Douglas McGregor, Revisited: Managing the Human Side of Enterprise by Gary Heil, Warren Bennis, and Deborah C. Stephens, New York: Wiley, 2000, 196 pp., ISBN 0-471-31462-5.

I was a student of Doug McGregor. In a way he was my mentor. This was in graduate school at MIT in the late 1940s, sometime before he coined his famous terms, “Theory X and Theory Y.” So it was with considerable anticipation that I opened this “revisiting” of Doug’s work hoping for its reevaluation in the light of present knowledge. Perhaps expecting too much, I ended disappointed. The book revisits, but not critically, and it largely ignores some of the more complex elements of Doug’s evolving thoughts. Further, it is often unclear which of the concepts discussed are originally Doug’s and which are those of the present authors. Doug wrote clearly; they do not. But their main thesis comes through nicely: as business has become more technologically complex, the time has come to put McGregor’s teachings into practice, that is to build “intrinsically motivating, actualizing organization” and to create “cause[s] worthy of commitment.” Aside from six years as President of Antioch College, Doug spent most of his professional career at MIT. During that time he wrote on many things, including labour-management relations, but his best known work centered on Theories X and Y and their implications. Every manager, Doug argued, makes implicit assumptions about employee motivation. Admittedly oversimplifying, Doug distinguished between two sharply different sets of such assumptions or “theories.” Theory X is that workers are lazy, dislike responsibility, are resistant to change, and so “must be persuaded, rewarded, punished, controlled.” Theory Y is that workers are not inherently lazy or resistant to change. On the contrary “[t]he motivation, the potential for development, the capacity for assuming responsibility, the readiness to direct behavior toward organizational goals are all present in people. Management doesn’t put them there... The essential task of management is to arrange organizational conditions and methods of operation so that people can achieve their own goals best by directing their own efforts toward organizational objectives” (emphasis in the original). Among the Theory-Y related “organizational conditions and methods of operation” that Doug discussed were decentralization and delegation, job enlargement, participative management, and performance appraisal based on management by objectives. Today these techniques are often linked together under the general term “employee involvement.” Strictly speaking, Theories X and Y were alternative managerial assumptions. But McGregor and others of the “human relations school” enlarged upon this distinction with two important propositions: first, that the managerial behaviour of those who made Theory X assumptions would be autocratic and directive, while those with Theory Y views would be democratic and participative; and, second, that employees who worked for Theory Y managers would be both more satisfied and more productive. Happy and productive workers—the best of possible worlds. Much of the research in the field of human relations and later in organizational behavior has been concerned with the extent and circumstances under which this second proposition holds. Despite the present book’s claim that Doug “was the first to apply behavioral science findings to the world of business,” there were numerous others, such as Maslow, Argyris, and Likert who were developing similar concepts at roughly the same time or earlier. Doug’s unique contribution was to state issues in simple (perhaps too simple) terms. Except regarding performance appraisal, he had little new to say about applying these concepts. Neither did he test empirically his observations as to the relationship between managerial assumptions and behaviour. Miles did this later on. Theory Y and associated practices were widely accepted by academics until the late 1960s at which time they were challenged by new research, which suggested that whether they were appropriate in a given situation depended on …