Back in the 1960s Douglas McGregor developed two theories about human motivation in the workplace: Theory X and Theory Y.
I’m not interested in supervising X’ers who need to be motivated and encouraged to do good work. I want to work with Y’ers who are self-disciplined, demonstrate self-control and contextual judgement, and who motivate themselves to do good work. I’m lucky enough to be working in a team full of Y’ers.
Thinking about some X’ers I’ve worked with previously, I wonder if they were always X or whether they started out as Y but were turned into X by prolonged subjection to command and control management? Is this a chicken and egg scenario? I’m speculating but I would guess a transformation from Y to X is most prevalent in institutionalized organizations that do everything by command and control. That said, what worries me is the prevalence of command and control in the industry and that it seems to be the norm.
3 Comments
One of my happier experiences was with a team of rather downtrodden coders. We started pushing the decision-making to them (i.e. the people who were to do the work). It took a while but eventually they lit up and became a lot more vocal than before. I was surprised at how lively the atmosphere became.
Thanks for reminding me to always have faith in people.
Hmmm, this is particularly interesting when the whole culture is gravitating to X and not Y.
In Singapore (where I am currently working), and generally South East Asia, X is a prevalent cultural trait.
Taught from pre-school to employment to obey is an interesting challenge when it comes to implementing Agile when it isn't only the company that is being counter to principals but also the country.
It's still possible though, just a bit more work to progress one character on... Interested in how the guys in India deal with this, as its SEA x 10.