Back in the 60s
Douglas McGregor developed two
theories about human motivation in the workplace:
Theory X and Theory Y .
I'm not interested in supervising
X -people who need to be motivated
and encouraged to do good work. I want to work with
Y -people, 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 -people.
Thinking about some
X -people 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
institutionalised organisations 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.
Tuesday, 13 June 2006
X != Y
Posted by Simon Baker - Permalink
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.