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Honoring Douglas McGregor and the human side of enterprise
Edited by Therese Yaeger
The work of McGregor has had a significant impact on management and management philosophy. It in particular has had an impact on the applied academic field of organization development (OD). The paper focuses primarily on the history and current contribution of McGregor's thinking to OD. McGregor's work reflects a set of values, values which are deeply reflected in the values of OD. McGregor also identified a set of managerial and organizational initiatives which he felt were consistent with his Theory Y philosophy of management. Although McGregor's work is based on a set of cognitive assumptions, it is the values inherent in his work that serve as the primary focus of this paper. The influence of McGregor in the early days of the OD field and its value base is particularly well presented in [40] Mirvis (1988), [55] Weisbord (1987), [8], [7] Burke (2008, 2009) among others.
The paper focuses on the history and application of management initiatives identified by [37] McGregor (1957a) in one of his original articles which have become a major part of OD. Although McGregor's work has clearly influenced a wide range of behavioral and organizational disciplines, the focus of the paper is on those approaches which are cited in his early article referenced above and recent developments which clearly fall within the domain of the field of OD. Even though a comprehensive review of McGregor's influence beyond the field of OD is clearly a worthwhile endeavor, the presentation here is limited to his influence within the field of OD. This discussion focuses on job enlargement, leadership/participation, organization structure/delegation-decentralization and performance evaluation/management by objectives (MBO). The paper then moves to major new developments in the field of OD, Positive Change approaches, particularly appreciative inquiry and international and global OD. The paper closes with a discussion of national and international success rates in the application of OD, again relating it back to the roots founded by McGregor.
Centralization and decentralization
Centralization/decentralization and delegation are important management and organizational concepts central to ways of thinking about organizations. For McGregor, decentralization and delegation were identified as organizational forms consistent with Theory Y. These ideas have taken a number of different forms in...