Carrot or stick?

We’re starting with an Organisational Behaviour topic for two reasons - it’s commonly one of the “core” subjects that MBAs kick off with in the first semester; and understanding and effectively applying the theories and concepts taught in these modules is absolutely key to being a part of an effective organisation.

Today's topic is motivation

Sooner or later as a manager you’re going to come up against a situation where getting that other person to do something is harder than it was before, or harder than getting someone else to do it.

At an individual level, some days are easier than others - you can power through the tedious stuff on the way to a satisfying session working on the things that you really enjoy. Some days are a slog, and you have to force yourself to do anything at all.

What happens in those two situations is the focus of motivational theory.

You can dress it up with fancier terminology, but ultimately the major component of management is getting other people to do things, whether that’s with or against their will. For that reason, looking at the various theories and models of how human motivation works is a key part of the organisational behaviour syllabus.

Because they’re so central to day-to-day organisational life and the success or otherwise of teams and firms, there’s a lot of theories about motivation, and entire academic careers have been spent trying to prove or disprove one or the others.

It’s possible to look at motivation from two perspectives, that of management and that of the individual. Broadly speaking, they’re about answering two different but highly-related questions: From the manager’s point of view: “how do I motivate my team, and keep them motivated” - and as an individual: “what is it that motivates me?”

We’ll start with the management approach - how can you as someone in charge influence the people that you rely on to deliver your goals?

Carrots, or sticks? Theory X and Theory Y

Although it sounds like the plot of a Marvel movie, Theory X and Theory Y are motivational concepts that are fairly well-known. The names get bandied around a lot, but often with a fairly limited understanding of what it means.

At its heart, they're pretty straightforward - do you have a positive or negative view of human behaviour?

If you subscribe to a Theory X view of the world, your assumptions are largely negative. If you want to get anyone to do anything, you need to beat them with a stick. Left to their own devices, everyone will slack off and do nothing, and it’s your job as a leader to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Theory Y, on the other hand, is the alternative. This holds that people inherently want to do a good job, and your role as a manager is to put the systems and policies in place to allow them to do that.

The theory was developed by Douglas McGregor in the 1950s, when he was a professor of management at MIT. It was published in book form as The Human Side of Enterprise, and not surprisingly for a model which is simplistic at first glance, it got a lot of traction.

Theory X: a fairly pessimistic assessment of the human condition.

By default, workers try to get away with doing as little as possible for the money that you pay them, and your task as a manager is to use a combination of threats and inducements to get them to deliver what you need.

On the threat side, that’s things like enforcing rules and regulations.

Systems of clocking-in, where there’s a physical record of when a worker is present is one example of rule enforcement. In the security industry it’s common to find systems where guards have to scan tokens at various points on their route to prove that they’ve actually visited the location.

Both are examples of processes that are rooted in a Theory X view of the world - unless you enforce visiting every location and prevent “cheating”, your workforce probably won’t bother.

If your Theory X approach is more reward-based, then this often focuses on the individual rather than the team.

Bonuses for working faster, for example, where you try to incentivise more than the bare minimum. Leaderboards and public recognition of performance also have a Theory X angle, especially where they’re “Worker of the Month” rather than “Team of the Month”.

Sometimes the rewards can seem nakedly cynical - I once worked for a company that offered free food and beers after 6pm on Fridays. It looked generous, but on course you had to still be in the office at 6pm on a Friday to take advantage...

Fundamentally, Theory X is also about a very hands-on view of management - “directional” is often a word used to describe the style. As a manager or leader, you’re in control, the buck stops with you, and you are proactive about issuing instructions.

Theory Y: most people inherently want to do a good job

In other words, it's the opposite of Theory X.

Your role as a manager or leader is two-fold: to put the systems in place that allow your team to actually do a good job, and to encourage cooperation between individuals as part of a team.

To a large extent, this is the theory that’s the “default” in our industry, because it’s the one which sounds “nicest”.

As managers and leaders, we’re told that people are our greatest assets and we have to treat them like adults. Beginning with a basic level of trust and working from there is the way to get the most out of your workforce.

Workplaces with a Theory Y approach often stress the downward distribution of responsibility to the level of the individual worker.

There are targets or aims to reach for, but the fine-detail of how is left to the individual.

Agile development processes are a good example of this - the overall high-level aims are set externally to the team, but the detail (and to a certain extent, the sequencing) is left in the control of the people who (should) know best.

