioral definition of motivation as the process used to allocate energy to maximize the satisfaction of needs; the psychological feature that drives a person to achieve their goals and keeps them goal-directed in their actions (Pritchard and Ashwood, 2008). Note that McGregor’s focus on human motivation in the work place expanded on Maslow’s (1943) hierarchy of needs as the source of goal-directed behavior. Managers who subscribed to Theory X believed that workers need to be closely supervised and comprehensive systems of policies and procedures developed to motivate the workforce. The view of managing quotas, schedules, and keeping overhead to a minimum translated into questions about when to incentivize, force, and threaten the workforce if objectives and goals were not being reached. And, of course, this required a hierarchical organizational structure with narrow spans of control at every level.
Managers who were more inclined to take a Theory Y approach to motivating workers believed that employees enjoy their work and if given the chance will showcase their creative abilities and innovate something new to improve productivity. Instead of controlling the workforce, Theory Y managers would ask questions associated with liberating the workforce, particularly when the challenges of effectiveness and efficiency were not being satisfactorily met with following the procedures or doing it by the book.
Theory X and Theory Y would foster survey research of employees which would investigate the sources of worker satisfaction and what motivated workers to strive for higher levels of productivity and efficiency. Finally, McGregor’s contributions would evolve into questions and perspectives about “management styles” and “organizational leadership styles” as significant contributors to worker motivation and organizational success. This was an advancement in the approach and methodologies previously employed by Taylor’s time-motion studies and the “laboratory” approach introduced by Mayo and Roethlisberger in the Hawthorne studies.
To conclude, four points were discussed in this posting: First, the changes that Theory X and Y brought to management science; second, how that change affected management science’s understanding of human nature; third, ways Theory X and Y asked questions; and fourth, how those methods differed from previous research approaches.
Franke, R. H., & Kaul, J. D. (1978). The Hawthorne experiments: First statistical interpretation. American Sociological Review, 43, 623–643.
Maslow, A. H. (1943). A theory of human motivation. Psychological Review, 50(4), 370–396.
Pritchard, R. D., & Ashwood, E. L. (2008). Managing motivation: A manager's guide to diagnosing and improving motivation. New York: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York, NY and London, UK: Harper & Brothers.
After you have read the Sample Response:
Doc. reference: phd_t1_sobt_u06a1_h01_evaldisc.html