Douglas Murray McGregor (1906 – 1 October 1964) was a Management professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and president of Antioch College from 1948 to 1954.[1] He also taught at the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta. His 1960 book The Human Side of Enterprise had a profound influence on education practices. McGregor died, aged 58, in Massachusetts.
In 1994, the School of Adult and Experiential Learning at Antioch College was renamed the "McGregor School" in his honor. It was later renamed "Antioch University McGregor" and then "Antioch University Midwest." He had an informal teaching style, which many of his students remembered with affection, often sitting with his feet up on the lecture desk. When not sitting, he was invariably jangling keys and coins in his pockets.
In the book The Human Side of Enterprise, McGregor identified an approach of creating an environment within which employees are motivated via authoritative, direction and control or integration and self-control, which he called theory X and theory Y,[3] respectively. Theory Y is the practical application of Dr. Abraham Maslow's Humanistic School of Psychology, or Third Force psychology, applied to scientific management.Although McGregor's book on the theory was not published until 1960, he first outlined it in a speech at MIT's Sloan School of Management in April 1957.
In “Frontiers of Excellence” (Nicholas Brealey, 1994) Robert Waterman revealed that Theory Y had been a secret weapon in Procter ; Gamble's competitive armoury for many years. A senior P&G executive had invited McGregor in the mid-1950s to set up a detergent plant in Augusta, Georgia, along the lines of Theory Y. The executive, back from the Korean war, was convinced that military-style command-and-control management did not work in corporate life.Some, however, have criticised his ideas as being tough on the weaker members of society, those who need guidance and who are not necessarily self-starters.
There are, moreover, conspicuous examples of companies that have followed Theory Y precepts and yet foundered: DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation), steered by its charismatic founder, Ken Olsen, for one. Shortly before he died, McGregor was developing an outline for something he called Theory Z, an answer to many of the criticisms of Theories X and Y. But his thoughts were never widely published.
