Managers' assumptions about whether people avoid or seek work become self-confirming through the systems they build.
McGregor's 1960 framework, and the interesting claim is self-confirmation: monitoring built on Theory X assumptions produces the behaviour that justifies the monitoring.
In practice
- A firm that removes clocking-in finds attendance unchanged, and had been paying for the clock for eleven years.
- A workplace that installs activity tracking finds staff optimising the tracker, which is read as confirmation that tracking was necessary.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- Why organisations learn, harden and decline