Motivating Your Employees

It is an unwritten rule that, when you want something too much, you will finally lose control of it. Think about a person who pretentiously tries to be funny on stage. The more he/she wants to look funny and to amuse the audience, the less likely that the audience could be amused. The same theory applies to any company’s management of employees. The more a company wants to control its human resource, the less likely it might be to really hold them within the company. Wall Street Journal points out “Theory X” that most companies’ human resource management is based on and “Theory Y” that, Douglas McGregor, a founding faculty member of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, thinks should be applied in terms of employee management:

“Theory X”

1. The average human being has an inherent dislike of work and will avoid it if he can.

2. Because people dislike work, most people must be coerced, controlled, directed and threatened with punishment to get them to put forth adequate effort toward the achievement of organizational objectives.

3. The average human being prefers to be directed, wishes to avoid responsibility, has relatively little ambition, and wants security above all.

“Theory Y”

1. The expenditure of physical and mental effort in work is as natural as play or rest.

2. External control and threat of punishment are not the only means for bringing about effort toward organizational objectives. People will exercise self-direction and self-control in the service of objectives to which they are committed.

3. Commitment to objectives is a function of the rewards associated with their achievement.

4. The average human being learns, under proper conditions, not only to accept but to seek responsibility.

5. The capacity to exercise a relatively high degree of imagination, ingenuity, and creativity in the solution of organizational problems is widely, not narrowly, distributed in the population.

6. Under the conditions of modern industrial life, the intellectual potentialities of the average human being are only partly utilitized.

There is shift from negativity to positivity from “Theory X” to “Theory Y”. The focus on company control has been changed to the objective of being employee-centered. And the key lies in employees’ self motivation. This topic will continue to be a heated issue over the coming decades.

This video is what I will share with you today. It motivates me as an individual. A company with powerful leadership, as far as I am concerned, is a company that regards every employee as an independent individual instead of someone at a lower rank who feels obliged to work.