Sixty years ago Douglas McGregor from the MIT Sloan School of Management presented two theories of workforce motivation he named “Theory X” and “Theory Y.” Over the intervening decades these theories have been used by leadership teams, HR professionals and OD folks as they craft and create HR policies, performance management programs, rewards and recognition, and work space design.

If it’s been some time since you gave much thought to McGregor’s work, here’s a refresher:

Employee experience Theory X vs Theory Y

Theory X assumes that:

• people dislike work
• people want to avoid work (i.e. “people are inherently lazy”)
• people don’t want to take responsibility

Theory Y assumes that:

•  people are happy to work
•  people are self-motivated to pursue objectives
•  people thrive on responsibility

In a Theory X organization

• management is authoritarian
• control is centralized with a belief that people must be coerced
• uses a reward and punishment style (i.e. “carrot and stick”); believe financial incentives (or financial punishments) are the best motivator

In a Theory Y organization:

• management is participative; involves employees
• feedback, especially positive feedback, is continuous
• assume that control, rewards and punishments are not the only ways to stimulate people
• people have self-direction and self-control

Simplified perhaps. Because, of course, we all learned in our earliest forays into leading others that management of a team requires some combination of Theory X and Theory Y style.  Every employee is unique.  Yet “simple” is helpful as we tackle what we consider to be the nuanced and complex workplace issues today; decades after McGregor first shared these theories in 1957.

Is your EX X or Y?

So, as I sit here, day-in-and-day-out, and think about the employee experience (which, let’s face it, is merely an amalgamation of previous terms and is now the trendy catch phrase/buzzword for everything else that has come before it) I often find myself stripping all the glam and sexy stuff down to a pretty basic question… “Do you provide an X or a Y experience?”

For therein lies the problem. Without asking that question and truly examining a few key principles about how people are viewed, numerous organizations continuously circle round and round in a never-ending journey of futility.  They may telegraph to candidates, applicants and new hires all the Theory Y things they do when, in reality, the policies, rewards and management style exhibited by the vast majority are most assuredly Theory X.

The sad reality of employee experience theory

There’s a real danger of ongoing confirmation bias. A Theory X organization that operates with control and coercion may find, as time goes on, that employees become so accustomed to punishing behavior (“You’re 5 minutes late! Here’s your penalty!”) that they do, in fact, exert minimal effort and thus confirm all the assumptions that managers have had all along. “See how lazy they are!  You can’t trust people to show up on time. We have to punish them or no one will come to work!”

Let’s be real though; there is not one single HR pundit or “Future of Work” speaker out on the vast global conference speaking circuit touting “Top Ten Ways to Motivate Your Lazy Unwilling-to-Work Employees!”  Nope; that wouldn’t sell a lot of tickets.

Instead, managers from assorted disciplines attend their specific professional development conferences, sign up for the ‘HR Track’, and take copious notes as some HR consultant/speaker talks about the Theory Y ‘New Way of Work’.

And then those very same managers head back to the office, roll up their sleeves, and bust out Employee Experience Theory X.

Originally published at robinschooling.com