Agile teams that embrace the feedback side of the processes take advantage of this - run well, retrospectives can be used as a checkpoint to assess how well things are going, and then take corrective action at the team level to tweak the things that could be improved.

In some ways, we shouldn't be surprised that software development is a field where Theory Y approaches tend to dominate.

Writing software is an inherently creative activity, and there’s a point beyond which it’s difficult to be prescriptive about how it’s done. There may be style guides or in-house standards which set the broad guidelines about factors like naming conventions or following single responsibility principles - but being overly-detailed about how software should be written quickly hits a point of diminishing returns.

Waterfall approaches, where every last little detail of functionality is defined up-front before any code gets written, have been shown time and again to fail in the face of the uncertainty and fuzziness that's inherent in trying to model real-world processes in the constraints of code.

Which theory is right?

That’s a trick question - one of the first things you learn on an MBA course is that nothing is ever completely right or completely wrong! Everything is contextual, and whether some approach works or not depends on the specific circumstances.

Arguing about which theory is right can be entertaining, but it’s ultimately pretty pointless. The truth, as ever, lies somewhere between the two extremes of the theory, and it both varies over time, and is contingent on the situation.

Just as nature abhors a vacuum, so application of theories of human behaviour abhor prescriptiveness.

A useful way of figuring out how well a theory fits is to do a quick thought experiment, and thing about what happens at the extremes.

Take Theory X for example.

What would happen in your team if it was applied to the full extent - no trust, everything rules-based, and punitive enforcement of non-compliance?

That sounds pretty negative - more like a prison than a workplace, right? But even prisons rely to an extent on the co-operation of their inmates - guards are greatly outnumbered, so an institution which relied solely on force to operate would quickly become ungovernable.

Even in organisations which you would expect to be very firmly on the side of Theory X, the reality is more nuanced. From an external perspective, the military is all about shouted orders and “drop-and-give-me-50”, so you’d expect the armed forces to be very firmly on the side of Theory X.

In practice, though, military training puts a huge emphasis on training individuals at all levels to be able to apply their individual judgement in the chaotic circumstances of combat, while still following overall mission guidelines.

Similarly, imagine taking Theory Y to extremes in a software organisation.

Without any kind of guidelines, you run a real risk that the outcomes that are delivered by the processes that emerge won’t actually meet the goals of the organisation.

Holocracy is an interesting case of this - it’s supposed to involve completely-flat hierarchies and totally self-directed teams. But when you look at successful organisations that claim to be holocratic, in practice there’s often still a large amount of direction going on - it's just concealed in different ways.

Bringing it up to date

Another fun exercise is often taking your new theory, and trying to apply it to what’s going on right now. We’ve seen the tensions between the two approaches play out in microcosm with return-to-office mandates.

These are usually dressed up with fine words about collaboration and serendipitous exchange of ideas, but peer behind and there’s more than a whiff of Theory X about it. “If I can’t see you working, you’ll slack off, and I want you back in my expensive glass palace so I can keep an eye on you.”

Probably not a coincidence that there seem to be very few grassroots ‘return to office’ movements - usually they’re top-down mandates from senior management, and the stick isn’t all that well-hidden.

There’s also a lot of research which suggests that high levels of psychological safety are important in high-performing software teams - they need a culture where it’s OK to ask for information and guidance, and individuals don’t feel shamed or pressured for doing so. That’s something that runs counter to a Theory X approach to a certain extent - it can be hard to speak up if you think there’s a risk of being called out for doing so.

What's up next?

Theory X & Theory Y was one of the early models of motivation that was developed post-WW2 as management became an academic discipline, so it’s not surprising that lots of subsequent models build on it as a base.

Next up, we’re going to look at two that link into Theory X and Theory Y:

Maslow's Hierachy of needs, and Herzberg’s theory of hygiene and motivation factors. They’re both easily-accessible and very applicable - in fact you’re probably already using their principles day-to-day even if you’re not consciously aware of it.

Some links & further reading

This is McGregor’s original article from 1957, which launched the theory:

The original 1960 book-length version, “The Human Side of Enterprise” is still in print, although I wouldn't necessarily run out and buy it today

Unsurprisingly, the military are very interested in leadership effectiveness. The Habit Of Excellence is about how the British Army addresses their challenges, and it looks in some detail at the tensions between direction and empowerment

This is an interesting paper that puts Theory Y into various historical perspectives This link is to a paywalled article in an academic journal, but it’s also available through the many open-access services which take the view (and make practical steps to ensure) that academic research shouldn’t just be the preserve of those with access to expensive databases…