Mcgregor Motivation Quotes

I hope this book will inspire the kitchen con-artist in you, increase fruit and veggie consumption in your family, and motivate you to become an Accidental Cook. Pass it on!

It may be argued that intellectual achievement, as measured by consistently high grades in all subjects, is evidence of motivation and willingness to work. Perhaps it is—in the academic setting—but it is also evidence of willingness to conform to the quite arbitrary demands of the educational system. There

The answer to the question managers so often ask of behavioral scientists „How do you motivate people?“ is, „You don’t.

Douglas McGregor, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. In The Human Side of Enterprise, published in 1960, McGregor laid out two theories of human motivation, foreshadowing much of modern motivational theory. The first, “Theory X,” framed people as fundamentally selfish and lazy, willing only to work for themselves and for extrinsic rewards such as money, status, and power. The second, “Theory Y,” hypothesized that people are motivated as much or more by intrinsic rewards—by the pleasures of mastery and autonomy, by the opportunity to build relationships with others, and by the desire for meaning and purpose. Theory Y anticipated much modern research in postulating that people are as much “groupish” as they are selfish, that they are hard wired to enjoy being part of a group and even—under certain circumstances—to act cooperatively and even altruistically. The book was sometimes interpreted as an argument in favor of Theory Y, but McGregor himself insisted that his point was not that Theory Y was correct, but that both theories are useful models, and that to rely on Theory X alone is a dangerous oversimplification that leaves many powerful sources of motivation off the table. One

YOU CAN’T ALWAYS JUDGE a book by its cover, but you can sometimes feel justified in discarding one on the basis of its title. Anything called “How to Motivate Your Work Force,” “Making People Productive,” or something of the sort can safely be passed over because the enterprise it describes is wholly misconceived. “Strictly speaking,” said Douglas McGregor, “the answer to the question managers so often ask of behavioral scientists—’How do you motivate people?’—is, ‘You don’t.’”1